How the Democratic Party became a tool for Wall-Street

[AggregateDemand]

I understand such matters far betteer than you boyo. I understand that the arguments about graduated minimum wage raises supposedly resulting in a net job loss has never materialized in practice. I realize that broadly rising wages creates comsumer demand and thus greater job growth to offset the worst imagined job losses. I realize that raising the lowest paid workers is a way to end corporate welfare subsidies by companies paying so little even their full time workers are forceedd to rely on food stamps and other public assistance. I know that 98+% of minimum wages workers support a raise in their wages, but upper mmiddle class and rich toffs are oh so willing to to save the poor ignorant dears from themselves.

I also know there's never been a poster who has more relied on buzzzwords and bald unsupported assertions, who nevertheless thought he was SOOO smart without basis, than you.

Yet, you're not smart enough to realize that the only sustainable way to raise median income is to have more labor demand than labor supply, a phenomenon we experienced in the late 90s. So you support min wage initiatives that encourage companies to lean their labor forces, and you refer to worker assistance programs as corporate welfare (as if individual corporations can control the labor market), though economists of all stripes have described such programs as superior to the current system which pays people not to work.

You are a penny-dreadful caricature of a high-school-educated working-class hero from the 1960s rust belt. Your only real job is putting yourself out of work with pompous self-important legislation.

Real min wage has been declining since the 1960s. What data are you examining that shows no job loss?

[Cassius]

Americans use the word boyo? Not that I've ever heard anyone younger than 70 use it, but still, who would have t'ought it?

[Badger]

I understand such matters far betteer than you boyo. I understand that the arguments about graduated minimum wage raises supposedly resulting in a net job loss has never materialized in practice. I realize that broadly rising wages creates comsumer demand and thus greater job growth to offset the worst imagined job losses. I realize that raising the lowest paid workers is a way to end corporate welfare subsidies by companies paying so little even their full time workers are forceedd to rely on food stamps and other public assistance. I know that 98+% of minimum wages workers support a raise in their wages, but upper mmiddle class and rich toffs are oh so willing to to save the poor ignorant dears from themselves.

I also know there's never been a poster who has more relied on buzzzwords and bald unsupported assertions, who nevertheless thought he was SOOO smart without basis, than you.

Yet, you're not smart enough to realize that the only sustainable way to raise median income is to have more labor demand than labor supply, a phenomenon we experienced in the late 90s. So you support min wage initiatives that encourage companies to lean their labor forces, and you refer to worker assistance programs as corporate welfare (as if individual corporations can control the labor market), though economists of all stripes have described such programs as superior to the current system which pays people not to work.

You are a penny-dreadful caricature of a high-school-educated working-class hero from the 1960s rust belt. Your only real job is putting yourself out of work with pompous self-important legislation.

Real min wage has been declining since the 1960s. What data are you examining that shows no job loss?

Increased labor demand is fostered by consumption requiring increased consumption fostering increased production. People like me know that rising wages is the feasable long term method to susxtain both growing employment and an economy based on the middle class.

People like you believe that the "real" way to maximize employment and wealth is to reduce the American standard of living to 50 cents an hour. Your economic utopia of a broad mass living at or near subsistance level (if even that) with a tiny oligarchical elite living in gated patrolled communities, and overall a stagnant national economy without a substantial middle class to nurture growth.

My model for a strong economy and employment is America; yours is Guatamala.

[pbrower2a]

Real hate of working people implies a reversion to the 70-hour workweek and 40-year lifespan of industrial workers as was once the norm. That they are in the more 'socially advanced' retail or food service business is hardly an improvement. All that is necessary is that the social norms mandate that wages be so low that people must work to exhaustion just to get the most basic needs and pay off the grafters.

The only change since the 1960s is that the rest of the world is tired of being agricultural peasants and Europe has grown tired of endless counterproductive wars. The United States is no longer alone at the top of the economic pile.

Lazy half-wit American Democrats can no longer dictate how the world should or shouldn't work anymore. Sadly, Dems still try to command the market to pay more money and deliver more services to their constituency, which makes the rest of the world looks like a more attractive place to do business. Americans suffer, particularly those at the bottom end of the income spectrum.

For real half-wits, try some Republican pols who vote as puppets of the Koch syndicate.

The GOP wants America's economic elite at the apex of power and personal indulgence with the rest of America driven to the worst in wages and working conditions. Such would allegedly create economic growth -- but that only a few could enjoy.

Few people want to lick the boot attached to the feet of the owner who has every right to kick one. Besides, who in his right mind would want to be a helpless peasant?   

[Mechaman]

Americans use the word boyo? Not that I've ever heard anyone younger than 70 use it, but still, who would have t'ought it?

Well, I sometimes use it as part of my Green Fenianist schtick, but I think that some hipsters or whatnot might use that in conversation to accost pseudo intellectual libertarian f****ts IRL conversations.

Just a hunch though.

[Mechaman]

Also, for the record, Aggregate Demand is making some pretty stupid arguments.  Some pretty (word redacted) stupid ones.

[AggregateDemand]

Increased labor demand is fostered by consumption requiring increased consumption fostering increased production. People like me know that rising wages is the feasable long term method to susxtain both growing employment and an economy based on the middle class.

People like you believe that the "real" way to maximize employment and wealth is to reduce the American standard of living to 50 cents an hour. Your economic utopia of a broad mass living at or near subsistance level (if even that) with a tiny oligarchical elite living in gated patrolled communities, and overall a stagnant national economy without a substantial middle class to nurture growth.

My model for a strong economy and employment is America; yours is Guatamala.

I'm just now realizing that you genuinely don't understand how negative income taxes and workfare function. I'm basically pushing for low-income entitlements that work more like Social Security and Medicare. In your mind, this would be a sign of slack aggregate demand and .50/hr wages.

This conversation really is well above your paygrade.

[AggregateDemand]

For real half-wits, try some Republican pols who vote as puppets of the Koch syndicate.

The GOP wants America's economic elite at the apex of power and personal indulgence with the rest of America driven to the worst in wages and working conditions. Such would allegedly create economic growth -- but that only a few could enjoy.

Few people want to lick the boot attached to the feet of the owner who has every right to kick one. Besides, who in his right mind would want to be a helpless peasant?   

What's happened is politicians have told Americans that they deserve the American Dream on a silver platter. The asset class and upper classes are never going to fall for political parlor tricks so they lobby for a way out of the system.  They have their own tax system (capital gains/dividends), their own medical system (no insurance or patient-pay), their own retirement system and their own income/expense regulations (commercial regs). Politicians need the productive classes so they let them have their own set of rules.

The rest of us are stuck on the Animal Farm. The government taxes us during our youth to pay for mismanaged Social Security and Medicare programs. Fiscal mismanagement crowds out investment federal investment spending so each generation of animal works harder to pay the bills.

The dumb little donkeys bray for someone to clean up the stye. The elephants look out into the wilderness and they contemplate ways to escape. There is a fundamental difference between domesticated beasts of burden and the feral middle-class.

[Mechaman]

For real half-wits, try some Republican pols who vote as puppets of the Koch syndicate.

The GOP wants America's economic elite at the apex of power and personal indulgence with the rest of America driven to the worst in wages and working conditions. Such would allegedly create economic growth -- but that only a few could enjoy.

Few people want to lick the boot attached to the feet of the owner who has every right to kick one. Besides, who in his right mind would want to be a helpless peasant?   

What's happened is politicians have told Americans that they deserve the American Dream on a silver platter. The asset class and upper classes are never going to fall for political parlor tricks so they lobby for a way out of the system.  They have their own tax system (capital gains/dividends), their own medical system (no insurance or patient-pay), their own retirement system and their own income/expense regulations (commercial regs). Politicians need the productive classes so they let them have their own set of rules.

The rest of us are stuck on the Animal Farm. The government taxes us during our youth to pay for mismanaged Social Security and Medicare programs. Fiscal mismanagement crowds out investment federal investment spending so each generation of animal works harder to pay the bills.

The dumb little donkeys bray for someone to clean up the stye. The elephants look out into the wilderness and they contemplate ways to escape. There is a fundamental difference between domesticated beasts of burden and the feral middle-class.

So the wealthy elite is forcing two different standards so that they are not at all effected from normal taxation laws and everyone else gets stiffed?

Good analysis (seriously not sarcastic right now.  No really, I'm not).

Statist liberalism is an ideology that was created by Wall Street, FDR and crew to subvert the originally radical left from making the significant and real progress that the country required.  In place of ideologies that attacked both Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue the Grand Sachems devised a system (much like in Stalinist Russia) where support for societal equality has been replaced by a system that encourages worship and devotion to the almighty fascistic state and support for all actions (emphasis mine) that encourages any and all growth of the state and of all statist actions.  Meanwhile, advocates of this system can claim to feel good about themselves because "the rich are getting taxed their fair 90%, 70%, 50% 39.5%", hoping that none of the dumb sheeple notice that said high rates only refer explicitly to standard W9 wage taxation and not to the incredibly smaller and more generous Capital Tax System with it's liberal amount of loopholes that allow such parasites as Warren Buffet who brags about how much less taxed he is than his secretary to prosper (and really "liberals", why aren't you asking the real questions about humanitarians like Buffet, like why he pays his Secretary such a sh*tty salary if he is such a successful person?).

Of course the real solutions needed scare the "liberals" in this country scareless.  A lot of Democrats, especially the anti-proletarian bourgeois class who sneer at everyone beneath them, are actually conservatives who hath taken up the cause of "Social Liberalism" to distract from their actual societal conservatism in promoting the continuation of their diseased parasitic culture that has been waging a war against the working masses since time immemorial.  A few decades ago they would've proudly touted the label "Rockefeller Republicanism" to signify that they were "anti-racism" by dragging blacks out of Southern Jim Crow regimes and putting them into a new nationwide Jim Crow that we'd all like to call "the War on Drugs".  Of course with the success of dumb reactionary populism in the GOP, they had to shift parties to Third Way Clintonialism which continues to rule the "party of the Working Class" that pretends to really want 60% income rates but can't get them because of "mah GOP obstructionism!"

The truth is that you are actually partly right, dear libbie troll.  The state and the wealth bastards they are assigned to protect from birth are a real problem.  And as long as both continue to exist they will keep on giving each other the proper wank off.  Where I imagine we disagree though is the means we need to take to stop it which is full tilt violent revolution.  I imagine many establishment liberals are now scoffing at this, as they have been conditioned all of their lives to think that State=God and not the institution by which the inherently reactionary society exists.  The time for pragmatic and well reasoned solutions is far past, the populace can only truly prosper if there is a strong dissolution of  the marriage between Big Capital and Big Government.

So yes, consider this my official coming out as an Anarchist.

[AggregateDemand]

The conspiracy is not the success of commercial enterprise or the material wealth and intellectual property it generates. The conspiracy is incompetent politicians and ignominious bureaucrats who take the citizens money and make it disappear.

I'm not sure how anarchy solves any problems.

[MaxQue]

The conspiracy is not the success of commercial enterprise or the material wealth and intellectual property it generates. The conspiracy is incompetent politicians and ignominious bureaucrats who take the citizens money and make it disappear.

For someone which claims to be a expert on economics, claiming than money "disappears" is very silly. Money can't disappear. It only goes in other hands (in this case, public servants and insurence executives/shareholders).

[pbrower2a]

The conspiracy is not the success of commercial enterprise or the material wealth and intellectual property it generates. The conspiracy is incompetent politicians and ignominious bureaucrats who take the citizens money and make it disappear.

I'm not sure how anarchy solves any problems.

Normal business has constraints. Raw deals, no matter how initially lucrative for a devious or corrupt operator, fail. The business that hurts its customers typically sets up its own ruin. I have seen people argue that Wal*Mart, which has sought to undercut its competitors by importing instead of buying American-made stuff, has done great harm to American blue-collar workers that were its core of customers. Wal*Mart isn't a particularly corrupt or devious operator. Wal*Mart now faces a saturated market. It is no longer a growth investment.

Political corruption creates its own problems. The people who do corruption are typically above average in income, so graft ordinarily intensifies the concentration of wealth and income. To be sure, the grafter almost invariably spends what he gets  dishonestly, but such might not always be the case (the grafter sends the corrupt gain to a foreign bank account) ; what the grafter buys could easily be luxury imports that mess up the balance of trade. Consider the Marcos family when it ruled the Philippines; it bled the country and spent heavily on its own indulgence, often in imported luxuries (like Imelda's collection of shoes). If the workers and peasants of the country had gotten a fair share they might have eaten better and been able to wear shoes.

Entities profiteering from corruption are likely to fund the corrupt pols who create the dishonest gain.   Such money finds its way back into the economy -- in an objectionable way for an objectionable purpose.

Money may be transferred from where it does good to where it does no good, but it is unlikely to be destroyed as a reality (barring an effort to destroy currency that might otherwise feed an inflationary tendency). Governments typically replaced damaged currency.

[tarheel-leftist85]

I'm seeing a lot of excuses for Democrats like "weak" and "inept." No, they know what they're doing.  Wall Street has paid both parties to play certain roles.  As a former Democrat, Wall Street has commissioned Repubs to play the crazy bad cop so that I might run into the safe grownup arms of the Democrats.  Meanwhile, it's the Democrats that actually legislate and execute Wall Streets every desire.  Wall Street had an interest in making sure Romney was Obie's "opponent" so as to once again set up the good cop/bad cop dynamic and suppress SoCon turnout in places like Ohio and Iowa.  Romney could be the obvious mean Monopoly Man, while Obie was the gentle community organizer - who, goshdarnit, was just too "weak" at times.

It also helps to have a base increasing of minorities and youngs who they know will not show up in midterms, to fulfill solid "obstructionist" Republican majorities that can then whine about in presidential years.

Of course, what did Dems do with their supermajorities?  Romneycare - and let's be clear that forcing people to buy junk plans doesn't actually mean they get care. A perpetuity to the financial services industry (QE) and loaning them our own money interest free on which we have to pay interest.  No help for underwater homeowners.  No help for the unemployed.

And if Obama really was the greatest orator of our time, he could've convinced the American people - who already support at supermajority levels according to most survey data - single-payer, a jobs program (which would've made the racialized welfare "outrage" moot), a government company that would've bailed out homeowners (like the one "bitter" "clinger" Hillary proposed after Wall Street left her for Obama).  Instead, we had the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.

And it's clear from PM scores that the Democratic Party really is just Goldman Sachs sponsoring Human Rights Campaign galas.  They're for kabuki "equality," not the real thing.  And in my estimation that doesn't make them any "less evil" than their "opponents" of whom I supposed to be terrified, mostly because of their words, judging by the Dembot spam that still floods my email.

[AggregateDemand]

For someone which claims to be a expert on economics, claiming than money "disappears" is very silly. Money can't disappear. It only goes in other hands (in this case, public servants and insurence executives/shareholders).

We use fiat currency. Our money is the wealth of the United States and the full-faith in the US Federal Government to honor its debts. The money can disappear without a trace, regardless of who is holding the greenbacks.

If someone bought $1,000 of gasoline and they burned down a town's school district, do you really think money is just changing hands? How about when a government arrests, fines, incarcerates, and impairs the economic productivity of millions of citizens for smoking weed? How much wealth is lost when we tax the young working class, which reduces their rate of employment, and we transfer money to secure elderly citizens who use SS to protect their family's inheritance? How much wealth is lost by paying young able-bodied people not to work, rather than expanding employment? How much do we lose when children go without healthcare, while the elderly receive $100B for failed experimental surgery in the final year of life and another $100B in hospice care, which is basically a non-insurable inevitability?

We can make wealth/money disappear without a trace, and we've been doing it for quite a long time. Why do you think we started borrowing and deficit-spending in the 80s?