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User: Fned

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  1. Re:Tax cuts for the rich? on Can Long Term Research Survive the Coming Age of Austerity? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There are some people who view the above as a problem; this problem is called "the rich get richer". Even if the poor get richer also, which confuses me. How will you increase jobs without someone who is rich getting richer? And how does that rich person hurt the poor by getting richer?

    The majority of the public has no problem with "the rich get richer". Look at the path of Clinton's approval rating; we were ALL getting richer and it was fucking great, no matter what kind of douchebag shit he pulled.

    What people have a problem with, though, is when the rich get richer but the rest of us get fucking poorer. How the rich have been doing that lately (they've always been doing this, but sooooo much more during the last decade) is by making themselves richer without actually producing anything of value. You don't increase jobs by funneling money into your pocket, you increase jobs by investing in actual enterprises.

    Yes, we have been getting poorer. Average wages haven't been increasing when adjusted for inflation -- unless you make over 100k. But many things have been getting more expensive compared to inflation -- food and shelter, which everybody needs, and for which poor people have to pay a far, far larger percentage of their income.

    It's nice to think that more investment and job creation will be the natural result of lower taxes and deregulation, but recent history is pretty clear: all rich people need to do to get richer, is spend money in a way that accomplishes that. If that means investing in industry, they'll do that. If it means rolling up a gigantic tarball of toxic debt and hot-potatoing it around the marketplace until it crashes the economy, and then run begging to the US government to wash the hands of whoever caught it last, they'll do that, instead. For example, Koch Industries, who fund Reason Magazine, made a pretty penny in 2008 via "contango" oil price manipulation. They got more money, but produced no additional value. They brazenly enriched themselves at the cost of the rest of us.

    Multiply that action by thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and you start to see the path that led us here. Money going upstairs and nothing of value coming down.

    Lower taxes and looser regulation is what we've been DOING FOR TEN YEARS. it's what GOT US HERE.

  2. They can to Hertza Haeon... on Tae Bo Workout Sent Skyscraper Shaking · · Score: 1

    ...with meat bodies?!??!!