mallarde

An Economic Nightmare Before Christmas

I agree that distribution of wealth is a problem that Americans reflexively refuse to discuss -- as though it makes you a Marxist.

You cannot have a healthy society or economy if a huge proportion of the population cannot earn enough in wages to live comfortably.

Instead of trying to stuff the American "consumer" with more debt, the government should concern itself with cutting the illegal population out of the labor market. That alone would help lift wages and allow the American working class and young people to start spending cash again.


On Dec 14 01:13 PM carey_jim wrote:

> Instead of facing financial collapse, America might have to consider
> two "ugly" possibilities:
>
> 1) Reducing military spending
>
> 2) Redistributing a very large part of the wealth of the upper 1
> percent of the American population who own 33% of the wealth (stocks,
> bonds, real estate, etc.) to the bottom 80% who own only about 10%
> of the wealth. sociology.ucsc.edu/who...
>
>
> If these two unpleasant things don't happen rationally, history might
> exact its pound of flesh as it has, periodically, in the past, through
> war or revolution or just social upheaval.
>
> In terms of wealth and income distribution, contemporary America
> is at about the same place as it was during the time of the "robber
> barons" at the turn of the last century, just before World War I
> when the FTC and the Federal Reserve were created.
>
> It was also the time when the Supreme Court first ruled that a Federal
> income tax was not "unconsitutional&a... (and "socialistic&q...
> as it said of the1894 Federal income tax which it DID rule unconstitutional)
> and the first time the Sherman Antitrust Act was invoked to break
> up large corporations (Standard Oil and The American Tobacco Company.)
>
>
> But then again, as Henry Ford said, "History is more or less bunk.
> It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present
> and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history
> we make today"
>
> Maybe it's time to make history instead of being unmade by it.<br/>
>
>
>
>