How the Democratic Party became a tool for Wall-Street

[AggregateDemand]

So a Conservative is saying that liberals aren't liberal enough?

They aren't liberal at all. It's just a faction of people who want to continue wasting money on 50-year-old programs that don't work.

[AggregateDemand]

Why is a Republican criticizing the Democratic Party for being a tool for Wall Street when his own party is an even bigger tool if you go by how much money they got from them?

I accused American liberals of being a faction of phonies who support the failed status quo. DeadPrez accused Democrats of being Wall Street shills, which is true, even if Republicans shill for Wall Street as well.

[AggregateDemand]

This is another case where Americans are hurt by not knowing themselves. Because people hold onto the mythology of Infinite Opportunity, they don't see themselves as Poors, Working Classers, or even Richers. Everybody is Middle Class, floating around like an Oklahoman in the Update, convinced that one of these days things are going to work out if we just believe. Americans need a serious dose of realism. We're all busting our butts for peanuts, and things are not going to change until we make low prestige jobs worthwhile. It is not possible for everybody to be a doctor, a CEO, or a lottery winner.

I agree about improving the plight of workers who bust their asses at minimum wage jobs, but raising the minimum wage is the wrong solution, and its a lazy shift of responsibility from government to private companies, who simply fire Americans and move overseas.

Also, most of us are middle class working-stiffs by choice. Buy overpriced garbage. Give your income to creditors, rather than accumulating assets. Wouldn't be so horrible if the government didn't actively subsidize the permanent indebtedness of the people.

[AggregateDemand]

Obamacare is FAR from perfect, but at its core, it is still a wealth distribution system that primarily benefits the poor and working class. So why is it that working class people are not rallying around this law and punishing the Republicans who unanimously opposed it (in fact, they rewarded them generously in 2010)? It's because people don't divide themselves politically by class, but by their ideology and political party. "The working class" is not a cohesive unit of voters.

Some working class are better educated than others, and they've realized they are the victims of wealth redistribution. Perhaps the American people could accept wealth redistribution away from young working class to elderly retirement class if our entitlements were properly managed. Unfortunately, our entitlements are not properly managed in even the loosest interpretation of fiduciary administration.

Therefore, this group of well-educated individuals is highly skeptical of the people who invoke the term wealth redistribution to chase the nebulous concept of social justice. These people have already done great damage to our nation.

[AggregateDemand]

Education and income, once reliable proxies for partisan identity and voting, are no longer so.

The Democratic Party has become a conservative party as the Republican Party has become a semi-fascist party. As the Republicans make harsher demands on social issues they offend profit-minded interests  who can imagine those interests being threatened. The Religious Right may be anti-abortion, but once it starts demanding prohibitions on alcohol and pornography it will hurt the profitability of business.

Democrats have paid attention to the revenue side of business -- that Big Business needs well-heeled customers unless America is to become a Hell-hole of cheap, brutally-managed workers paid so little that they no longer form a market and that such prosperity as America has depends upon exports. That asks for too much. The Republicans have paid attention to the expenditure side, which normally looks good on paper to wealthy industrialists.

What Democrats have sacrificed is any support of competition in industry.     

Our country is awash in demand stimulus, and aggressive deficit spending is a contributing factor to the median income growth from the 80s until 2001, along with loose consumer credit. Republicans understand the income effect.

The biggest drag on the income effect, at the moment, is our inefficient entitlement system, which suppresses employment, LFPR, and income growth. Officially, Republicans don't believe in entitlements or workfare, which pushes corporate donors to the Democratic Party, where they are greeted by lazy lefties, like Obama, who couldn't care less about reform.

[AggregateDemand]

That sounds like a pretty good platform to me. The main thing Democrats need to do is articulate a vision, and be more than the "catch all" party for anyone who isn't a far-right wingnut.

It should also be added that one of the major reasons Obamacare is not as successful as it could've/should've been is because of the SCOTUS and Republican governors rejecting Medicaid expansion for literally no reason other than because they're partisan hacks and want to stick it to Obama. As someone who fell through the coverage gap due to the asshole Corbett, I know this problem well.

Democrats can't talk their way out of socioeconomic policy failure, just like Bush couldn't talk his way out of Iraq/Afghanistan.

If Democrats want to win, they have to do something of substance in the domestic sphere. Promising to make our problems worse by shifting more income around isn't going inspire anyone.

[AggregateDemand]

It's certainly much better than "take two tax cuts and a deregulation and talk to me in the morning".

While the Republicans have used all of the marginal benefit of tax reform and lower rates, those policies do not actively harm the United States. Sloppily administered entitlements that transfer money from the young have nots to the elderly haves (because we don't have effective means-testing) can be very damaging.

[AggregateDemand]

"I'm so concerned about the plight of minimum wage workers, I want them to bust their asses for even less money!"

Thank you for highlighting your utter lack of understanding regarding labor policy. I had no idea that workfare, negative income tax, etc  were too complex for the site moderators.

[AggregateDemand]

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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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?