Comments on: Just to keep the Slosh party going…

By: bowser

bowser — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 02:58:07 +0000

In the US He would have been persecuted. The FBI would have hounded Christians the way it does religious minorities in general and proponents of other economics systems.

Nope, Jesus would have had a hard time here.

By: ER

ER — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:14:21 +0000

He was the Occupy Movement of his time.

http://arnel113.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/jesus-cleanses-the-temple.jpg?w=620

By: bowser

bowser — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 23:41:23 +0000

Radical! Socialist! That would destroy the American dream (which has morphed into a $10 million bonus), crush iniative, foster welfare as a way of life.

What would Jesus do? That was several thousand years ago, and things change. Jesus would be preaching prosperity, and have a PO Box for donations.

Capitalism, the economic system least able to meet the needs of the masses, does take care of the evangelists, and Christ was an evangelist above all else. The “apostles” would have been “capos”, and parishioners would be “soldiers”.

Time to go with the flow, and cast away old ideas, and realize that God loves those with money.

Ask anyone, anyone who matters, anyway.

By: ER

ER — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 20:40:06 +0000

’til there are no rich no more.”

-Alvin Lee, Ten Years After, “I’d Love to Change the World”

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 20:31:23 +0000

If so, Frank, you can in part thank estate taxes. Mindless rightwing rhetoric that government is simply inherently evil to the contrary, for over a century progressive governments have used the estate tax for the narrow and worthy purpose of breaking up dynastic fortunes and preventing the (re)creation of an aristocracy. A case like the Lee’s is a very good reminder of the good the estate tax does.

It’s disingenuous to cite only the American estate tax rate, without also noting that Republicans have progressively raised the threshold to the point that it applies to, statistically, nobody–something like 0.01% of Americans are even theoretically required to pay it, but that’s before they apply the routine tax evasion tactics, some of which were discussed in that article, that are the reason that the US government collects only $12 billion in a population of 330 million. Like I said, statistically insignificant.

No doubt you ‘ve heard about Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”. I’m about halfway through, and I’m finding it a remarkable work because it’s the first time I’ve ever seen the scientific method applied to economics. (Many people mistake economics for a branch of mathematics because economists toss around a lot of numbers, but nothing could be farther from the truth–it’s all about making assumptions and guesses about human behavior; a branch of sociology, in other words.) There are graphs scattered throughout the book, but what’s interesting is that most of them have a consistent U shape, showing financial inequality very high at the beginning of the 20th century, bottoming-out at the end of WWII, and starting to rise again in 1970 and eventually reaching a level today equivalent to the turn of the 20th century.

Flip the graph vertically, and you have a graph of the number of people in the middle class. The middle class was created both by circumstances such as war and financial crash, and the deliberate policies of progressive governments that instituted things like progressive income tax rates and the estate tax to minimize inequality and spread the wealth.

A rising tide doesn’t lift all boats because of capitalism. It lifts all boats because of government policies that rein in capitalism.

Including the estate tax.