Dwein --3 -- Since the 50's, 60's and 70's were the best economy the world has ever known, it is hard to understand what you mean by curtailing human progress. It seems the civil right's movement was borne out of the power the middle class that was provided by that economy.

Isn't "wealth equality" just a different way to say communism. Why stop at taxes. Here we have Hutterite Colonies everyone has the same size house, same meals, same clothes . They all get the same health care. All money and work is shared Equally. Sounds like a liberal utopia. If any one wants to sign up I can get you a contact.

Kend, you are a virtual fountain of dumb-ass posts. I won't even bother responding to the parts where you bemoan everyone in the "same size" house, "same" clothes, etc... but the part about health care really bugs me. You still think health care should be a privilege, don't you? Pathetic.

Since you apparently think our uniquely American for-profit healthcare aparteid is so great, how about switching citizenship? I'm sure Blue Cross Double Cross, ODS or United Health would love your patronage. - AIW

ScottFromOz -- Your words are motivational. I do not want to distract from their motivation, but I can't help myself. Things were much worse in the late 1800's and the early 1930's than they are now. We overcame them.

Alice I was just trying to make the point that what makes our countries so great is that we are not all the same. We can have anything we want if we work for it. I don't think anything is a privilege. I don't want your health care system any more than you do. but I know how much better ours could be. Everyone should have health care just as much as everyone should be working to pay for it. When people are down on there luck we should all pitch in to help them. I have a hard time with the concept that just because someone has more money than you that you believe it's your privilege to take it.

Please people you write on this blog like America is some third world country, if it's so bad why do so many people want to move there.

Alice you don't want me there. I am a self suffeint, hard working, job creating righty. My tax dollars maybe. But me. I don't think so.

Aliceinwonderland: You've got me laughing so hard that I can't even hunt and peck at my usual lame pace. No offense intended Kend!

I'll give it a shot though.....It's a fact, the rich getting richer has not created jobs, but it has created a small number of people who have become more powerful than their respective Democratic States/governments, so I agree, it is a global problem. We can call this growth of private power whatever we want.....oligarchy, plutocracy, corporatocracy...... or fascism, which is what many of us are calling it. I don't really care, it's still arbitrary power in the hands of scoundrels. It's government by and for the wealthy few and thus government against the working class many. The social contract has been blatantly violated, and we the people should not tolerate this any longer.

"Before this miserable system of wreckage has destroyed the life germ of respect and culture in our american people, let us save what was here, merely by having none too poor and none too rich, the theory of Share Our Wealth Society is to have enough for all, but not to have one with so much that less than enough remains for the balance of the people." Huey Long...Share Our Wealth Society.... 1932

Another quote by the Huester...."Always take the offensive-the defensive ain't worth a damn."

The Teapublicans and Fox News have done well with this offensive advice.... I say it's time for we progressives to go on a massive offense, and also demand it of our elected reps. I think the talking point that 85 out of control citizens, have as much wealth as half the worlds population......this because those same monied Fascists have political control of their governments.... is a good place to start.

List of members of the American Legislative Exchange Council http://bit.ly/L0zmws

Note: most on the board of directors and every other level are Republicans and most of the companies are big corporations... i.e., government by the corporation for the corporation ...with lobbyists accepting super PAC $ for legislated favors such as tax loopholes etc.

PS: ALEC almost all are Republicans & big corporations... https://twitter.com/RACmoveToAmend

Alice, Ray Kroc worked the floor at McDonalds when he started, Mr Walton greeted people coming into his first store, and Jeff Bezos stocked the first shelves at Amazon. It wasn't below them. It was a stepping stone.

what do you call tax increases. That is taking someone's god damn money. Isn't it?

those same fire dept. , infrastructure, law etc are delivered equally just the same in a capitalist system, health care ihas a way to go Down there but even in Socialist Canada it's not delivered Equally.

@chuckle8 wrote "Things were much worse in the late 1800's and the early 1930's than they are now"

Agreed and fair point. However when things are heading south at a rapid rate of knots, what does it benefit us to say "things are not yet as bad as they once were"?

"Others see things as they are and ask 'Why?'. I see things as they could be and ask 'Why not?'"

Must we wait until our living standards and our wealth inequality are on a par with the poorest countries before we decide to do something about it? If we wait much longer will we be able to do anything about it? Short of some kind of overthrow of the plutocracy, are we able to do anything about it now?

Yes, things were worse in the 1800's and there was a kind of revolt against the robber barons, but the robber barons now have much more pervasive and sophisticated propaganda machines. Witness the power of the Murdoch media on uncritical individuals like Kend.

Even in the 70's we revolted against a government that had dragged us into an unjustified and unwinnable war. When W and Cheney dragged us into Iraq on false pretences, where were the protests? Where was the critical journalism to expose the lies and deceptions? The corporatised media can no longer be relied on to give us the critical scrutiny of the powerbrokers anymore. The media are now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Over the past 30-odd years our political position has been shifted so far to the right it is barely distinguishable from Fascism. This is the role of the Tea Party. To be a party that is so far out in the extreme, they make the modern Republican party look moderate by comparison. They are anything but moderate.

Finally, every call for some form of moderation is met with responses like Kend's that "this is a move toward Communism" (where they mean Totalitarianism rather than actual Communism). In actual fact, the concentration of wealth and power has brought us closer to Totalitarianism than all but the worst of the dictatorships.

Kend, bully for them. Most people in minimum wage jobs nowadays aren't getting a stepping stone; they're stuck in a trap with no exit. For you to use Mr. Walton as an example is patently absurd, since he owned the friggin' business. (HELLO) I can't give an answer regarding Jeff Bezos or Ray Kroc, who I know nothing about (altho Mr. Kroc's name seems vaguely familiar). But you are missing my point. I'm not saying any job is below anybody, as long as there is reasonable opportunity to improve one's lot in life and move up the socioeconomic totem pole. At this time, and in this country, those opportunities no longer exist. Social mobility is dead in the good ole USA.

When it comes to the issue of taxes, you conservatives remind me of five-year-olds throwing a massive hissy fit whenever they're told to share anything: "Waah! That's mine!" It's about being an adult, Kend, and paying your fair share for infrastrastructure we all use. As Thom keeps pointing out, the wealthier one is, the more that person uses the courts, the roads, airports, etc. So why shouldn't they pay more, then? These things all cost money. And shouldn't the amount of tax be based on a person's ability to pay?! My only problem with taxes is the unfairness of our tax system in this country, which routinely places the heaviest burden on those who can least afford it. Meanwhile approximately 25% of major, privately owned corporations pay no taxes at all; not to mention how much of our tax $$ gets sucked into the war machine, instead of going to things that are useful and actually benefit us. But you seem resentful about paying regardless of where the tax $$ goes, which is extremely shortsighted. And selfish. Anyone who owns as much property and stuff as you do has nothing to complain about, and frankly Kend, I don't give a damn how hard you worked for it. Time to grow up, put on your big-boy panties and stop whining. - Aliceinwonderland

It's really odd how people who were lucky enough to get a pile of wealth always claim they worked hard for their money. I believe that is a "Kroc of sh!t" (pun intended). Of course, I no longer eat sh!t burgers (that's what I call them because of what's in them...what! you didn't know? where do you think the e-coli comes from?)

In many cases they don't even work as hard as the lowly peons sweating in the fields or the service people who sweep the floors. Many of these wealthy people were just lucky to have made the right decisions, investments perhaps, accepted a position perhaps, that led to opportunities that they took advantage of. They were just plain lucky! I think we can find at least a few examples where education sure didn't help them "get lucky". ;-}

And, by the way...don't overlook all of those acts of violence that occurred in our history. Nothing would have changed were it not for those downtrodden and exploited finally fighting back against those who were beating the crap out of them for daring to protest against their conditions.

It is no accident that the ruling elite propaganda machine tries to down play those historic acts of self defense and try to emphasize the icons of peace as the vehicle of change. They would much rather you go out and get your heads cracked open by the fascist police than for you to actually fight back. They want you to be like Gandhi and MLK and not like those who stand their ground and inflict as much pain as the bullies inflict upon them. That's why they, after these icons are dead, use them as models of the way they want us to act...non-violently...the thing that never really works unless it was coincidental with major acts of violence.

And the masses could very well overwhelm the few jackals that are dressed as jackbooted Nazis. And that's what they don't want us to know. Look what's happening in the Ukraine. Look what happened in Egypt and Libya. Look what happened in the French revolution, in the Iranian revolution, the Russian Revolution. The people amassed and violently overthrew their corrupt leaders.

It always starts out with people getting really fed up and taking to the streets in protest. Then the cops or company bullies are hired to crack heads of the protestors. Eventually, insurrections break out like at Matewan. This puts the exigency of realizing that the capitalist-industrial bullies and their toady politicians had to finally relent a bit.

The alternative is complete breakdown and potential mob violence against the criminal elite who stand to lose everything they have stolen. But now, they use the corrupt two-party ruse to keep hope alive always to be shot dead after their newly elected Democrat "savior" wins the election. They know that if they can keep fooling people with false hope they will continue to push us all into slavery all without having to fire a shot.

Excellent article, Gary. Thanks.

Dweinstein says "Human progress should be defined as more leisure time and less materialism." And I say YES!

AIW -- This reply is talk about critical thinking being taughtl. However, I first would like to remind people, that according to what Thom has said, the average work day for native americans was 2 hours. That was before the mentally diseased Europeans arrived.

Now to critical thinking. IMO, I think you were taught critical thinking from kindergarden to the end of your formal education. I think you would believe the same thing if you were to compare the teachings in a fundamentalist religious school to how you were taught. I think the Texan repug party had fundamentalist Christian schools in mind when they entered that plank about no teaching of critical thinking.

All wars are resource wars. We know from reading our Marx and Engels that economic concaetcerens are the "prime movers" in politics and everything else., The policies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Obama are in response to the Mid Eastern countriesa nationalizing their oil industries, and so, ending the imperial, colonial hedgemony over them of the United States and Western Europe.

A good a story was published in Mother Jones in 2002 in the run up to the invasion of Iraq written by the former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia of the Nixon Administration of that period describing how it was already the newly adopted policy then that the Western Powers should take the Mid East oil back by force. That action by the nationalist mid eastern governments is what really ended our care free economy of the '50s and '60s, not Ronald Reagan like Thom says (Thom acknowledges that U.S. wealth peaked in 1973, the year of the O.P.,E.C. Oil Embargo). Reagan was only reacting to it. We didn't have recessions before that like we do and did since.

Capital flight, the flight of manufacturing, in the United States began in the '70s (well before Reagan) for a number of reasons. Among them were high taxes, environmental regulations, union collective bargaining contracts increasing the cost of labor, etc. but they all added up to a "per unit cost of production", or the cost of manufacturing goods, here in the United States that manufacturers felt was too high for them to make the profits they wanted. The final push, however, was the sudden skyrocketing of the price of oil.

First, in the '70s manufacturing began to move out of the U.S. cities and into the suburbs and suburban "industrial parks" because the taxes were higher in the cities than in those suburbs and many suburbs tried to lure manufacturing by promising low tax rates. Industry, until then. had been the tax base of the cities and when it moved out property taxes became the tax base. Thus the numbers of the homeless exploded by the '80s not only because living wage jobs for the uneducated and unskilled were gone but the property taxes' exponential increase brought about rapid gentrification of the cities steadily eliminating any affordable housing (Reagan helped by deregulating the housing industry and eliminating housing subsidies. He always greased the skids for what happened but he didn't initiate it.). Thom likes to blame homelessness on Reagan's closing of mental hospitals, and so, dismissively stereotyping the homeless as all being mentally ill - not unlike H.W. Bush while president, tried to do when he said, to paraphrase, that the homeless were all "undereducated and crazy". (Don't get me wrong, I agree with Thom 90% of the time BUT not this time.)

What Reagan and Thatcher represented was the wealthy elites in our civilization preparing to have us, their working class fellow citizens, for lunch instead of the coolies of the "underdeveloped world" that hitherto kept them satiated. England was far more feeling of the economic pressure from declining imperial hedgemony as it, a small island nation, was far more dependant on it and had been steadily losing colonies to their indigenous nationalist movements (whereas the United States, with its duplicitous method imerialism and colonialism of pretending to respect the independence and self rule of less powerful, less developed nations all the while establishing and maintaining puppet governments in these nations that keep their economies in an export, service role to ours - and which received many of our factories thus making them more of the service role - effectively making their populations our coolies, was greatly aided by the Cold War as it gave us a pretext to actively oppose the indigenous national liberation movements as they naturally gravitated to Leninist Communism because of its doctrines for the inalienable right of self determination for all ethnicities.). The current "free trade agreements" also exemplify this as does, in general, "globalization", i.e., dropping the pretense of national divisions being a significant, compelling and just cause for exploitation of other humans and a more open and frank class exploitation of one's fellow citizens.

Mark S – You are describing the building of pressure on capital to leave the US (high median wage, environmental regulations, Carter’s oil embargo etc.). You are not describing capital leaving the country. To keep capital in the country even when there is so much pressure for it to leave, the government needs to build a “dam”, that is, tariffs, no tax credits for moving factories out of the country, all government expenditures go to USA companies etc. Even with all these “dams” I am sure capital leaks out of the country when the pressure is great enough. Hopefully, that would be only a little. I think the reason Thom says it began with Reagan is that Reagan started tearing those dams down.

Funny, America was perfectly comfortable with severe income inequality for years. It only seems to have become an issue as middle classers are starting to feel the pressures of the policies and politics that they, themselves, chose. Sorry, folks, but what the rich are doing to the middle class is simply what the middle class already did to the poor. We were warned back in the 1980s that "trickle down economics" would only result in trickle-up austerity.

Wish we could get over the propaganda crap about "the value of work." The richest work the least, and those who work the hardest are often the poorest.

Ain't that the truth? Propoganda is just what it is.

Mark, just one point if I may. We needn't assume Thom was stereotyping all homeless people as mentally ill, just by emphasizing Reagan's disasterous cuts on mental hospitals. He's talked about other causes of homelessness as well, for what it's worth... - AIW

Okay here is my positive spin -- the Pope, Facebook/Twitter (power to the people; please use it for our own good), and the expanding Lationo population (is it racism to point out a positive trait about an identifiable portion of the population; various polls about happiness have shown that to the culture of S.America happiness is not so strongly correleated to wealth).

He always repeats the "homelessness in America is because Reagan emptied the mental hospitals" thing and I almost never heard him say anything else about it. I understand he wants to blame Reagan but there are more accurate and more substantive accusations he can make - like deregulation of the housing industry and eliminating housing subsidies and whatever he did to help manufacturing leave the country.

It's unlike Thom to stereotype like that but it's "fightin' words" for me when I hear somebody do that. I even wrote a member blog about it once.

I mean, he's still okay with me, i.e., I agree with him 90% of the time ...

Economic inequality, but not poverty could be fixed by raising the reserve ratios (in same cases are less than .5% when you consider GSE's and ABS lending).

The reserves ratios are what allows the banks or other lending institutions such as GSE's to lend against deposits. For instance if you deposit $100 in a bank and the bank has a 20% reserve ration it can lend $80. The person or people it can lend $80 too will also deposit the money in a bank and that bank will reserve $16. The next bank will get $64 and reserve $12.80 and so on. If you do all the math, all the banks together will lend $400 and reserve $100. A $100 deposit therefore creates $500 in assets or a multiplier effect of 5.

Other countries such as China are printing money and using their trade surpluses, the multiplier effect to buy US Assets to create Asset inflation. By printing foreign currency and buying dollars, it makes their currency weaker to the dollar, allowing them to increase their trade surplus. The bigger the trade surplus, the greater their ability to make the dollar weaker to their currency. Asset inflation makes their products cheaper than US products and it bids up the wealth of the rich elite. One person's asset is another person's debt. Asset inflation is making the wealthy very rich. While it should be taken into account that because the US is the largest economy in the world, our trading partners don't have anywhere else to put their dollars, strengthening the US dollar does cause their exports to priced less than US goods.

Debt deflation is what happens when assets such as homes, stocks and bonds (which lower interest yield when bond prices increase in value) all increase in value. An inflated stock market leads to debt deflation because people have to work longer before they can retire becasue stocks yield les than they did before. Low interest rates allow corporate raiders aka stock activists to use debts, derivatives (options, credit default swaps. secritzation) to drive stock market prices higer. 2013 was a record year for stock market activsim.

The greater the asset inflation, the greater the leverage until the whole thing crashes down. The government is the biggest enabler of it all by taxing unearned income not at all or very little. The deduction of interest allows for manipulation not to pay any tax at all.

Government leadership could simply fix inequality all by allowing debts to be written off and increasing fractional banking from 0% to a level where the productive economy is more advantegeous than risk arbitrage. Tax policy should also be changed to tax unearned ncome as much as earned income.

Once income inequality is fixed, then we could get back to the hard job of fixing poverty which will require progressive actioin. Tomorrow's words will just be some reassurance, feel your pain that does very little to cure inequality.

Total credit growth of the US 52 trillion dollars (3 times US GDP) http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCMDO

Rest of the World investment in the US. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ROWFDNA027N?cid=33246.

You're right Chuck, about why so many dems stayed home through the last midterm elections. But I say (as I've said all along): no excuse!

I get as frustrated and disgusted with the Dems as everyone else on this forum... but I challenge anyone claiming both parties are the same to look at the detailed voting records of all members of Congress, such as Project Vote Smart painstakingly digs up every few years. Trust me, folks; both parties are not the same. Anybody who bothers to examine these Congressional voting records will see they're not the same. I swear by this even though there've been plenty of times when I'd have liked to throw the whole Democratic Party out the window. - AIW