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Buffett: Stop coddling the super-rich

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Alma, Aug 15, 2011.

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  1. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Yup. We are no longer a great society.
     
  2. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Incorrect.

    http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-of-americans-living-in-poverty/#ixzz1VLc2eKzO

    The US Census Bureau is out with its annual report on poverty and incomes today and the results are striking: The number of people living in poverty in the US is at an all time high. The last time this many people were living in poverty in the US was in the late 1950s. In 2009, 43.6 million people lived on the equivalent of less than $5,500 a year. That was up from 39.8 million Americans in 2008. The 2009 number means that more than 1 in every 7 Americans live in poverty. The actual rate was 14.3%, which is the highest that measure has been since 1994, and was up from 13.2% in 2008.

    ...
    Second, income equality is a lot worse in the US than it used to be. The Census measures inequality by something called the Gini index. Back at the beginning of the 1980s, the Gini index stood at 0.374. It is now 0.458. That's a jump of 22%. And when you have more people living on the edges of the income scale, unemployment can quickly push the people on the bottom into poverty.
     
  3. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    What's incorrect?

    I'm not disputing your numbers, I'm disputing the causes.

    Americas largest cities have been run (mostly) by Democrats, and have seen compassionate, liberal policy damn two generation to poverty.

    Inner City schools, run by champions of liberalism, are disasters. Kids are sentenced to failing schools.

    Black on black crime is an epidemic in inner cities. And no one gives a shit.

    Barack Obama is on a feel good bus trip through rural Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois.

    Meanwhile, the Congressional Black Caucus is trying to calm a riot at a meeting in Detroit last night.

    What have liberal policies done for the poor in America? What has Barack Obama's Presidency done for African-Americans in America?

    Why isn't he in LA , in Detroit, or the West Side of Chicago?
     
  4. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    As my post showed, poverty was declining beginning with the end of the Eisenhower presidency and the beginning of Kennedy, which then spilled over into LBJ. It was in 1980 -- when Reagan began the War On The Middle Class -- that wealth inequality started to really spike.

    But yeah, it's Obama's fault that one in five kids is poor. Yep, he hasn't solved that problem in his three years, and it's really all LBJ's fault too, even though poverty declined quite a bit between the '50s and the '90s. And the trickle-down (but really trickle-nowhere) policies of the last 30 years haven't had a thing to do with it. Mmm hmmm.

    What we really need to do is reduce the neighborhood millionaire's taxes so he will hire four of those unemployed as manservants for $10,000 a year. Win-win!
     
  5. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    You're looking at the Presidency.

    Look at the cities. Look at the schools.

    Who ran them? What policies were enacted?

    We've seen the results of liberalism -- it's devastation. We don't have to wonder what would happen if liberals got their way and could implement policy -- we've seen it.

    Crime, poverty, failed schools.

    Broken families, drug abuse, alcoholism.

    And, limousine liberals never have to deal with the results of the havoc they create. They sentence poor, black kids to failed schools, but send their own to lilly white, private schools.

    They don't live in the crime infested neighborhoods their policies have sustained.
     
  6. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Then please explain why poverty was declining under the War On Poverty, and started to expand again in the 1980s coinciding with reduced tax rates and increased wealth inequality.
     
  7. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Drugs. Crack cocaine. Drug related crime.

    Where did you grow up?

    I went to high school in the Bronx in the '80's. I was lucky & went to a good private school, but the world around it was crashing, and it wasn't because of Reagan.

    Look at the cities, Look at education policies. Look at the education policies.

    Look at what drugs did to the inner city. Look at what AIDS did to the African-American community beginning in the late '80's.
     
  8. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Education policies, yes. I have read all about the failed liberalism of the New York schools. Why don't you also bring up the reduction in education funding? Was that liberals too?

    If you believe Reagan's feed-the-rich-screw-the-poor policies -- as well as his laissez faire attitude to all businesses including the importation of cocaine, and to the burgeoning AIDS crisis you mentioned -- didn't play a major role in the rise in wealth inequality, you're just not even trying to see the whole picture. He turned the entire government into an agency to help big business. And his crazy disciples continue to carry that thought beyond his wildest dreams.

    For the record, I grew up going to a public high school in a Midwestern automotive town. It was a great place to live, I had access to all the AP classes I wanted to take, and people there had enough to get by, if not to get rich. Since 2008 the unemployment rate has been about 15 percent.

    Obama's and LBJ's fault, no doubt.
     
  9. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Liberal policy did destroy the US Auto Industry.
     
  10. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    In great measure, yes. As did the oil industry stomping out any effort (and there were many) to increase American cars' fuel efficiency to the standards of their Japanese counterparts.

    I can see you're just in one of your moods where you want to say liberals have destroyed everything good and conservatives have been fighting with moral purity and conviction, and that America would be a better place if we just handed millionaires our money and told them to take care of us with it. But we're pretty far by now from the thread topic.
     
  11. SpeedTchr

    SpeedTchr Well-Known Member

    LTL, please explain to me how taxing the rich more will decrease the poverty level for the lower end.
     
  12. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    It isn't a one-shot panacea. But it will raise revenues, which will help to rein in the debt that is so troublesome to the GOP now for the first time in 31 years, and thereby stabilize the economy. It will allow for spending in areas such as education, which is only historically the #1 way people in the U.S. move out of poverty. It will allow the government to invest and create jobs in public-works projects that, for all they are derided by the revisionists in the GOP leadership and on this board, have done a hell of a lot of good for the United States for the past eight decades.

    And it will limit the reduction of Social Security and Medicare benefits to people who really need them. That's what we're talking about -- the GOP decided that, instead of returning tax rates to their second-lowest level in history for those people who count as wealthy under any measure, we'd rather take money away from seniors.
     
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