What You Should Really Think About Wisconsin
…is that what happened last night in Hong Kong was infinitely more important.
If you’re busy gloating, you are allowed 24 hours of it, max, before you start looking like a dumb jock who can’t stop victory dancing after scoring one goal. All that happened was you won a state election you felt strongly about. And if you’re upset, you are allowed exactly 24 hours of self-pity before you look like a crybaby having a tantrum. All that happened was you lost an election you felt strongly about.
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There will be those on the left that slam the election since Walker is corrupt and bleed the unions dry to balance the budget.
There will be those on the right that say this is the example of good things to come.
I say that the baby boomers have run up debt that even our kids and grandkids will not be able to pay for so we can live a life of “buy everything you want” life style. I think the younger generation is smart enough to recognize they are getting screwed with state and federal social programs and pensions they will be paying for, but will get no benefits for their money.
Could be that Wisconsin meant the younger generation is beginning to see the light and have begun to view life and politics somewhat like the generation that grew up during the depression. The great recession may have planted this seed.
Well this Boomer has not contributed to the debt at all. In fact I am owed Medicare and Social Security as I have paid into it since the age of 15.
I have more than paid my share of taxes, and being a good liberal didn’t whine about it like the wussy Republicans.
As far as gloating I like to think Americans are Tea Party morons who are unable to speak a second language, believe the earth is six thousand years old, and denounce global warming.
What I really “think” about this election is simple: Walker’s side drew special interest money from outside Wisconsin and outspent his political opponents 8 to 1. The only winners here are Koch industries and others who benefit financially from a continually squeezed middle class that was largely created by unions. Speaking of which….
RP,
That “debt” you seem to think the baby boomers piled up didn’t start piling up until Reagan cut taxes on corporations and the rich, and introduced us to deficit spending. With lowered tax revenues for over 30 years now, the debt has had nowhere to go but up. I’m not sure what parallel you’re drawing between Wisconsin and those who grew up during the Great Depression. The times following the depression was a time of increased unionization, and higher corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthiest Americans. The last 30 years have been a reversal of these policies, and we’ve seen a correlating increase in income disparity. If anything, Wisconsin voters helped us take a step back into the Gilded age of rampant poverty and a few wealthy barrons.
Please excuse me, but I am about to write the most cynical comment I have made in quite some time…
Tens of thousands of people marked the Tienanmen Square events in a vigil in Hong Kong. No doubt it was moving, inspiring, and an unforgettable event for those who attended.
Yet at the end of the day, as in Wisconsin, all the protesting was for naught. The powers that be brought all their powers to bear, and remain so firmly entrenched in power that most people are more than happy to have them there.
Wisconsin is a microcosm of what is happening in America. People with enormous amounts of money at their disposal are effectively buying public office, and their money has allowed them to drown out whatever grass roots protests might arise.
China is, in a way, reflective of what might happen if Wisconsin is replicated…a ruling party that is so immune to protests or challenges to its power that it actually allows them from time to time, just to make it seem as if they’re more magnanimous than they really are.
The difference of course is that our leaders must still rely upon being able to claim a mandate from the voters, but between Super PACs, Citizens United, and the efforts to purge the rolls of voters in Florida and elsewhere, we seem to be inching closer to China every day.
CJJack, I’m trying very hard not to share your level of cynicism on all of this. I certainly get it though…
I have more cynicism that CJJack. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are getting their walking orders from the very wealthy and have been for some time. Goldman Sachs was the top contributor to the Obama campaign in 2008. It was also the top contributor to the McCain campaign.
Josef Stalin said that he did not care which person the populace voted for so long as he got to pick the candidates. It seems to me that Goldman Sachs has taken the same point of view.
@RP
The debt to GDP is little more than at the Depression, and way lower than debt after WWII. Didn’t we survive both?
For those that commented about my position on boomers creating debt, check out the benefits that have accrued for government workers over the last 30 years. Has the unions and government paid inot the pension funds moneys required for future payouts? As for SS, many have paid into a fund that they will withdraw. Others will get much more out of it, especially Medicare funding, than they or their employers ever paid in even with interest added. All of these facts can be confirmed by many different non-political websites. And what generation of individuals devised and promoted these programs???
rudi — I think it’s really important to remember what we spent that debt doing in those cases, particularly the WWII debt, as we then entered a decades-long period of incredible growth and prosperity, economically speaking. Why were we in hock so much after WWII? We put the money into building things — places to build things, teaching people to build and design things, getting the materials to build things, and then rebuilding things we blew up with other things we had built. At the end of all that, we were left with a bazillion people who now knew how to design and build things, and all the non-human resources to design and build things. That’s one helluva economic engine. Obviously there are many more subtleties, but we basically put an astronomical amount of money into educating and training people and getting everything in place to manufacture and export goods. After the war, those things no longer needed to be tanks and bombs and bullets and war-stuff, and instead were cars and houses and refridgerators and toasters and washing machines.
Compare that to what we’ve spent our debt on now — tax cuts for the wealthy and privately-owned armies and outsourcing production — and let’s say I’m not too optimistic about all that as an economic engine.
cjjack… I am actually more cynical. We don’t have tanks pointed at our heads. Our own ignorance, apathy, and selfishness is the problem.
“And what generation of individuals devised and promoted these programs???”
The same ones who had top earners paying a lot more in taxes, had corporations actually paying taxes, and made cap gains more than a silly 15% in order to pay for it. Feel free to compare the following graphs to the years in which things happened. Most notable what the tax rates were leading up to a crash, and what they were during recovery and good years.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/189189-u-s-dividend-cap-gains-tax-rate-history-possible-relevance-to-future-taxation
Be interesting to compare this to a quintile breakdown over those years as well to see if there is, and I suspect there is, a correlation with lower GDP growth and higher percentages of the economy in the hands of the top tier folks.
Slam, you’re repeating an argument that has been made many times here. Unfortunately no one has shown that the top marginal tax rate is even a good predictor of how much tax people paid, much less of any larger economic trends.
For example, the top rate in 1952 was a whopping 92%. But that applied only to income over $400,000, which in today’s money means over $3.5M AGI (that is, net of deductions and donations and other tax-avoidance strategies). Hardly anyone would pay that rate, and those few that would wouldn’t pay it on many dollars.
If you really want to argue that these tax rates made the economy healthier, you need to demonstrate that they really collected significantly more taxes and show the mechanism by which that helped the economy. You’ll also need to explain the awkward government growth trend: despite top rates falling since the 50s, the government has nevertheless been collecting a larger and larger slice of GDP right through 2000, and its share is currently about as high as it has ever been.
Dr J — If your argument is that raising marginal rates on the highest earners doesn’t actually end up creating more revenue, why are Republicans so vehemently against doing so? If they’re not going to end up paying significantly more anyway, one would think they’d throw the bone to the poor and middle classes as a sign that they are doing something to put in their fair share. (Heaven forbid they actually throw in their fair share…)
Roro, I can’t speak for the Grover Norquist hardliners. My guess is it’s an issue of trust. They don’t trust politicians in general and liberals in particular to spend the money responsibly.
And I’m not claiming raising marginal rates won’t raise revenue. It will, if the thousands of other rules in the tax code stay the same. Over the period Slam is making claims about, they haven’t. Hence total government revenue has gone steadily up, even as top marginal rates have come down.