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True. It's like the Dallas of California.

Yep.

Well, just like the Tea Party got people talking about the Deficit, OWS is getting people to talk about the Income Gap.

Both groups have accomplished a lot regarding their core message in a short period of time.

Also, the OWS in Oakland is starting to morph into an anti-police thing. That is a huge mistake!

Is it wrong that every time I read this thread this song keeps popping into my head?




Not sure how much longer this is gonna go on for. I mean looks like there's trouble in paradise and the cracks seem to be getting bigger.

Easy E wrote:Well, just like the Tea Party got people talking about the Deficit, OWS is getting people to talk about the Income Gap.

Both groups have accomplished a lot regarding their core message in a short period of time.

Also, the OWS in Oakland is starting to morph into an anti-police thing. That is a huge mistake!

It is? Absent this board and CNN I don't notice anyone talking abut them much at all, and if so, its more along the lines of get a job you bum!

Serious issues but these are the exact opposite of the group of people you want to bring this up.

Frazzled wrote:

Easy E wrote:Well, just like the Tea Party got people talking about the Deficit, OWS is getting people to talk about the Income Gap.

Both groups have accomplished a lot regarding their core message in a short period of time.

Also, the OWS in Oakland is starting to morph into an anti-police thing. That is a huge mistake!

It is? Absent this board and CNN I don't notice anyone talking abut them much at all, and if so, its more along the lines of get a job you bum!

Serious issues but these are the exact opposite of the group of people you want to bring this up.

Then who is going to bring it up? The lazy do-nothings who proclaim "get a job you bums!" any time anyone complains about it?

Melissia wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

Easy E wrote:Well, just like the Tea Party got people talking about the Deficit, OWS is getting people to talk about the Income Gap.

Both groups have accomplished a lot regarding their core message in a short period of time.

Also, the OWS in Oakland is starting to morph into an anti-police thing. That is a huge mistake!

It is? Absent this board and CNN I don't notice anyone talking abut them much at all, and if so, its more along the lines of get a job you bum!

Serious issues but these are the exact opposite of the group of people you want to bring this up.

Then who is going to bring it up? The lazy do-nothings who proclaim "get a job you bums!" any time anyone complains about it?

Unemployed steel workers.
Unemployed auto workers.
Tea Party fellow travellers.
Small business owners who have lost their business.
People who's jobs were outsourced.

Apologies for image spam, but I'm doing it anyway:

Generators? Where did they get generators?
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/28/us/occupy-wall-street/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Frazzled wrote:
Unemployed steel workers.
Unemployed auto workers.
Tea Party fellow travellers.
Small business owners who have lost their business.
People who's jobs were outsourced.

So, the Tea Party, basically.

Probably someone rented one or already had one and brought it over to help their newfound pals.


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dogma wrote:

Frazzled wrote:
Unemployed steel workers.
Unemployed auto workers.
Tea Party fellow travellers.
Small business owners who have lost their business.
People who's jobs were outsourced.

So, the Tea Party, basically.

Isn't the Tea Party basically owned by business anwyay by now?

Frazzled wrote:Generators? Where did they get generators?
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/28/us/occupy-wall-street/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

http://www.honda.co.uk/energy/generators/?s3campaign=PE_Energy_Brand_+_Generic_exact&s3advertiser=Google_PPC&s3banner=honda_generators

Hey, I think we rented one of those when the power went out one time, so the food in our freezer didn't go bad.

Melissia wrote:
Isn't the Tea Party basically owned by business anwyay by now?

I don't think so, but business interests will definitely use their populist rhetoric to get bills passed.

Yes, the Tea Party bus tours and rallies were funded by billionaires like the Koch Bros. and other corporations who didn't want to see every American have affordable health care because it would cut into their profits. And of course those rallies were promoted free and endlessly on Fox Nausea, another major corporation and their propaganda machine.

I am the 1%!!!

Best. Halloween. Costume. Ever.

Phanatik wrote:Once again, it's really none of your concern to trouble yourself with whether or not I find my time on dakka worthwhile. Also, to do so is not a refutation of anything I've said.

It certainly isn't my concern how much you're getting out of dakka. But it certainly should be your concern, and as such, while you don't need to convince me that your time here is well spent, you do certainly need to be able to convince yourself of that.

So again, did you believe, to yourself, that claiming there was a slippery slope between caps on executive pay and Nazism would lead to anything that would justify the time you spent typing it?

In your rush to criticize, you don't seem to have comphrehended what I said. I said early Nazi. I never mentioned Hitler.

And that difference is totally important and completely relevant, and makes one blind bit of difference to how ridiculous your comment was. I mean seriously dude, you're the one who thinks there's a connection between caps on executive salaries and Nazism, but then you get all pedantic over Hitler and the Nazis.

First of all, it's Koch brothers. Second, I don't think they ever collaborated with the Nazis, or made their money by wrecking foreign currencies, thus destroying the life savings of millions of people.

Uh huh. Because a 14 year old Jewish boy keeping his cover as a non-Jew accompanying his uncle as he collected property from other Jews and receiving no personal gain from it is totally 'collaborating with the Nazis'. And that's enough to justify condemning a man for the rest of his life, and therefore condemning every movement that he ever gives money to.

Your politics are ugly, and based entirely on bs. You should be fething ashamed of what type on this site. Absolutely fething ashamed.

And in amongst all that ugliness, you never even bothered to substantiate your assumption that the value of CEOs had grown by a factor of ten in the last two decades. It gives the impression you're only capable of parrotting cheap, nasty soundbites from Anne Coulter and not actually capable of substantiating your claims with original thoughts.


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Easy E wrote:We have reached a point where all jobs can be outsourced regardless of skill level. It doesn't matter whether it is high skill or low skill.

No, we haven't. If you study the make up of industry in different countries, and read analysis on why those industries formed where they did, you will see that not everything can be done everywhere.

The city of Delhi puts out 4 times as many college graduates in a year as my local metropolis.

Which makes the very bizarre assumption that the quality of education delivered by a city of Delhi graduate is exactly the same as one delivered by a first rate university in the West. If that were true, we wouldn't have overseas students paying an absolute fortune for educations in the West.


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vercingatorix wrote:So about overpaid CEO's
first of all, when lehman brothers collapsed, no one lost more money, than Lehman brothers CEO.
second: his pay was almost entirely in lehman stock which he had sold about 500 million dollars worth from 2000 to 2007. That seems like a lot of money but when you realize that his company was controlling assets worth 688 BILLION, he's really payed a pretty reasonable amount. (for instance if someone managed a 2 million dollar resturaunt for the same time period. They'd get payed less than 17k over 7 years.)

And if there was an arm's length review of the CEO's remuneration, with clear and objectively proven points of clear shareholder wealth, then maybe you'd have something. Instead, it's a guess. We really don't know how valuable one figurehead at the top of a 100,000 person organisation is, how much of the growth in share price is due to decisions made by his predecessor, or to good market conditions. We undertake

Ultimately, we know we don't have to pay people as much as we do to run our very big corporations. We know twenty odd years ago we paid them on average about a tenth of what we pay them now, and things were run about as well.

The best way to decrease that disparity is educate people on getting in on the prosperity! Not killing it out of some sory of jealous fit.

No, the best way to decrease that disparity is to ensure equal opportunity

Also, on taxing the rich. First of all, I have a minor in accounting and Corporate profits actually get taxed twice. The corporate entity gets taxed and then dividends given to investors get taxed.

I have a double major in accounting and finance, a CPA qualification and ten years industry experience. And the double taxation of corporate profits in the US was ended under Bush. One of the best things he did.

Secondly, 47% of the country isn't even paying taxes and half of those are actually EARNING money from the government.

Nope. 47% aren't paying federal taxes. They still pay all kinds of state sales taxes and the like.

And they're not paying federal taxes because they're unemployed, or working minimum pay jobs where they're barely able make ends meet as it is.

It absolutely blows my mind that you could build an economy where 47% of people earn so little that to tax them would be to drive them into absolute poverty... and then instead of thinking 'well perhaps we should do something to help those people grow their incomes' instead you complain that they're not paying taxes.

We are already taxing the rich, considerably.

Compared to? Compared to the rest of the world? No, the opposite is true.

Compared to your own country historically? No, the opposite is true.

Mmmm... I love the smell of tear gas in the morning!
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20111030/D9QMCJLO0.html

daedalus wrote:Apologies for image spam, but I'm doing it anyway

I think this is somewhere where the right and left generally agree - the influence of money in government is a problem.

The difference, however, is in what the solution to this problem is. The left wants more regulation, more government involvement, and wants corporations to act "ethically" by stopping spending. The right, on the other hand, wants less regulation, less government involvement and wants the governmenet to stop creating the incentives by which corporations spend money on politicians.

Personally, I like the right-wing idea of reducing the power of government because it reduces the incentives that corporations have in spending money and they will willingly stop. I dislike the left-wing idea because more government creates an even bigger incentive for companies to spend money in government, which leads to calls for an even larger government...

biccat wrote:The right, on the other hand, wants less regulation, less government involvement and wants the governmenet to stop creating the incentives by which corporations spend money on politicians.

Personally, I like the right-wing idea of reducing the power of government because it reduces the incentives that corporations have in spending money and they will willingly stop.

No they won't. There is an intrinsic incentive to the expenditure of money on politicians.

biccat wrote:
I dislike the left-wing idea because more government creates an even bigger incentive for companies to spend money in government, which leads to calls for an even larger government...

Good, good, cast your opposition in a negative light, make it appear untenable without arguing to that effect.

The rhetoric is strong here.

sebster wrote:I have a double major in accounting and finance, a CPA qualification and ten years industry experience. And the double taxation of corporate profits in the US was ended under Bush. One of the best things he did.

Hm. Dunno about the best thing but my father's business certainly benefitted.

After Bush did that, he had his company become incorporated because he'd be taxed less that way than as a sole proprietor. Which left him slightly more money to help try to pay off debts.

It's really kinda sad, that non-corporations tend to be taxed more than corporations... and yes, before anyone asks, I still support the idea of raising taxes on corporations through cutting loopholes and penalizing offshore tax havens. Small businesses don't usually use those quite as often...

dogma wrote:No they won't. There is an intrinsic incentive to the expenditure of money on politicians.

There's only an incentive to spend money on politicians to the extent that the incentive exists. If you take away the incentive, people stop spending money on politicians.

It's no surprise that as the scope of government has grown so has the amount of money donated to politicians.

biccat wrote:
There's only an incentive to spend money on politicians to the extent that the incentive exists. If you take away the incentive, people stop spending money on politicians.

Indeed, but since politicians always have power, being as they are politicians, there is an intrinsic incentive to spend money to influence them.

biccat wrote:
It's no surprise that as the scope of government has grown so has the amount of money donated to politicians.

I'm not sure that's a valid conclusion given that, when adjusted for inflation, campaign finance has not grown more expensive in correspondence with the increase in governmental scope.



I mean, I guess you might claim that the government was smaller in 1978, but it would be a difficult case to make given the marginal tax rate.

Two out of three Americans surveyed tell the Hill the middle class is shrinking, and they've got some ideas about what's gone wrong:

Close to 7 in 10 said the income tax system is either somewhat or very unfair — a finding that was supported among most ideological groups and income levels.

But voters are also far from convinced that a flat tax — like the one Texas Gov. RickPerry (R) proposed last week — was the solution to that problem.

A clear majority — 58 percent — said they favored a graduated income tax system, with only 35 percent backing the sort of flat tax that magazine publisher Steve Forbes pushed for during his 1996 presidential campaign.

But here's the disjunct: Voters appear to be split almost exactly between the two parties when it comes to taxes. Democrats are pushing higher taxes for the rich and breaks for everyone else. Republicans are pushing a regressive flat tax, tax breaks for the wealthy and an end to tax breaks for working families. The choice is stark, but somehow it's not clear.

maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/31/8561396-hill-poll-flat-tax-still-unpopular

dogma wrote:Indeed, but since politicians always have power, being as they are politicians, there is an intrinsic incentive to spend money to influence them.

That's why there should be a limit on the scope of power. When there's less power to buy then you will decrease the demand for it.

dogma wrote:I mean, I guess you might claim that the government was smaller in 1978, but it would be a difficult case to make given the marginal tax rate.

No, actually it wouldn't be such a difficult case. The government was actually much smaller in 1978. Marginal tax rates, unfortunately, have at best a tenuous connection to government tax receipts or spending.

biccat wrote:That's why there should be a limit on the scope of power. When there's less power to buy then you will decrease the demand for it.

You know, the demand will still be there. A big reason why the government's scope has expanded is because there was demand for it to be so. Including fro mbig business, I should note.

Demand/supply for government services or power or whatever doesn't follow the economic model.

biccat wrote:
That's why there should be a limit on the scope of power. When there's less power to buy then you will decrease the demand for it.

Limiting the scope of power does not necessarily reduce demand for that power. If I have power over the money supply, and nothing else, then there will still be a lot of people that want to influence me.

biccat wrote:
No, actually it wouldn't be such a difficult case. The government was actually much smaller in 1978. Marginal tax rates, unfortunately, have at best a tenuous connection to government tax receipts or spending.

By what measure? Certainly not federal revenue, and not really according to budget either (exempting the last 3-4 years).

That's sort of the problem with talking about government "size", it doesn't really mean anything, and when its discussed the person who brings it up generally uses "big government" as a replacement for "Government I don't like."


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Melissia wrote:
Demand/supply for government services or power or whatever doesn't follow the economic model.

Especially since legal prohibitions are not absolute.

biccat wrote:I think this is somewhere where the right and left generally agree - the influence of money in government is a problem.

The difference, however, is in what the solution to this problem is. The left wants more regulation, more government involvement, and wants corporations to act "ethically" by stopping spending. The right, on the other hand, wants less regulation, less government involvement and wants the governmenet to stop creating the incentives by which corporations spend money on politicians.

Personally, I like the right-wing idea of reducing the power of government because it reduces the incentives that corporations have in spending money and they will willingly stop. I dislike the left-wing idea because more government creates an even bigger incentive for companies to spend money in government, which leads to calls for an even larger government...

This is really, really contrived.

Any way you cut it, the government sector is going to be a very large part of the total economy. There is just no avoiding that in a modern economy. As such, there is always going to be a significant incentive for private individuals to benefit from distorting the system to access some of that cash. Never mind that outside of direct government spending, there is a vast amount of gain to be found in beneficial legislation, or just on matters of principle.

Never mind that have close regulations on spending doesn't have any relation to the scale of government.


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Melissia wrote:Hm. Dunno about the best thing but my father's business certainly benefitted.

Oh, there's certainly better ways the reform could have been handled, but I really do believe it's the best thing Bush did because, really, there isn't much competition.

In terms of handling the reform better, it would have been better not to just not tax dividend streams, but instead have the dividends counted among other income for the year, but then have a tax credit come across with it for any tax already paid by the company on that income.

Effectively what you're doing is saying that it doesn't matter how the income is earned, in an incorporated body or not, it will be taxed the same - as part of the recipient's income. It's a principle most every developed country has accepted over years of tax reform, and something the US should embrace to start taking the nonsense out of it's own tax scheme.

sebster wrote:Any way you cut it, the government sector is going to be a very large part of the total economy. There is just no avoiding that in a modern economy. As such, there is always going to be a significant incentive for private individuals to benefit from distorting the system to access some of that cash.

Actually, it could be avoided in a modern economy. Because government does not have to be a significant economic actor.

Incomprehensible sentences removed for clarity.