[Vision2020] Income Inequality

[lfalen]

Ted
I think that you are wrong on this. The excess regulation does not hurt big bussiness that much. Big business and big government are  close. What high regulation does hurt is small business. It makes them hard to stay in business therefore widening the gap between the rich and poor at the expense of the middle class. The death tax adds to this as small business are unable  to pass there businesses on to their descendants and the business must be sold. A good share of the time the are gobbled up by big corporations. A good example of this is the Feed Industry. When I started in the Feed Business in the late sixties there  was a feed mill in almost every small town. They gradually ether went out of business or were bought by regional companies and then national companies. Today there ore only two major companies left. they are Cargill The largest privately held company in the world and Land o Lakes, a coop.
Roger
-----Original message-----
From: Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:16:29 -0700
To: Ron Force rforce2003 at yahoo.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Income Inequality

> It is ironic is that the political/economic ideology of lessening regulation
> of business and/or finance, with the goal of improving the economy, of
> letting the "free market" work its magic to generate wealth, that the middle
> class in the US has supported to some extent, has resulted in wealth
> generation that has gone mostly to the upper classes, in recent decades.
> Voters under the guise of the wisdom of free markets are voting for
> politicians who allow big corporate and finance interests to control
> government legislation to favor the wealth generation of the wealthy. The
> facts are clear the middle class is being economically hoodwinked; and this
> has been supported by both Democrat and Republican party policies influenced
> by money pouring in to politics.
> 
> For over a decade I have commented repeatedly that the US was being
> transformed into more of a "third world" nation (using that exact wording),
> with an increasingly economically marginalized lower and middle class
> dominated by a small group of powerful and wealthy.  Just a few days ago I
> saw Arianna Huffington being interviewed regarding her new Sept. 2010
> book "Third
> World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and
> Betraying the American
> Dream<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307719820?ie=UTF8&tag=daikos-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307719820>"
> (
> http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/9/18/901673/-Book-review:-Arianna-Huffingtons-Third-World-America
> ),
> and was both pleased and annoyed at her book title.  I thought, "She stole
> my idea!" though it is probable that many people have described what is
> happening to the US in terms of the US becoming more "third world."
> 
> The title or subtitle of this excellent article on Slate, "Introducing the
> Great Divergence," by Timothy Noah, regarding income inequality, is borrowed
> from Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman.  The excerpt below from this
> article contains facts that should be repeated in headlines over and over:
> 
> "The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged,
> and by the decade's end, income inequality had started to rise. Income
> inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the
> 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts. In his 2007 book *The
> Conscience of a
> Liberal<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393333132?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0393333132>,
> *the Nobel laureate, Princeton economist and *New York Times *columnist Paul
> Krugman labeled the post-1979 epoch the "Great Divergence."
> 
> It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income
> inequality, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is,"
> Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States
> experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic
> growth—the "seven fat
> years<http://www.abebooks.com/abe/ParaRoute?pid=17184&url=http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=2886391131&searchurl=sts%3Dt%26tn%3DSeven%2BFat%2BYears%26x%3D0%26y%3D0>"
> and the " long boom<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738203645?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0738203645>."
> Yet from 1980 to 2005, *more than 80
> percent<http://web.mit.edu/ipc/publications/pdf/07-002.pdf>
> *of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic
> growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity
> increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually
> none<http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp195>of the increase
> translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an
> outcome that left many economists scratching their heads."
> -----------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
> 
> 
> On 9/17/10, Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >  Slate magazine (a subsidiary of the Washington Post) has an interesting
> > 10-part series on the rise of income inequality in the US:
> >
> > http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266026/
> >
> > It includes a widget so you can enter your zip code and income to find out
> > where you rank in the U.S. and compare with the averages for the zip, Idaho,
> > and the US (if you want to know).
> >
> > "A man worked for years and years on a philanthropic project - to arrange
> > the transfer of the money that the rich don't need to maintain their
> > lifestyle the poor who need it. After years and years of work he declared
> > that the work was about 50% complete - the poor have agreed to accept the
> > money."
> >
> > Ron Force
> > Moscow ID USA
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
>