Korean Job Discussion Forums

[R. S. Refugee]

. . . because the ruling class already won.

It's a Class War, Stupid: Election season will be packed with distractions, but the real issue is a matter of life and death
Economic Policy
by Matt Taibbi

A few weeks back, I got a call from someone in the office of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders wanted to tell me about an effort his office had recently made to solicit information about his constituents' economic problems. He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to "tell me what was going on in their lives economically." He expected a few dozen letters at best � but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job � in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class. For example, this letter came from the owner of his own commercial cleaning service:

My 90-year-old father in Connecticut has recently become ill and asked me to visit him. I want to drop everything I am doing and go visit him, however, I am finding it hard to save enough money to add to the extra gas I'll need to get there. I make more than I did a year ago and I don't have enough to pay my property taxes this quarter for the first time in many years. They are due tomorrow.

This single mother buys clothes from thrift stores and unsuccessfully tried to sell her house to pay for her son's schooling:

I don't go to church many Sundays, because the gasoline is too expensive to drive there. Every thought of an activity is dependent on the cost.

Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating "cereal and toast" for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter � forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.

"The middle class is disappearing," says Sanders. "In real ways we're becoming more like a third-world country."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/21830103/its_a_class_war_stupid

[blaseblasphemener]

Seems like just about all the quotes were about gas money, even though gas in the States is still dirt cheap compared to anywhere else in the world, other than the middle east.

Here's a hint: sell your SUV/V8 pick-up truck/81 Lincoln Continental. Buy a Daewoo Matiz: Comfortable driving.

You will get laughed at, but at least you can: go to church/visit your 90-year-old grandfather/get your chemo treatments.

You might want to budget for your property taxes as well, especially considering dude is a business owner. It's not like you didn't know you had to pay them. Shouldn't they be less than last year anyway, since property values have dropped everywhere?

[Gopher]

It is no longer race, class, and gender but rather class, gender, and race. Alert the Ministry of Truth immediately!

[Ya-ta Boy]

Class has always been a curious concept in America. The early settlers brought the idea with them, but the environment gave people the hope of entering the upper classes. Some say that is why Marxism never caught on in the US. The Jefferson-Jackson strain of political philosophy promised that the doors were open to anyone who could squeeze in, so why execute the aristocrats.

Truman's policies after WWII expanded the middle class like no time before. Blue collar workers could live a middle class life. Working class boys home from the war could go to college and get ahead.

The policies of the last 40 years have battered the middle class. The good-paying blue collar jobs have all moved abroad. Isn't it mises who says 2% of the population now own 95% of the wealth. I hope the Age of Activism that Brooks talked about addresses this inequity.

[ontheway]

What Bernie is seeing are the effects of Socialism in America. Years of government spending and taxation has eaten into the middle classes. Socialism always puts pressure on the middle class and expands the lower classes, creating more and more poor. Socialism always creates or sustains some kind of rich, elite politically connected class as well.

The US has had decades of socialism: the Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, Property Tax, Inheritance Tax, massive subsidization and malinvestment in the transportation and energy industries, subsidies for automobiles and nuclear power, destruction of the solar and wind power industries. Social Security has reduced net national savings by $20 to $40 trillion dollars or more, destroying investment and hundreds of millions of jobs around the world, creating poverty and war.

Thanks to the party of the Clintons, LBJ, FDR, George Wallace, and Lyndon Larouche America's socialism has placed a crushing load on the backs of its citizens. Then the Republicans decided to join the big spending party and made things worse - and Bernie Sanders, being an avowed Independent Socialist should wake up to this fact: It is his ideology that has failed.

At least he had enough sense not to be a Democrat.

[Ya-ta Boy]

It's always amusing to read your Back to the Future reinterpretation of history. To hear you talk, the sweatshops, company towns and the capitalist looting of the country was the Golden Age. Are you a Social Darwinist?

[mises]

[ontheway]

Everytime I read your posts, Yata, it becomes clear that you have no background in economics or politics. Since you don't know what candidate ran in what party and cannot correctly analyze political positions, it's obvious that you are not familiar with political science beyond the basic middle school requirements. And you have no clue about economic history.

The socialist dogma about "sweatshops" etc. that you refer too is not an accurate picture of the economic history of the era.

The world grew from poverty. The world had to escape the system of state control - petty dictatorships, kingdoms, fiefdoms - the equavelent of fascist-socialism of the era.

People, regular people, were largely farmers and they CHOSE to work in factories and other forms of labor for hire because IT IMPROVED THEIR LIVES. People were better off as a result of these operations that are called "sweatshops" by the ignorant, socialist psuedo-intellectuals of yesterday, and still today.

Such practices were not ended because of government, labor laws or unions. Working conditions improved because investment made by individuals allowed workers to earn more money and work shorter hours. The free market caused the demand curve for labor to shift so that workers were paid higher wages for their labor. Workers too became investors, investing in their skill base which made them more productive enabling them to earn more.

The actions of the government, the stupid laws and rules of the fascist-socialists have made things worse for workers. Workers make less money and have worse working conditions because of the government than they would have if the government had done nothing.

Economists estimate that the Government of the United States has REDUCED the standard of living of the average worker in America by 90% due to its rules, taxes, regulations etc over the past 95 years.

That means, if the govenment had done nothing, the standard of living of the average American would be TEN TIMES what it is today.

This effect has impoverished the world as well. The US Social Security program ALONE has destroyed a minimum of 200,000,000 - that's two hundred million - jobs around the world, outside the US.

[mises]

[browneyedgirl]

[bucheon bum]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Kuros]

What the hell is with this class warfare?

Look, we've been suffering from bad economic and fiscal policies for some time now. This afflicts the poor and lower middle-class harder. If we change to Clintonian-style fiscal conservatism with compassion, everyone wins.

[jkelly80]

[quote="mises"]

[mises]

Now, jkelly, do you know of the law of diminishing returns as it pertains to economic size? How does that apply to your silly assertion that high taxes = economic growth full stop? That, plus 4% for a what was a mid range developing country by current standards for much of that time is fully unremarkable.