Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

this one is great but only shows up for me in 240p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_whSnPErl7c

It's all Bush's fault

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/04/23/a-rise-in-wealth-for-the-wealthydeclines-for-the-lower-93/

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/04/SDT-2013-04-wealth-recovery-0-1.png

it's high time we cut taxes on the wealthy again

why 93%/$836,033 as a cutoff, out of curiosity?

oh nm sry:

(The focus in this report on the upper 7% of households rather than some other share of high wealth households reflects the limits of the tabulations published by the Census Bureau. The boundaries of its wealth categories dictated the split of households analyzed in this report.)

if that chart doesn't spur a new round of tax raising, then you people need to abandon hope for this administration

It's almost as if when bush left office all the laws that hugely favored the wealthy signed by him and the last x presidents stayed in effect.

you know, you people

DJIA has doubled since then. FYI.

well the start date kinda matters there

starting it in 1981 would be really interesting too

Even more interesting at 1975

THE UNDERGROUND RECOVERY!
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/04/29/130429ta_talk_surowiecki?currentPage=all

It’s a huge number: if the government managed to collect taxes on all that income, the deficit would be trivial. This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books.

a lot of those people would wind up paying little or no federal income tax anyway (although they would certainly pay payroll taxes), so I think the deficit assumption here is a bit off

don weiner sometimes it seems like you believe you have been sent here to troll us into seeing the light, but that if we don't soon see the error of our ways, you will forlornly return to your home planet

Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with.

we're all undocumented now

don weiner sometimes it seems like you believe you have been sent here to troll us into seeing the light, but that if we don't soon see the error of our ways, you will forlornly return to your home planet

It's been 11 or 12 years. I must be very stubborn. Or very stupid. Likely both!

Being a moderate republican is a very cold and lonely place these days. We should allow don to come in and warm himself by the genial fire that is ilx. Like any moderate, his trolling is very pastel colored.

i'm curious what don would do about income inequality

Like any moderate, his trolling is very pastel colored.

I voted for Obama twice, so I must be mellowing with age.

I'm not bothered much by income inequality per se; I'm more bothered at how the system is gamed. Maybe that's the same thing. I don't think raising taxes will control income inequality very much or even change it much. Is there an effective system where the rich don't get richer?

heavily subsidizing higher education worked pretty well in the post-WWII years

the united federation of planets

heavily subsidizing higher education worked pretty well in the post-WWII years

how did that work? Across the board (scholarship, funding academic chairs, research, etc.)?

xp

low tuition at public u's, pell grants, the gi bill, etc.

even w/ heavily subsidized higher ed, there were fewer college grads back then then there are now

like 'lots of people go to college' was part of the economic prosperity of the era but it wasn't something that happened in a vacuum, the us was in a fairly unique place in history post-ww2. 'get more people to go to college' might be as helpful for income inequality as 'fund more sockhops'

imagine no student loans, but higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for higher education. more young people with greater spending power to keep the economy moving. it's easy if you try

'young people don't have enough money' is definitely a problem but it's probably not the root of our economic malaise

What do you think we could do to significantly shrink income inequality iatee?

One characteristic of old people is that they spend very little on consumer goods compared to young people just starting a household or a family. otoh, old people with money are a huge boon to the pharmaceuticals industry.

soak the rich xp

pretty much works by definition

maybe we should try it sometime then

We did during WWII.

I think the idea that we'll create millions of middle class jobs through govt tweaking policy this was or that way is pretty much a dream. we're in the new normal, the question is how we deal w/ it. even w/ strong economic growth sometime in the future income inequality will continue to climb, as job creation will stick to a bipolar distribution.

Aren't most of the significant gains in wealth inequality related to equity ownership? Or is it primarily wages?

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2011.pdf

Interestingly, the income composition pattern at the very top has changed considerably over the century. The share of wage and salary income has increased sharply from the 1920s to the present, and especially since the 1970s. Therefore, a significant fraction of the surge in top incomes since 1970 is due to an explosion of top wages and salaries. Indeed, estimates based purely on wages and salaries show that the share of total wages and salaries earned by the top 1 percent wage income earners has jumped from 5.1 percent in 1970 to 12.4 percent in 2007.5

Evidence based on the wealth distribution is consistent with those facts. Estimates of wealth concentration, measured by the share of total wealth accruing to top 1 percent wealth holders, constructed by Wojciech Kopczuk and myself from estate tax returns for the 1916-2000 period in the United States show a precipitous decline in the first part of the century with only fairly modest increases in recent decades. The evidence suggests that top incomes earners today are not “rentiers” deriving their incomes from past wealth but rather are “working rich,” highly paid employees or new entrepreneurs who have not yet accumulated fortunes comparable to those accumulated during the Gilded Age. Such a pattern might not last for very long. The drastic cuts of the federal tax on large estates could certainly accelerate the path toward the reconstitution of the great wealth concentration that existed in the U.S. economy before the Great Depression.

saw that link, those are only based on estate tax returns through 2000. Would be interested to see the effect of the past 12 years.

a good way to solve income inequality is to take money from rich people and give it to poor people

too complicated!

i still think we should tie the highest marginal income tax rate to unemployment. couldn't hurt

or straight up tax wealth whenever unemployment rises above, i don't know, 3%. it's not like trickle down economics hasn't been totally disproved to work as advertised

Re soaking the rich, the capital gains tax rate used to be higher (that's where the rich do especially well) and the percentage of income that is taxed for Social Security payroll taxes used to be higher. Capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as regular income-- there have been studies I believe showing that the Republican argument that lower cap gains rates will help create jobs and boost the economy does not work.

I get the feeling only the marks on the right believe that trickle down economics "works" as advertised

i agree, but it's a zombie theory that still has way too much sway over public discourse

studies our GOP friends have suppressed, no less, curmudgeon

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/11/02/non-partisan-congressional-tax-report-debunks-core-conservative-economic-theory-gop-suppresses-study/

They also have sway over Obama's White House. When he "compromised" for just taxing the income rate of the wealthy who make more than $400 grand, he also should have pushed for restoring cap gains rates higher at that time (they went up slightly but not to the same rate as income taxes).

My mba grad sister who always votes Democrat and is liberal on social issues, thinks raising the payroll tax cap on Social Security is unfair to the wealthy who got there by working hard. I want to give her the stats I read that at the beginning of the Reagan administration a higher percent of income was taxes for Social Security purposes than is now, but sometimes you just can't argue with family. The Washington Post editorial page is stubborn on this too.

was taxed

the norquistists have done a fine job conflating taxing labor earnings with property and inheritance. hats off to grover

preach it brother matt

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425?hatersgonnahate

My experience in the past four years has been the exact opposite of this:

The Myth of America's Tech-Talent Shortage

anyone else on ILX in tech?