Chomsky is a joke.

Cain isn't blaming the poor, he's blaming Washington, and the liberal OWS folks that elected them.

There's a subtle distinction there that you all are missing.

Also, Anderson Cooper is a biased reporter (he "keeps them honest" with Republicans as much as Democrats) who also fakes his news stories. I once watched him "report live" from a hurricane, with him standing in the middle of a bunch of water... on a bright sunny day.

I may not have been in many hurricanes, but they're usually not clear, sunny days when you're in them.

*lies

Reich is lying here.

Nobody actually ever paid the outrageous high marginal tax rates that libs like him try to look back to.

When the high marginal tax bracket was lowered by Reagan, he (and this is important) also eliminated tax shelters and loopholes.

Medicare is also not "cheaper than private insurance". Though if people want to pay $12k/year for Medicare, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to enroll in it if they want to.

Don't listen to the 4th Reich.

I love me a good milkshake, but not when it's "warmed up".

Ugh. Kelis obviously never worked at a Dairy Queen.

Whew, thank goodness TPM isn't biased or anything.

*eia

Disgusting how many people on this page are rooting against their own country.

And before you get off on how "evil" we are, have you idiots ever thought about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people were sent to re-education camps after we sold them out? Or do you just get all of your oxygen from Chomsky and idiots like him?

Try whitewashing the bloodstains out all you want, but calling us "evil" in comparison to the North Vietnamese is just a statement of profound ignorance.

Slavoj is why you don't do cocaine, kiddies.

"99%"

LOL.

@raverman, Ok, so you want to institute a pay ratio. What, 10/1? 100/1?

So my friend, who might take in $1M or more from his properties (he's not a hypothetical creation by the way) would have to pay a minimum of, what, $100,000 to a person to do office work for him? How does that make any sense?

How would you enforce this on the multinationals who have moved most of their labor overseas anyway, where such laws wouldn't be enforced?

@raverman: "You have no ethical responsibility toward those who have lifted you on their shoulders to success."

You have an ethical responsibility to pay them at whatever rate they are contracted to pay.

A friend of mine owns about $10M worth of properties, which he manages himself. He drives around town, collecting rents, dealing with angry tenants, and so forth. Suppose he hires someone at $20/hour to do that for him, or maybe $40k/year.

Is that fair? If he or she eventually decides that she's "doing all the work" that runs his $10M empire, does she have the right to take some of his capital away from him? Why should she "deserve" more, especially since the work is fairly low level, and he's paying her at a rate well above the minimum wage?

@jmzero: "Imagine a situation where nobody can afford food"

Precisely. The absolute amount of wealth/resources/whatever is much more important than the percentages involved. We're currently living in a society that has more income inequality than ever before, and yet lower hunger than ever before - from what I heard, America isn't tracking death by starvation any more since it so rarely happens - 120 deaths in 2004. (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_die_from_starvation_each_year_in_America) This is absolutely amazing in a country with 300 million souls in it, and unprecedented in human history.

>>"Most people won't get mad if one person is richer than them and can have golden toilets and they have "whatever else they want" (which is ridiculous - we're imagining a place where people have all they want?)"

I meant that somewhat flippantly, and somewhat seriously. There's a certain point after which incremental gains in money does not buy any more happiness, and the point is around $60k-$75k. This the point where you can afford food, a house, a car, health care, take the occasional vacation, and so forth. I'm not saying they're buying golden toilets, but the point is, people that achieve that relatively modest level of wealth no longer have to worry about all the really shitty parts about being poor (and I've been there - it sucks) and can instead be happy or sad based on whatever else in life is going to make them happy or sad.

If our poor hit this level of affluence, then there won't be a single person, outside of the anarcho-communists that seem so popular on forums like these, advocating for the overthrow of the social order.

Hell, look at China as an example of how rising affluence lets people overlook (actual, real) problems with their society, instead of pretend problems like income inequality.

@raverman: "The inequality of distribution of wealth has to be fixed INSIDE the corporations remuneration for effort."

If I found a corporation, and never go public, why should you have any right to the profits of the corporation, other than the normal payment of taxes?

What, will you forcefully nationalize my corporation and take it away from me, to give it to the workers? There's a name for that.

@jmzero: "As such, it's perfectly possible to think of the "poor getting poorer" if their relative income isn't growing as fast as others' incomes... the gap in income can still have social consequences."

How? If all the poor suddenly earned $60k a year in constant dollars and could afford all the health care, food, and whatever else they wanted, do you think there's going to be "social consequences" because Warren Buffet and his friends made an extra billion that year?

No, there wouldn't be.

You have to both look at the percentage of the pie each income quintile is taking, but also the size of the pie. Economics is not a zero-sum game, which is a mistake most of the people make when talking about income inequality.

Anyone who uses the phrase "income inequality" automatically gets labelled an idiot, as is anyone who uses the phrase "The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Poorer" without actually looking at the numbers.

Income Inequality is a meaningless statistic. What percentage of the pie each quintile of income earners earned is MEANINGLESS without looking at the size of the overall pie. It is quite possible for the rich to earn three times as much, and the poor to earn twice as much, and still have "income inequality" increasing.

While there are some numbskulls that would not want the poor to do better if it meant the rich would do even better still - and I refuse to grant this notion any credence, as it is anti-poor - by and large the metric we should be looking at is median household income.

It is up, across the board (rich and poor alike) quite strongly since the 1940s, even after adjusting for inflation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg

As much as we like to pretend that the 40s-60s were the "high point" for the middle class, the reality is that the middle class and the poor are making about twice as much now (inflation adjusted) as they did back then.

Anyone that talks about "income inequality" automatically gets labelled an idiot in my mind, as does anyone who says the phrase "The rich get richer, the poor get poorer."

In reality, the rich and poor have all been doing better since the 1960s, even after adjusting for inflation.

The important thing to look at is median household income, divided by income quintile.

Look at this graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg