What made the big disparity in wealth?

The dismantling of regulations over the years by right wing interests, enabled the criminals to snatch up everything in sight for themselves while they fleeced society and sent what was once our thriving economic society, overseas, for profit.

 

Exactly. If your dream of becoming a middle class yet assembly line is the only thing you want to do for the rest of your life then good luck. They can only blame themselves. You can't fix stupidity. It's something we all agree.

 

My maternal grandfather was a young man during the Great Depression and when the New Deal began. He not only worked hard as a signalman for a govt. railroad that had an excellent retirement program but he also invested in a parcel of land and subdivided it into numerous lots which he sold for a huge profit after he retired.

My grandfather had also built a boat and chartered fishing parties, earning more money on weekends than he earned as a signalman during the week, and he was frugal. He fixed his own vehicles, appliances, home, etc. while hoarding away all of his savings in US Treasury bonds.

When my grandfather retired he was sixty five and he was financially locked in as being solidly middleclass, but he lived to be 94 and witnessed what the intent of the New Deal was: inflation. Inflation was the cure for the Great Depression, which was created by and thrived under deflation.

John Maynard Keynes wrote that Lenin was right, that the surest way to destroy capitalism is to debauch the currency. Some folks suggest that the best way to debauch a currency is to take it off the gold standard and restructuring it to be fiat, backed only by faith in government.

 

BMW is a sponsor for the USA Olympic team. I'm sure a lot of American are proud of it as well.

 

Americans like cheap third world products. Until they decide otherwise, the jobs will stay over there.

 

Well, that's true. It's up to Americans to decide if they give a crap about the future, and by all indications at this point, they don't. When you're right, you're right.

 

Which is why the Americans in the group of tourists that I was with at the Grand Canyon a couple of years ago were the minority.

The same thing happened in Napa Valley, where we were surrounded by Europeans and Chinese, and in Manhattan, where the only Americans in our hotel were the help (and they all spoke Spanish).

 

I only want to debate with adults.

I wouldn't have to pay as much in income tax if those who had higher incomes than me paid their fair share. So yes, it actually does affect my ability to make money by reducing my venture capital.

Didn't happen.

 

The amount of reality in this thread regarding lost jobs is essentially nil. For every manufacturing job that went overseas a thousand died to automation. Jobs that used to take 20 people and 18 engine lathes to do were replace by ten people and 8 turret lathes, which were, in time replace by two guys with a CNC lathe. It's now a guy, 2 robots and 6 CNC machines. And they out produce those 20 guys by a facotor 20 to 1 and produce parts that are more closer to tolerance and more consistant over the run than any parts ever produced entirely by human beings. In another 20 years the only human beings in most manufacturing plants will be the owner and the however many programers and engineers he needs to update his product line and and new designs to the mix. Oh and it's likely that the engineers will be contract labor that never show up at the plant.

 

Roughly speaking, yeah. There aren't financial cutoffs, if you make x to y you're in, below x or above y and you're out. It's just a general area where the middle class sits. Quite typically someone with 100-200k incomes doesn't earn it on investment income, or on unskilled or low-skilled labor. People in that income range are generally highly-skilled labor.

 

I'm blaming the government for the way they wrote up NAFTA and Free Trade, which allowed many more companies to leave than would have if it had some restrictions in it. I blame the government for allowing Japan to close their markets to our products while keeping ours wide open to theirs and costing us several big industries we once dominated. Most of my complaints is government actions and inaction. that has cost us millions of good paying Jobs. I couldn't in good conscience, ever buy a Japanese car knowing how they have screwed us, no matter how good they are. China is also playing some dirty tricks on us that I will get into later.

 

And that's the sound of the hammer hitting the nail on the head. Sadly, he probably has no idea what you even mean by that because most Americans (and particularly the hard-right) are woefully ignorant about historical tax rates.

MisterMet and others, spend a few minutes looking at the second list (the inflation adjusted tax brackets) at this link: http://taxfoundation.org/article/us...-2013-nominal-and-inflation-adjusted-brackets

Notice the top tax bracket in 1940, for instance. A top tax bracket with a threshold equal to $81,997,857 and a rate of 79%? Yep, that happened. Or the 94% tax rate in 1944? A 91% rate as late as 1963? Yet the economy soared. So much for trickle-down. Only in bizarro-world modern America have doctors with $300,000 incomes had to pay a higher tax rate than Wall Street executives with $30,000,000 incomes.

 

It's amazing how many people hate everything American these days.

In the car segment, American cars are outperforming the imports in the last 2-3 years. Ironically, a lot of American cars now are mostly foreign while most of your Toyota is American. *Shrug* Ignorance...

 

That range is more "upper" middle class. That gray echelon between middle class and rich. Statistically, they use the 25-75 percentile as middle class, which is less than $100K / year.

 

Are you frickin kidding me?

Blaming Obama of all things.. for the wealth inequality?

I just can't. Someone pinch me.

 

If a person can work an assembly line job and make enough money to pay his bills, buy a home and car or two, have enough to put away and go on vacation when he wants, I would say that person is well off. I have a cousin in Lancing Mich that did just that working and retiring with Ford and he is quite happy. I have another cousin who worked as a plumber and lives in Scottsdale, one of the nicest places in Arizona. I don't know why some people think working with your hands is degrading. We all can't be college material. But we can live a good life by working hard and managing your money.

 

Exactly. I hate this argument. One of my conservative associates is an IT guy, and he always clings to the "you slacked your whole life and had to resort to manual labor." Somewhere along the line this country became too good for manual labor it seems.

I respect the hell out of manual labor. The conditions now are much better than they used to be, but there is still a need. There shouldn't be any kind of discrimination for an honest days work, even if it means using your hands.

 

wtf? what "they" uses the 25th-75th percentile incomes?

"Middle Class: The socioeconomic class between the working class and the upper class, usually including professionals, highly skilled laborers" - the dictionary

 

Neoloberalism in the eighties. The abridged version is basically: the government deregulated several markets while corporations engaged in massive lay-offs to increase profits in the short term, and the lack of union dues from the shrinking work force weakened the unions, so when firms re-expanded their workforces they could slash wages and benefits. This was combined with anti-union legislation. Tax cuts on the highest income bracket also played a part.

There's also the dismantling of domestic industry in the UK (mostly in Scotland and the North) and the subsequent outsourcing, I'm not sure if that was the case in America though I get the impression that it was.

 

What I find fascinating about those numbers is that the tax code was small and simple in those days; those who had to pay a 94% rate actually did pay about that. Today, the tax code has millions of words and is the basis of an entire industry -- including the new field of tax lawyers who are paid by the rich to profit from new loopholes and evade taxes.

Reagan's rich-friendly policies did absolutely nothing to increase economic growth. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the nation's economy is stagnating.

Reaganism was so successful with their conflation of wealth, religion and family values that, even today, the poor are the biggest advocates of the rich and big business. I wonder how many people on this forum complaining about statism, interventionism, etc., are on welfare... quite a few I think. Despite this, the wealthy (individuals and big business) are still using Washington lobbyists to press for even more tax cuts, while telling the poor that it's for the best... that they'll eventually benefit... despite no evidence of this in the past 30 years.

 

While I agree that the rich could be taxed more,(Not at 91%) I don't see where taxing the rich is going to make the poor any richer, as it seems like many believe. It only gives our government more money to waste. The only way to lift the poor up is through jobs. Not jobs like Burger King or Walmart. How do you get those jobs? By buying what we make here. I can't understand why that is so hard for people to understand.

 

Thing is, the government spends money while the rich just put it under their mattress (this is more or less the fatal flaw in voodoo economics).

 

As long as they earn enough to support their lifestyles, it's none of anyone business. What I pointed out is your definition of middle class is ridiculous. I know a lot of new college grads starting salaries is approx $50 k/year and they're quite happy. Being an assembly line worker won't cut in middle class in this environment, worst, they all will be on unemployment roll if they don't want to learn a new skill, trade and knowledge to boost their earning power, they can only have themselves to blame.

End of story.

 

Japanese & German automakers do have plants in the US and they're employing millions of hard working Americans. They're paying them decent wages and good benefits. Of course, that is something you don't want to admit. Keep boycotting all foreigners as you want, the truth is buying a Jap or German vehicle that made in the US is supporting American jobs and supporting our community. On top of that, I'm sure they would never demand a taxpayers' bailout for their failures.

 

Where did you get the numbers? I did a quick search but came up with lots of static. Can you provide a link?