2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Blaming Sanders: Why Democratic Party Unity is Officially Impossible [View all]GRhodes
(162 posts)has next to nothing to do with how well working people are doing. It is a fact that companies have spent a lot of funds buying their own shares to bid their prices up. If you want to challenge me on that, I will provide the evidence tomorrow morning. This isn't arguable. Not a single underlying problem we had in 2007 has been truly addressed, forget solved. Not a single one.
"As we get closer to full employment we'll see more growth in wages."
What do you mean full employment? We aren't getting to full employment. You know damn well that the official numbers don't accurately reflect the real unemployment numbers.
"I don't know what you want to eliminate inequality. Do you want to confiscate everything from the haves and hand it out to the have nots? That would be very problematic. Barring that solution we will have inequality. I don't see the problem with some people getting more. I see the problem with some people not getting more or even getting less."
Who said to outright eliminate inequality? Did I say everyone should make the same exact wages? I said that inequality is the highest it has been in a long, long, long time, and the policies that Clinton have supported have increased inequality. If you want me to post the actual data, I will, but I'd rather not have to look for it and I'm sure you know that inequality has exploded in recent decades, and has massively increased under Obama. The freaking IMF just released a report that acknowledged that inequality harms economic development and growth, which it does. The rich have a lower marginal propensity to consume and a lower propensity to consume, the opposite is true of the poor and working people. If the object is to grow the economy, we know theoretically and from empirical data that the best strategy is to give the poor, since they inject that money right back into the economy.
As you also may know, the taxes on estates, carried interest, dividends, the top marginal tax rates and capital gains (all things which benefit the rich) have been massively cut since Carter was president. Obama made most of Bush's tax cuts permanent, something that Rove and Norquist went on TV and bragged about. How can anyone, even on the center-left, not recognize all of this as horribly immoral and extremely right wing? Throw in the trillions in tax shelters and the trillions that the banks have been given by the state that sit at the Fed collecting interest.
"Hillary is not the tool of the elites you guys love to say she is. She has a very liberal voting record."
Nonsense, she has a center-right economic record, and has gotten (along with Bill) over three billion dollars from corporate interests and the rich since they entered politics. Her top donors over her career are giant banks and other corporate interests, she's gotten more money from Wall Street than all the other candidates combined this election cycle in BOTH parties and has gotten filthy rich thanks to their bribes/speaking fees. She and her husband have strongly backed policies that have benefited those groups and she recently said that she would put him in charge of our damn economic recovery, which was tone deaf in the extreme. I also don't know what the word "liberal" means but if it means on the left, hell the fuck no. Being on the left, since the French Revolution, has meant very concrete things, and she isn't on the left on economic issues or institutional power, never has been, never will be. Liberal, to me, is a useless word. Lots of libertarians are "liberal", in fact more "liberal" than Clinton, on a number of issues, yet they aren't on the left.