Wisconsin Gov. Walker Threatens To Deploy National Guard Against Unions

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Almost forgot, there was a second memo published a few years ago that shows how income inequality is continuing and is essentially based on slave labor: http://survivingcapitalism.blogspot.com/2010/05/revisiting-plutonomy-rich-getting.html

I don't see anything utopian in demanding justice from the highest levels in business and government. Just because the real world (aka status quo) is what it is right now doesn't mean that there is some unseen force that is keeping it the way it is. Change has always been a constant in human history, and over the long run it has been mostly positive.

For another view on my position, I point you to the works of physician Susan Rosenthal, who wrote a book called Power and Powerless that is available for free download: http://susanrosenthal.com/power-and-powerlessness

 

Thats like saying it gets warmer when the sun comes up. Of course those who have more are going to suffer less. How, in any way, does that mean they should have their family earned wealth taken from them? Sure it would be nice if they donated some(or a lot) but it should always be up to the individual, not some gov't entity.
I have problems taking anyone seriously that thinks japan is egalitarion. They are almost as class bond as india. By the time you enter high school your whole career path has been mapped out for you.
As far as your age goes, it is in no way an ad hominem attack. It is merely truth that our beliefs mature over time. I have a wonderful statement i like to use about it

usually atributed to Winston Churchill but originated with François Guizot.
It basically means you follow your heart more when you are young & your brain when you are older. Not trying to say that you don't use your brain when young just that you let your heart guide you more.
Crap, I don't know how I left off "ban all lobbyists!" I like your idea about the pay rate though.

It doesn't appear so. according to CNN number of millionaires increasing

Yeah we got some gerrymandered districts too. Some democrat, some republican. I would like to see all districts perfectly balanced but that is just a wish that will never be.

You would have the same person no more than about 30yrs(32 to be exact) Which is still way to long in my opinion. 2 term limits is good enough for the president, it should be good enough for the other politicians.
As far as retirements, it is that way to intentionally discourage people from trying to make a career out of being a politician. Serving in the gov't as a politician should be seen as a disagreeble duty that you need to get over with as soon as possible.
A flat tax would simplify the tax code, reduce the size of the IRS by at least 50%, get rid of all those loopholes some seem to hate so much & at least theoretically increase tax revenues.
Our gov't has gotten bloated over the last 100 years & needs to be trimmed. The gov't never reduces it's size unless forced to. Look at the massive increase in the dept of prohibition under the treasury dept. during prohibition. From $4.4 million to $13.4 million/yr, thats better than a 300% jump. When prohibition was abolished in 1933, did treasury get rid of all those agents? Nope, the next year they enacted the National Firearms Act. Suddenly all those idle agents had something to do again.

I think the 2 party system has gotten too uncomplicated(yeah, imagine that!). There aren't just reps & dems. There are liberal dems, conservative dems, moderate dems, liberal reps, moderate reps, conservative reps, liberals & conservatives that have no preference either way as far as dem/rep etc.
Sorry damedog, but susan rosenthals ideas of socialism is crap, as are most of socialisms ideas.

 

This reminds of one of my early classes in political science, we were having a discussion in class and one of the older ladies (35-40 I was 21 at the time so that was old) basically told me something along the lines of "I have spent 15 years taking care of the elderly and raising three children so I think a know a little bit more about international politics than you do young man". You remind me of that woman rg58.

 

We're getting a bit far afield here, but what the heck...

As for there being more millionaires every year in the US, that is not only true, but IMO, it is to be expected. The population grows every year, inflation happens every year, and people with middle to upper level incomes make more (in absolute dollars) every year. All of those things would suggest that there is a long-term trend towards escalating salaries. I would imagine that there are more and more people every year that breach just about every income threshold that you can come up with.

However, that does not necessarily equate to enhanced standard of living. While the typical worker made less in the 1950s in terms of absolute dollars than what a person makes today, it was not necessarily true that the standard of living is higher today.

As far as financial mobility goes, I saw an article in Time a while back, and what it did was break down annual wages into five tiers which they referred to as quintiles. Each quintile represented 20% of income earners in the US, so all the groups had the same number of people. The bottom quintile represented people who earn up to the 20th percentile of all incomes, the second quintile is people who earn between the 21st and 40th percentile of all incomes, and so forth, up to the top quintile representing people who earn above the 80th percentile.

What they did was compare which quintile parents were at a given point in their life, and which quintile their kids ended up at the same point in their life. So if the parents were 30 when they initially conducted the survey, they waited until the kids were also 30 to do the followup. Obviously, this was a very, very, long study. Irrespective of what group the parents were in, there was a 90% chance that their kids wound up within one quintile of their parents. So if the parents were in the middle quintile (41st-60th perncetile) 90% of their kids would end up in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th quintiles as well.

The obvious counterpoint is that about 10% of people wind up much better off (or much worse off) financially as compared to their parents, by either jumping up (or falling down) at least two quintiles. So mobility is not impossible, but it is unlikely.

EDIT: Oh, and I do think politicians should make more than average Americans. In fact, if you favor rewarding merit, the ones that keep getting re-elected should be making more than 1st term ones. (Right now, all 455 members of the House of Representatives make the same salary - $174,000 - which is not excessive IMO.) There are a ton of people (doctors spring immediately to mind) that make more than that.

 

Well a freshman Congressman (Sean Duffy) was caught on tape saying he is "struggling" with his salary.

This was kind of a humorous gaff considering the current job and income situations for many in the US, but the GOP in my state is trying to boost his reelection chances through redistricting.

After all, why move a border in a manner that will just affect 20,000 people and satisfy district requirements when you can affect 170,000 and potentially impact an election?

 

edit - Eh, this was really off-topic.

 

All good points Aldeth. Going a step further, in the 50's the cost of living was not comparable to today, as technology has advanced. Which in turn has produced more "required" commodities/necessities so to say. Our grandparents didn't have Cable or Dish when they were kids. They sure didn't have Cell phones, PCs, I-pods, etc.. Not to have these commodities in today's world puts you behind. Life was a bit simpler in the 50's. Though sometimes I wish I could of lived then as well.

As for poiticians salaries, my boss makes just under what a Houe Rep makes, as a Senior Import/Export Manager in my company. House Reps aren't poor by any means, but they aren't "Rich" either...

 

If they weren't doing a good job, why would they keep getting elected? Sure, there may be some years where there isn't much opposition, but there are a great many members of Congress that have been elected over a dozen times (or at least several times in the cases of the Senate). Here's a list of all members of Congress that have served in excess of 30 consecutive years (current members mind you). They are all men, and the longest servivng members are mostly Democrats, although the list evens out towards the bottom:

John Dingell (D, MI-15) 55 years
Daniel Inouye (D, HI-Senate) 51 years
John Conyers (D, MI-1) 47 years
Charles B. Rangel (D, NY-15), 41 years
Bill Young (R, FL-10) 41 years
Pete Stark (D, CA-13) 39 years
Don Young (R, AK-At Large since Alaska only has one) 39 years
Patrick Leahy (D, VT-Seante) 37 years
Max Baucus (D, MT-Senate) 37 years
Tom Harkin (D, IA-Senate) 37 years
George Miller (D, CA-7) 37 years
Henry Waxman (D, CA-30) 37 years
Ed Markey (D, MA-7) 35 years
Norm Dicks (D, WA-6) 34 years
Dale Kilder (D, MI-5) 34 years
Nick Rahall (D, WV-3) 34 years
Richard Lugar (R, IN-Seante) 34 years
Orrin Hatch (R, UT-Seante) 34 years
Thad Cochran (R, MS-Senate 33 years
Jerry Lewis - (R, CA-41) 32 years
James Sensenbrenner (R, WI-5) 32 years
Tom Petri (R, WI-6) 32 years
Carl Levin (D, MI-Senate) 32 years
David Dreier (R, CA-26) 30 years
Chuck Grassley (R, IA-Senate) 30 years
Barney Frank (D, MA-4) 30 years
Ralph Hall (R, TX-4) 30 years
Hal Rogers (R, KY-5) 30 years
Christopher Smith (R, NJ-4) 30 years
Frank Wolf (R, VA-10) 30 years
Steny Hoyer (D, MD-5) 30 years

32 members - 17 Democrats, 15 Republicans. Most of them are members of the House, meaning they've won well in excess of a dozen elections. How many times can you get lucky if you aren't doing a good job?

They always are graded poorly, but those polls typically ask you how Congress - in the generic sense, not your Congressman - is performing. Evidently, for a lot of people, it's every one else's Congressman that's the problem.

I just think that being a Congressman is a fairly important job, and that they should make a few times as much as the typical American. And they do. Salaries get excessive when you start getting into CEO money. Guys getting paid millions when the typical guy in the company makes $40K. Granted, I think the CEO is a more valuable member of a company than just a regular employee, but I don't think he's a few hundred times more valuable.

That's true, but it also probably resulted in more disposable income, which, when you get down to it, is as good a definition as any for standard of living.

That's kind of my point. They are well compensated for the work they perform, but unless you already were rich at the time you ran for Congress (and many of them certainly were), you probably won't get rich by becoming a Congressman.

 

That's not exactly true BTA. While there are a great many "safe" districts in the sense that only a D or R will win, the threat there is a primary challenge.

 

LOL I remember those days! It's always like 10-15 yrs older than your current age.
I'm not trying to say her opinions are invalid because of her age. I was just pointing out that as you get older you move away from listening to your heart as much as your head. Typically because you realise how many crapheads there are in the world. IMHO, it's perfectly natural for her to have the opinion she has at her age, hell at her age I thought the gov't owed me millions!

Thats just it Aldeth, it shouldn't be a job. It should be a duty not a job. No one should be in office that long.

 

So what, you rather have fresh meat entering the politcal field every other year???? While it is nice to have fresh ideas, we would get destroyed when it came to International politics as our opponents wouldn't be playing under the same rules.

 

Blades, I'm drawing a blank here, when was the last time a congressman took the lead in international politics ?

[edit]
seriously, I am having a blank moment, stayed up to late last night

 

I never said Japan was egalitarian. That was a Citigroup memo. And dismissing an argument on the basis of my age, without any proof that my age has anything to do with my political beliefs or that they are logically flawed, is in fact the very definition of one. "Dismissing the argument on the basis of an irrelevant fact about the person who creates the argument" And I think you missed the point of the study. The standard of living in the society actually didn't show any signs of effecting those social problems at all, so even if we all had a lot it wouldn't matter. What it said is that, even if you have a very high standard of living, if there are people way poorer than you and way richer than you than those social problems begin to appear much more often. I also think you have a naive assumption about how money is earned, especially for the super rich that are the largest target of most progressive taxation. You can put a million dollars into a bank with a 4% interest rate, and make 25,000 dollars a year simply off of that money. Same with stocks, you put millions of dollars of money into stocks, and over time you are going to get much, much more than your investment through dividends and other things. But such scams as making money off of money itself is a privilege only the rich and powerful have to create more riches and more power. And "family earned" is an assumption. This could be a bit subjective, but most of the "rags to riches" stories I hear, as rare as they are, are equated most to individuals. The family didn't earn the money, the individual did. Besides, you act as though ALL of their money would be taken, which is completely untrue. Even if I got half of a multi millionaires fortune I wouldn't exactly be complaining, especially when that money goes to help society as a whole. But you want a better reason? See the earlier study. It would keep things more equal and make power and wealth something you earn and not something that is your right from already being rich. Why do we want things to be more equal? Because it provably would make a happier, healthier, less drug addicted society. I take data and logic over ideology, and so my views can't be equated with me being young and just trying to follow my heart over using logic. My views may seem very bleeding-heart, but that's only because those are the views that seem most supported by both public opinion (poll after poll says the majority of americans want to cut the military and tax the rich more over cutting social programs. Sen. Bernie Sanders quotes quite a few of them here: http://www.truth-out.org/sen-bernie...ance-budget-backs-working-families/1309280399), the data that I have seen, and logic. Why should we allow a person's greed (not wanting to be taxed on money that the clearly don't need, aka the multi million dollar estates that are taxed by the estate tax and million dollar individual incomes that get the most taxed) to rule our decision making when that money could be used to help people who desperately need it? That seems like a more productive use of that capital, that data shows it's better for everybody (except maybe the top 1%), and it's what the majority of americans want.

Sorry if that was a little sloppier than my eariler posts, I typed this in a hurry before work.

 

@damedog - you may want to break your posts up into more paragraphs. One big paragraph gives the wall-of-text feeling, which can lead to people not reading.

 

Well I'm sure there have been others before and after.

There was Charlie Wilson (I'm sure others were also a major part of it) who was highly involved in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Also Congresspeople have a long list of issues they work on. While some issues may be particularly special to them members of Congress work on more than one.

Leo Ryan (democratic congressman from CA) was killed in Jonestown because his constituents raised concerns to him about family members and he went there to see if their concerns were valid or not and while there offered to take anyone who wanted to leave Jonestown with him.

One of my own former US Senators, Russ Feingold, was a constant worker for campaign finance reform.

While you may want to have some people leave positions of power after awhile so that new blood brings new ideas but there is also some value to institutional knowledge which the old blood has built up and the new blood may not have. So there are valid arguments each way and, for the moment, I tend to lean towards not having term limits for most elected posts.

 

Damedog, decaf ! please !
I'm assuming you missed where i said

Your opinion is as valid as anybody elses. Do I agree with it? Not a bit. Doesn't make it the least bit of a invalid argument.

I will call BS on this statement though. I can show you polls where obama hasnt had a positive rating since june of '09. You can find a poll to support any side.

@pplr, I actually did remember charlie wilson & leo Ryan, but thought that too long ago for most here. I can't think of one in the last 10-15 yrs. Not saying there aren't any, I just can't recall any.
There is no "institutional knowledge", it is all about what deals they can work with the other entrenched politicians & their cliqs. Getting rid of the politicians every few terms helps dispose of these cliqs.

 

Well, that's a completely different arguement than the one I was making. Compensation level and term limits, IMO, are two totally separate things. IMO, paying members of Congress poorly would lead to only more kickbacks and backroom deals. There would be more incentive for those members of Congress who are not super-wealthy to take them.

Perhaps it's also the way I look at income and wealth. I do not consider $174K per year as super-wealthy. It should certianly be enough that you're comfortable, but if that's you're only source of income, you're not in the same league as what I would consider to be rich. In fact, I'd say that $174K per year is attainable in a household where both people are professionals.