The Reason for the Economic Decline of America

a reply to: xuenchen

The Democrats and Republicans often trade concessions. Reaganomics was definitely Republican

originally posted by: Willtell
a reply to: xuenchen


The democrats, in terms of taxes and economic policy, are better than the GOP, but not much better

They have been bought as well

Look at the money Clinton has now; he and Hillary are multi millionaires

Both serving. Same interests. Get yourself aware of the killings your country does abroad.....

cheers)

a reply to: Willtell

You are aware that this plan went into action in September?

originally posted by: Willtell

Look Augustus its no big thing but I didn’t imply or say Christie raised taxes on the rich.

Then whose 'rich policies' in New Jersey were you referring to? You made it clear that 'rich policies' meant cutting taxes. Whose taxes were cut and by whom?

a reply to: darkorange

Dude most Americans dont care at all about the deaths of foreigners unless they are our proven allies. Even with allies it's not a guarantee. I bet if France had a 9/11 a huge number of Americans would say "those froggies deserve it for being weak on Muslims and being such wusses in general".

They can't bring themselves to care about their neighbors let alone foreigners. Hell most people I know wouldn't even give their sibling a place to sleep if they lost everything. Most Americans are concerned with preserving their own little bubble of fantasy. That's why America is failing. A nation with no qualities besides selfishness and greed cannot survive long. Ayn Rand is the biggest joke in history and many still treat her as a Jesus figure.

It's a mad mad world.

originally posted by: tavi45
a reply to: xuenchen

The Democrats and Republicans often trade concessions. Reaganomics was definitely Republican

Total BeeEss.

The 1981 bill was introduced by the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, a Democrat and convicted criminal.

Garbage.

a reply to: Willtell

Supply side economics are the bane of this country! Nice post!

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus
Christie policies are giveaways to the wealthy

After spending his re-election year masquerading as a moderate, Gov. Chris Christie is back to his old tricks. The governor proposes a budget that slashes aid to mass transit, cancels this year’s round of property tax credits, and cuts cancer research and college scholarships.
It also skips pension payments, jeopardizing the retirements of middle-class families and putting the state’s credit rating at serious risk.

Despite the detrimental impact these cuts will have on New Jersey’s working families, Christie says his hands are tied. But while the billion-dollar deficit presents lawmakers with a real dilemma, it’s a dilemma of Christie’s own making. The governor seems unable to find resources to support investments in property tax relief, cancer research, college scholarships and other vital services, but he has had no problem identifying billions in tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations.

For the last four years, the state’s wealthiest residents have enjoyed massive tax breaks courtesy of the Christie administration. In fact, the only income bracket in New Jersey that has actually enjoyed lower taxes since 2009 is the top 2 percent.

Big corporations also have seen big windfalls. This week, a new report from think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective identified $4 billion in giveaways to corporations through the state’s Economic Development Authority, even as evidence mounts that these kinds of tax breaks haven’t created the jobs we need.

In 2011, the administration gave Prudential Insurance more than $200 million in tax breaks to move its downtown Newark offices a few blocks down the street. As part of the deal, Prudential was supposed to create 400 jobs, but internal documents show that they were planning to create many of them even without the grant. In other words, we paid them to do exactly what they were going to do anyway.

Even more troubling are corporations that have taken state subsidies and then turned around and laid off New Jersey workers. In 2013, Governing Magazine identified 20 corporations that have taken money from the state and then laid people off anyway. For example, Citigroup was given $12.3 million from the state economic development program in 2011 and then laid off 276 employees in Englewood Cliffs just weeks later. The worst part is that giveaways to the wealthy and corporations come at the expense of investments in strong, safe communities and the highly trained work force that has always been New Jersey’s selling point for employers. Every dollar given to the wealthy or doled out to large and profitable corporations is a dollar that can’t be spent fixing New Jersey’s roads and bridges, restoring Christie’s devastating cuts to public schools or putting cops back on the streets in crime-plagued communities.

The truth is out here its just that people don't look...they rely on dogma

How Chris Christie Destroyed New Jersey's Economy and Middle Class

ew Jersey governor Chris Christie is “tired of hearing about the minimum wage.” That wasn’t a campaign slogan for his re-election last year, but something he confided to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – the DC lobbying arm of multinational corporations. Oligarchs like the Chamber’s members love Christie so much, they already threw their weight behind him in the prelude to the 2012 elections, despite Christie turning down Mitt Romney’s offer to be his running mate. But Christie, the virulent class warrior who bestows bountiful gifts upon his rich benefactors and calls the Koch Brothers “great Americans” while simultaneously punishing the middle class, represents the new face of the GOP – hard-nosed, stubborn, and eager to blame drastic economic conditions on those preyed upon by his biggest campaign donors.

What Christie won’t do for minimum wage-earners, he’ll gladly do for multinational corporations. Since being inaugurated in 2010, Christie has given out $4 billion in corporate tax breaks in just 4 years. That’s more than all the previous governors of New Jersey combined have given out in New Jersey’s history. Yet for all of his corporate handouts, Christie has very little to show for it in terms of job growth. Under the Christie administration, job growth is the second worst in the nation, with only Alaska doing worse. Through Christie’s budget cuts, the public sector has been forced to endure salary freezes and mass layoffs, killing jobs as a result of more people spending less money.

Indeed Chris Christie is the rich mans dream politician

He's trying to outdo Reagan in idol worshiping them and giving them any and everything they want.

He is the typical GOP front man for the rich and super rich

From August of 2013 to August of 2014, New Jersey grew only 6,700 jobs. At that rate, it would take 44 years for New Jersey’s unemployed to all be working again. While Christie is gambling on more corporate tax breaks to entice big employers to open up shop in New Jersey, he’s ignoring the fact that companies formerly in New Jersey have since moved to Massachusetts and California. While both of those states are known for high taxes, they also have educated, highly-skilled workers ready to take on more high-skilled jobs.

The increased squeeze on public workers and stalwart refusal to increase workers’ wages has resulted in the highest poverty rate New Jersey has experienced in 50 years. And while New Jersey’s unemployment rate has fallen down to 6.5 percent, that’s still five-tenths of a point behind the national average. Most jobs that were lost in New Jersey paid median wages of $30,000 to $60,000 a year. Most of the new jobs that have been added pay median wages of just $30,000 or less. In a consumer economy, if people are working but only making enough to meet the most basic of needs, demand will continue to fall and more businesses will be forced to close.

READ CAREFULLY:

The increased squeeze on public workers and stalwart refusal to increase workers’ wages has resulted in the highest poverty rate New Jersey has experienced in 50 years.

Your hero is a zero

a reply to: Willtell

Trickle down economics are an excuse to bail out the rich. A healthy country has a thriving middle-class. I am noticing a big reduction in America's middle-class recently.

If someone is going to go to all the trouble to give the rich more money so that the poor can (questionably) get some of it, it makes more sense to put that money directly into helping the poor. It makes even more sense to put that money into progressing the poor into the middle-class.

The real problem imho is robotics and automation. The worst is yet to come since robots are not yet commonplace. Once transportation robots arrive people should start noticing how in a matter of years so many people got laid off and replaced by self driving cars, aircrafts, trains and boats and how this affects the economy.

When robots like Baxter are better developed and become more sophisticated, mass production workers will get laid off, but this might take another decade.

Schools should have had robots and computers by now, when those students finish school they will be trained for jobs that have been replaced or are in the process of being replaced and I see few incentives to turn the tide, if at all people are speaking doom and gloom about that tide.

originally posted by: Willtell

He's trying to outdo Reagan in idol worshiping them and giving them any and everything they want.

So are you know saying he did cut taxes for the rich? Can you tell us what the rate is now and what it was reduced from?

Your hero is a zero

Where did I say Chris Christie was my hero? I am not stupid enough to think that there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats.

a reply to: Willtell

Spoken like someone who truly has no grasp whatsoever on economics...

The reason the economy did so well back then had nothing to do with what party was in control. BOTH parties were HUGE into free market capitalism. The FREE MARKET is what breeds a strong middle class and reduces income inequality. The "Free Market" that the US has is actually a hybrid market, and the true free market that was once strong here has degraded massively in the last 50 years.

The left side of our government (which is only left relative to the right, but is not very far left at all), especially in the last 20 years has done a lot to erode the free market in what appears to be some attempt to globalize America's economy.

Reagen and Clinton were really the last bastions of the Free Market int he USA. Bush SR and JR were secret Crony Capitalists, and Obama is a straight up Crony Capitalist.

I suggest you read and watch "Free to Choose" by Milton Friedman.

You also don't seem to have a real grasp on politics, as the left and right in the USA are literally almost in the same place in the grand scheme of global geopolitics.

Political Compass

Pretty much every politician in the US is Authoritarian Right.

Very strong post and in combination with the Dark money post I just read makes this country look just hideous when it comes to money. I never understood why greed was a good thing. I realize people want more and better things for their family, but there is a belief in the native Americans that a man who draws his family circle around his entire community is the man who wants to better not only his life, his direct family, but also better everyone else's lives which he how he should be in today's societies; however, greed a good thing now and means you will see brothers steal from each other in order to get more for themselves.

a reply to: raymundoko

You didn’t even deal with the three aspects of economic decline I mention: trade policy, taxes, unionism and banking policies…all elements that created today’s decline.

Look at the statistics not political and economic dogma

The basic reality is that the politicians of both parties have sold out to the individual fat cat whose only interest is accumulating a lot of capital.

So the capitalists and industrialists have been allowed to export slave wage jobs overseas in the millions through trade policies

The taxes policies have allowed them to not only keep ALL their ill gotten gain but also allow them to continue to stay overseas in the slave wage market without penalties.

Lastly the breaking of unions nationally in the country has deteriorated wages and rights of workers to where the country is no longer a union shop with any rights or threat to the industrialists who have a free rein to do what they want to do.

Its called SERFDOM!

originally posted by: TerryMcGuire
a reply to: Willtell

I think you can add to your list at least one more reason. Post WWII the US was basically the only intact industrial nation left. Everyone else had been bombed to smithereens. No one else had any real productive capacity. This left the whole world open to US products and US center capitalism. There was basically no competition from the rest of the world. The US flourished, workers and industrialists.

This. FDR's mishandling of the Great Depression was rescued by the above facts and LBJ's great society frittered away the economic advantages we inherited from WWII.

Thom Hartmann: How America Killed Its Middle Class

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events. According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class

Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes? This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

Were being screwed because there is something called the MACRO ECONOMY that is a process where powerful people can influence it by excess capital and political manipulations to benefit the few not the many.

originally posted by: Willtell
Thom Hartmann: How America Killed Its Middle Class

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events. According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class

Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes? This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

Were being screwed because there is something called the MACRO ECONOMY that is a process where powerful people can influence it by excess capital and political manipulations to benefit the few not the many.

That's not what marcoeconomics is.

DEFINITION of 'Macroeconomics'

The field of economics that studies the behavior of the aggregate economy. Macroeconomics examines economy-wide phenomena such as changes in unemployment, national income, rate of growth, gross domestic product, inflation and price levels.

originally posted by: Willtell
Here’s the deal folks:
What we can call: The Raw Deal

The American economy in the 50’s 60’s and 70's, because of FDR policies from the new deal, unionism, sane trade policies, and the burgeoning economy fueled by a 90 percent tax rate on the rich, caused a great movement into the middle class by millions of Americans.

This middle class produced the radicalism and liberalism of the 60’s that for a time increased the wealth being shared and further enhanced the raising of poverty. This was primarily done by what is mentioned above, President Johnson’s civil rights initiatives, and other Great society programs that helped the poor.

Then what happened was a backlash by the reactionary classes of the conservative rich.

What they realized ( some big shot conservative wrote a book) was that the bigger the middle class became the more progressivism and liberalism came about that raised the poor into the middle class and was responsible for the economic fairness that existed in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.

They understood that revolutions, great economic changes, and society uplift come about NOT BY THE POOR CLASS rebelling against their poverty but by the middle class.

Something had to be done to halt this growth…

They reacted to this by deliberately creating the new conservative movement that was ultimately responsible (Ronald Reagan type policies of severely cutting taxes for the rich) for the economic decline we see today: TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS.

IT WAS A DELIBERATE POLICY!

If one follows the great economic growth of America after WWII they will clearly see that it was the tax rates, the trade policy (protectionism) and what unionism did for the middle class that fueled this great growth that no longer exists.

The idea that it can happen again through MORE severe trickle down policies (the GOP will surely try to do) is a pipe dream.

The only way back is to do three things immediately (something neither the Democrats of GOP will ever do now because they are ALL bought and paid for by the elite wealthy) amongst other thing of course:

First: Get the trade policy back to the protectionism is was( protecting US jobs) in past years

Two: Raise the tax rate of the rich to where it was in the 50’s and 60’s.

Three: Bring back the Glass–Steagall act that separated investment banking from ordinary savings and loan commercial banks.

Only then will the economy start returning to growth.

Johnson was the one that got rid of the 90% tax(nobody ever paid that much by the way). The economy took a dump in the early seventies, long before Reagan took office. That is also the same time America moved away from manufacturing into commerce. You can't deny what computers and robots have done to manufacturing as well.

It is not really accurate to base anything on the golden are of the U.S. economy. That is something the country had never seen before and will probably not be seen in our lifetime. You did leave out one of the biggest contributors to it, extremely cheap energy, we'll probably never see that again.

I'm with you on the Garbage Act though.