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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (698768)	2/13/2013 1:45:33 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575353

Nonsense i-node. For one, the retired and disabled make up the bulk of people on government assistance. I suppose you think it was better when the retired often dined on dog food. Of the poor, the vast majority want a better life, but have limited opportunities. Mobility between classes is lower than most any other developed country and has been getting worse ever since Reagan.This is one of the primary by-products of supply-side economics. It has happened everywhere it has been tried. And the unemployed want jobs. If I were on unemployment, I would get less than 25% of what I make now. That would suck. And the health plan is not that great. Your contempt for you fellow man is palpable. Sadly, that is true of a large fraction of the Republicans out there. Which is one of many reasons they haven't been able to win at the presidential level. Rational people don't consider it "hoarding" to keep the money you make. Some of us call that "saving". Apples and pineapples, i-node. Establishing a cushion for yourself isn't hoarding. Accumulating more assets than you could possibly use in a dozen lifetimes is. Especially if you start gaming the system so you gather even more assets at the expense of your fellow citizens is pathological. There is no evidence of that. Well, since your brand of 'economics' runs on unicorns and fairy dust, I can see why you might say that. It is indisputable that our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers have no money to spend, they don't. See the Great Recession, aka the Bush Bellyflop. Transferring money out of the hands of the 90%, who spend the majority of their income, into the hands of the 10%, who spend a much smaller fraction of their income, hurts the economy because it reduces money available for the consumer economy. This should be an obvious principle. The only exception is if there is a lack of investment funds. But this hasn't been the case since the 1970s. If anything, there is a surplus of investment funds that are chasing a declining number of opportunities to get a reasonable gain, leading to risky investments and bubbles. See the Great Recession. This is similar to what happened during the 19th and early 20th centuries with their economic booms and eventual panics and depressions. FDR solved that problem in the wake of the Great Depression. True, not everything was useful, but there was enough that we didn't have the equivalent of a panic or depression for 70 years. And that is only because we have been removing the checks and balances that kept it from happening for the last 3 decades.