The veracity of the statement has no bearing on the fact that you dismissed/questioned it first, and now agree. Your position changed....and so has your argument now from 'staggering wealth inequality isn't a bad thing" to ' wealth inequality isn't staggering'.
Forgive us if we take the words of economists, historians, reality, and our own senses over a random person's opinion.

Wiki- in 2014 the top wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation's wealth; the bottom 80% own 7%; similarly, but later, the media reported, the "richest 1 percent in the United States now own more additional income than the bottom 90 percent".[8] The gap between the top 10% and the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1,000% for the top 1%. The average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour"
If that's not excessive, I have to wonder what could be in your opinion. My wife, head of her department for 10 years, working 45-50 hour weeks, makes $30k a year working like a dog (at a job that is life and death for her customers, platelet donation, her department keeps our only local blood bank open as the only money making department, she doesn't make fries.)...Warren Buffet makes >10000 times that much doing absolutely nothing...not excessive?! Also, because he only pays taxes on what he spends, he pays less in taxes than we do.
Thpp!....Ack!

That might be, weirdly, the source of a confused correlation for some voters. Living standards for middle class voters ("my kid can do better than me") continued to rise through about the mid to late 1970s---and after that, flat-lined for a more than a generation, all the way to today.

The correlation that some people draw is "immigrants", "civil rights", etc...

Though, perhaps, academics might point them in a different direction---trade, tax policy, the decline of unions (driving middle class wages) in the face of a shifting industrial base, technological change, and the rise of competitors who finally recovered from World War II...

It would be nice if there was a rising tide that lifted all middle class (of all backgrounds) households still...

Even if Americans wouldn't accept the level of taxes and other wealth distribution methods that happen in Denmark, I think that we'd almost certainly be net better off / "happier" / have a higher standard of living if we moved in that direction at least a little bit.

Yes, Americans want to be rich. But, the 1% is going to be relatively equally happy whether they are 10 times, 100 times, or 1000 times richer than the 98th percentile just below them. Today, that disparity is massive. In eras that the GOP likes to remember as the good ol' days, say the 1950s, rich was still rich but nowhere near as far beyond the middle class as it is today.

High(er) taxes, particularly on income in those top percentile tax brackets, allow for the superior infrastructure, health care, and educational opportunities that benefit *everyone* and allow for the "American Dream" of anyone being able to make it big with a good idea, a lot of hard work, and a little luck. I don't think that recipe for success actually pans out in modern America, and that is a shame.

I'm pretty sure that if the tables were turned and somehow Hillary ran as a Republican, the Democrats would have voted for Trump as well. We tend to overlook things like reason and sanity in the USA when it comes to people/teams/etc that we hate.

Plus Trump was selling a message that a lot of people bought into, that they were somehow going to go back to a time when factory and coal jobs were a thing for middle class union type people. People who didn't work in those fields knew it was bogus from the get go, but when you live in a shitty area and desperately want to scroll back progress so that you can get your guaranteed 30+ an hour job/lifetime pension without a college education, you tend to overlook small things like guys grabbing pussies.

You are right, in a sane country Hillary probably would have been elected. She also probably wouldn't have been eligible to run because she would have beaten out Obama in 2008. She didn't because people were so desperate for something, anything to change in our fucked up government that they went with Obama. Hell, I even voted for him the first time. But, we lost our sanity sometime around the period when elected an actor over a generally 'nice guy' kind of president. Said actor/governor then instituted the following amazing things:

* The War on Drugs - utter failure
* Reaganomics - depends on who you ask, but it pretty much fucked us for years to come.
* Wonderful changes and cuts to education - See previous. They are still trying to undo the fuckery that was done to education in the 80's.
* Increased military spending to astronomical levels - pretty much fucked anyone not working for defense contractors.
* Destabilized Nicaragua and pissed off Iran worse at us - yeah, that didn't work out for us.
* Largely ignored the AIDs epidemic - tragedy on multiple levels.
* Etc

That fucker is still viewed as one of the best presidents and Carter as one of the worst.

China has enormous volume and inertia. Even if rich chinese stop getting richer quickly, there will be masses of poor chinese trying to make it out of poverty into the middle classes driving the world economy for decades to come. Unless something unexpected breaks down badly.

A trade war will hurt the US worse and faster, it just has more to lose.

And the solution is?

Only let the passing of a small amount at ones death?
Or to say cap inheritance it a 1 Million / child and dissolve the rest of the estate?




At 70K I think this is middle middle class. I don't think the 10%ers are keeping me poor. I think the lessening of the value of the dollar is.

Most of the statements in the video are true, but the numbers are off a little for the black unemployment rate. they haven't changed in any remarkable way, relative to other groups' unemployment rates. Black unemployed is still 2x higher then the rate of their white counterparts.

The pace of economic growth in america is still far lower then other emerging markets. One thing is for certain the american middle class is shrinking. While elsewhere around the world millions are climbing out of poverty and settling into their own country's version of the american dream.

If the G7 becomes the G6 by this time next year due to tit for tat tariffs we will be looking back at a DOW when it use to be higher then 25K reminiscing of the good old days.

Taking you seriously for a moment, I've never understood the armed militia/tyrannical government idea. Personally, I'd trust a soldier long before I'd trust a corporation or a judge, and never a lawyer. It's not the army people need to fear, they are us, it's the wealthy whose outlooks are alien.

Former friends of mine had a remarkable business surge that took them from lower middle class WELL into the 1%. The diminished empathy that came along with it is why they're former friends, not current ones. It was gross how their attitudes and beliefs changed.

This.

There are enough things wrong with Trump that shooting down everything about him in a one sided monologue looks the same as what Fox did with strawman arguments against Obama.

It's not enough to point out Trumps problems to people. You needed to have one of his prominent supporters on air to demonstrated that Trump is OBJECTIVELY worse than any other president. The other upside is actually getting a chance to have the voice of a Trump supporter like Roseanne out there so that maybe, just maybe, left leaning folks can hear the other side and find common ground. Until the democrats steal back people that voted Trump, the train is just gonna keep on rolling in the wrong direction.

Example, talking about rolling back Obamacare as though it should be obvious to poorer Trump supporters that they were screwed by this. You can't just change their opinion by calling them too stupid to know what their daily lives are like. You have to listen to the details of why they think their healthcare under Obamacare was, or would become worse than before it. I know my aunt and uncle in Alabama, although middle class, both swear that after Obamacare their costs went up and benefits went down. You have to listen to people a bit if you care about figuring out how to change their vote next term,

Interesting narrative - but maybe a bit too simplistic. "the boomers have all the assets" - really? is Bezos a boomer, how about Mark Z? There are some wealthy boomers, as there have always been wealthy individuals in the older generation - but lots of boomers are doing their best to survive on Social Security - maybe because they yielded to the siren song of consumerism. (a statement as simplistic as the claim that boomers have all the assets...). Technology has destroyed lots of middle class jobs - the working community displaced by technology is, as they always have, struggling to adapt. Some have adapted better than others. But the simplistic mantra of free college/university for all is a fraud when too many illiterates are being graduated from high school and too many parents are totally unconcerned that their children continue to advance in primary and secondary school with completely inadequate skills....
That's the thing with simple answers for the world's problems, they're usually wrong...

A Mitt Romney fan, eh? You should probably read this article, which absolutely guts the myth that only half of income earners pay taxes.

As far as the top 1% paying 40% of the taxes, I agree that is atrocious--they are supposed to be paying almost ALL of it! See, when the income tax was introduced with the 16th Amendment, it was primarily meant to be a tax on the rich. The federal tax rate for middle-class people was meant to be around 1-2% whereas the tax rate on the rich was around 7%. You can see the original 1913 tax form here.

Of course, since literally the income tax's inception, the federal government has continuously been shafting the middle classes while reducing the tax burden of the wealthy. It's about as American as apple pie by this point!

The big problem is that the government relies more and more on income tax to fund federal projects. Take a look at the graph in the article I linked to at the start of this comment and note how corporate taxes keep going down while income and payroll taxes keep going up.

It doesn't help at all that most of America's biggest businesses have offshore tax havens where they can avoid paying taxes (think Ireland for Apple, Inc., though that hasn't worked out so well for them thanks to the EU being less corporate cock-sucking than the U.S. government).

So, to solve America's tax deficit problem, the solution is pretty clear--tax rich people more (as was intended), tax corporations more and cut off their tax havens, and maybe give a tax break to the people who actually need and deserve it--the middle and lower classes.

But of course all of that sounds suspiciously like socialism, which as we all know is the devil incarnate and about as un-American as naming your kid Stalin.

States like Wisconsin and Kansas have implemented conservative policies - how's that worked out for them? Here's a hint. Go ahead and point me to a counter-example, where cuts to social programs and austerity have provided a benefit to the people of a state. I'm damned sick of the false promises of so-called "conservative values" - they don't fucking work, all evidence supports the notion that they don't fucking work, and they're destroying the progress this country made during the early and mid-20th century to create a strong middle class.

It's in these people's own best interests to support progressive policies, but the politics of division and hatred, and the highly effective lies from the likes of Fox News have blinded them.

The Republicans don't do tax reform (or math), they just raise taxes on the poor and middle class and give handouts to rich and corporations.

FTFY.

Keep in mind he told us he would run the country like one of his business, which means run it into the ground and embezzle funds until bankrupt and he gets barred from running things. His first likely legislation adds over 1 trillion to the debt so his kids can keep an extra billion of his money. That pretty much destroys any fiscal argument you could have had against democrats permanently.

In all seriousness though, here's my thoughts on the matter: I believe the n-word is used by most black people ironically. It's an attempt to reclaim power over the word that was used for so long--including today--to oppress them.

The thing is, there is precedent for this ironic use. Many in the gay community use the word "bitch" in an affection and jesting way to other members, but it takes on a completely different tone when a heterosexual person--even one who has a large circle of gay friends--tries to use it in a similar manner towards a gay person.

The thing is that this kind of ironic language usage is self-deprecating. As a member of the black or gay community, you're using a derogatory term that could just as easily be applied to you by somebody else.

Self-deprecating humor of this kind doesn't work so well when you're not a member of the group. It just comes across as punching down, especially in the case of privileged group members like middle-class white kids who will likely never know what it is like to be an "other" in their country of citizenship no matter how much they may sympathize (although as "minority" groups continue to eclipse the Caucasian population maybe within my lifetime they might actually start to experience it).

I mean, how hard is it for non-black people to not call someone an n-word? Very few black people are okay with it. The whiny " b-b-but they use the word all the time" excuse just reeks of entitlement to me.

But what do I know. I'm just some dumb white kid living in a foreign country where I can be pulled over by cops because I look different from the rest of the population and jailed for not immediately providing ID (unlike Japanese people who are legally not required to carry ID at all).