Because the wage stagnation has been pretty much across the board including at employers where the vast majority of employees never have received benefits.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here or where you get your data from. The papers I have seen on wage stagnation evaluate averages, and those averages are accounted for by benefits and regulations. I doubt you have detailed data about who did or did not gain.
As for regulations, that is a favorite excuse, but nobody can ever seem to name an expensive and unnecessary regulation.
Quite the opposite: people have a hard time demonstrating that regulations are effective or beneficial to employees. When they try to, they usually fall prey to neglecting opportunity costs, and count concentrated benefits while ignoring diffuse costs.
Follow the money.
Oh, indeed. And the money leads straight to people who advocate Keynesian interventions and regulations: they are almost always motivated by someone enriching themselves. And progressives are even more guilty of this than conservatives.
The antidote to this crappy system is free market capitalism.
the regulations that might encourage trickling down went away, as well as the ones keeping Wall Street from grabbing all the productivity gains.
Just to be crystal clear here: both parties push for laws that inflate the stock market and housing prices because that's what the politically powerful middle class with their mortgaged homes and 401(k) stock portfolios wants.
Part of that is ever greater government spending in the form of Keynesian stimuli of aggregate demand. What that translates into is that government makes credit really cheap in order to tempt poor people to go deep into debt in order to buy more crap (student loans and minority housing loans are particularly pernicious instances of this). Again, both parties are doing this. It's evil and it should stop, but it doesn't look like it will any time soon.
But my point is: stupid and evil as those policies are, you have a choice. You don't have to take on credit, and you can partake in the benefits of the stock market. Furthermore, no matter how stupid politically motivated spending policies of both parties are, lower taxes are always beneficial to the individual.
We already established that that is false: high-income earners made more money and the government got more tax revenue.
Bush lit the fuse on TARP then tossed it into Obama's lap. This is well established.
Bush went to Obama and said "let me know what you want to do". The bailout was entirely Obama's call.
Benefits have not gone up enough in cost to anywhere near account for the flat wages.
Quite right; which is why I said benefits and regulations.
Especially for the people working just short of full time so their employer can withhold all benefits. How do you explain them not getting any increase in pay?
Employers don't do this calculation on a per-employee basis, they look at their total costs and their total employee population. If their costs go up, they are primarily going to try reduce the impact on the most valuable employees while converting their least valuable and most easily replaced workers to part-time employment with no benefits. It's another example of how well meaning progressive regulations (mandatory benefits) end up having bad consequences for the most vulnerable.
So let's see where the money went! Much of Wall Street has been reporting record profits (and so the market keeps going up).
This is a post-2000 phenomenon and unrelated to Reagan. Such as it is, it's a good thing, since, as you point out, record profits drive up the market. And that is something every American can benefit from by buying stocks.
The USSR under Stalin or Nazi Germany would be strongly authoritarian, and even tending to towards totalitarianism.
"Tending towards"? Those states were totalitarian. Their stated objective was total control of the economy and individual lives for the common good.
Rather than defining as authoritarianism being the ability of the government to infringe any personal liberty, I would define it as one of extent. The exact point where authoritarianism begins would thus be difficult.
I agree. But look at Europe. Government spending is responsible for about half of all economic activity. Children are subjected to mandatory indoctrination in government-run schools, there are massive government-established media, essential services are nearly monopolized by the government and/or strongly regulated (healthcare, retirement, education, utilities), many kinds of speech can land you in jail, the Internet is becoming increasingly filtered and controlled, and even the means to personal self-defense have been taken away. European political elites regularly and publicly thumb their noses at the will of the people or the ability of individuals to take charge of their own lives. If that isn't authoritarian, what is? The US is following closely behind, although it's not yet quite as bad as in Europe.
Your statement would also cover the US Constitution, which also indicates that the common good can be used to justify various actions.
The only justification for government action under the US Constitution is that the action is one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution. If you are referring to the "general welfare" clause, it is not a justification for action, it is a limit on actions: among those actions justified by enumerated powers, actions are additionally limited to those that are for the "general welfare" (as opposed to special interests or select groups). Obviously, little of this is followed anymore, with the US following Europe on its authoritarian path.
Because you seem to be suggesting that the underlying reason for your perceived authoritarianism is some cabal intent on destroying rights,
What do you think motivates politicians, government officials, and NGOs? A Buddha-like concern for humanity? Of course not. What motivates politicians is the same thing that motivates business leaders: power, money, and fame. What differs is how they get it: business leaders get it by making better products, politicians get it by identifying new areas in the lives of citizens where they can pass laws and regulate.
One of the most effective way of doing that is in the face of some crisis. When they get together, it's not a "cabal intent on destroying rights", it's a group of people collaborating in getting more power and money; individual rights are simply collateral damage. And if there is no real crisis at hand, some far out, unlikely problem gets turned into an existential threat. This isn't some wild speculation, politicians and political strategists tell you this explicitly (Rahm's quote "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." comes to mind, but there are many others), and economists have been studying this for a couple of decades ("public choice theory").
Once this process gets started, it creates powerful special interests and voting blocs. For example, there are nearly a million people working in renewable energy in the US; if the US changes government policies, those people lose their jobs; guess who they are going to vote for. People employed, directly or indirectly, through social welfare programs number in the tens of millions (and are doing a lousy job); who do you think they are going to vote for?
as opposed to maintaining the planet in some habitable condition with the minimum of imposition on people's lives.
Wall Street did GREAT. Main street tanked. A lot of people's retirements went POOF in the mid 2000's.
And this is Reagan's fault... how?
Furthermore, if your retirement went "POOF" in the mid-2000's, you didn't invest it right.
The banks got bailed out, everyone else was thrown to the wolves.
Yes, courtesy of Obama, a massive crony capitalist scheme. The ACA was another massive crony capitalist scheme that made American workers worse off.
We can't have employers forced to actually be nice to the peons, now can we?
That's not what these regulations are doing. What they are actually doing is forcing workers to give up wages in return for benefits many of them don't want and wouldn't want to pay for if given a choice.
Meanwhile, while productivity has more than tripled, wages in constant dollars have been slipping.
Again, almost all of it has gone into mandatory benefits and regulatory compliance.
If it is social commentary, the theme of the movie seemed to be that black people are responsible for improving lives of black people. I found it to be a very right leaning narrative.
Perhaps. At the same time, Wakanda's wealth derives from control of natural resources, which is a rather left-leaning narrative.
And even what you mention doesn't strike me as "right leaning". Saying that "black people (as a group) are responsible for improving lives of black people (as a group)" is some kind of weird progressive, segregationist racial theory.
American conservatives say that "individuals are responsible for improving their own lives", period. Race simply has nothing to do with it.
The USA has not added states since 1959. On that basis it would seem fair
It's not a question of "fairness", it's a question of comparing apples to apples.
You seem to feel the best policy is to ignore it because of some unlikely risk of authoritarianism.
The basis of modern European government is that the state has the right to infringe on individual liberties and property rights for the common good. This is implemented by a political elite that rejects both classical liberalism and popular political choices. How is that not already authoritarianism? What is your definition of authoritarianism?
The strategy is explicitly to grab power incrementally
Ah... you're a conspiracy theorist. Never mind.
How can something that is explicitly stated be a "conspiracy theory"? Proponents of the Paris accords have acknowledged explicitly that the Paris accords are just the starting point for further measures because, by themselves, they are insufficient. That is, environmental regulators and governments will require even more power in the future to put their climate policies into action. I'm just using clearer language to describe this process.
Look, I agree with you: workers are not better off. While they were promised better benefits, they did not get better benefits and their salaries stagnated. What they got was costlier benefits. Benefits right now make up about 35% on top of salaries, and that does not even count the numerous costs of OSHA compliance and other regulations.
Hours worked is within 10% the same.
Yes, 10% less. And 10% differences are huge for hours worked, just like 10% wage differences.
Reagan's tax strategy increased tax revenue, but that's not really much of a measure of prosperity for the middle class, now is it.
Well, I'm glad that you see it that way, because progressives and socialists usually keep arguing that higher tax revenues and more government spending do help the middle class.
The trickle down didn't happen. At the same time, the owner class got really good at not letting the money trickle down.
Given how spectacularly well the stock market did under Reagan and his successors, I disagree: the benefits of Reagan's policies extended to a large portion of the middle class via stock portfolios and retirement plans. The "owner class" is anybody who actually bothers to save; you don't have to be wealthy to save and benefit.
You're just giving examples of what isn't in dispute, namely that the Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to state a preference against a protected. A violation can be determined simply by reading the ad.
Targeting is a completely different activity from putting discriminatory language into an ad. That is, with targeting, the ad contains no discriminatory language, it simply doesn't reach certain demographics. Nothing in the Fair Housing Act, nor any case law that I can find or that you cite, seems to prohibit targeting an otherwise nondiscriminatory ad.
Wow, full on delusion! We do not have better benefits, more time off, or more job security today than we had in the '70s, we have less of each.
I didn't say they were "better", I said we force employers to spend more money on it. Usually, things that people are forced to spend money on end up being worse.
Now how about answering my question. You implied that Reagan's supply-side economics was responsible for the stagnation of the middle class. Reagan's supply side economics delivered what he promised: more tax revenues from high income earners. So, you still haven't explained how getting more tax revenue from high income earners is responsible for the stagnation of the middle class over subsequent decades.
For example, your IP address is from a 'poor' neighborhood. Or, you don't have friends with any other high class FB users.
How is that a racial discrimination issue? Are you saying that I'm not allowed to advertise expensive products to rich people and cheap products to poor people anymore?
No, it bloody isn't. You don't need to sit in the sun for hours, 10-15 minutes per day is sufficient
And you don't need to sit in the sun for hours to get skin cancer either.
most people receive adequate sun exposure to produce vitamin D through their daily incidental activities
And a large percentage of adults in the West carry gene variants that lead to low vitamin D levels even with normal sun exposure. That's not surprising given that vitamin D is supplied by eggs, cheese, and fish, meaning there has been little selective pressure against deficiencies, and it may be in the process of becoming an essential vitamin for many humans.
Vitamin D is also generic and trivially cheap, at around two cents per day. The idea that recommending supplementation is due to some corporate scheme drumming up support for expensive drugs is laughable.
It's not progressive politics that have done this.
Yes, it clearly is: increased job safety, better benefits, more time off, more job security, etc. all have costs, and those are all costs that come out of the pay of workers. When you account for these intangible benefits in terms of dollars, the middle class has experienced significant income growth.
It's supply side economics, trickle down (guess what trickles down), and various other GOP schemes.
Reagan's tax cuts on high-income earners worked as expected: they increased tax revenue from high income earners. That's a win whether you favor more government spending and redistribution or more private sector activity because it increased both.
Now, tell me, according to you, in what way did getting more tax revenue from high-income earners cause the stagnation of the middle class?
And the great sins of [free market] capitalism, like crashes, and super-rich, are just accidents in complex systems, in that you cannot foresee who or what is going to go off the charts and thus regulate in advance to stop them..
Crashes are a sin of governments and fiscal policy, which turn moderate market fluctuations into disasters.
As for the very wealthy, they come in two varieties: the robber barons, who enrich themselves through government, and the entrepreneurs, who enrich themselves through creating stuff other people want to pay money for. Government creates robber barons (that's what the term originally comes from: the railroad and stell magnates who enriched themselves through government).
For myself I assume it is about individuals and creativity, in that, you can be as capitalist as you like but without a creative population you just have a pile of nuts and bolts coming off factory lines.
That's why free market capitalism rewards creativity richly: if you are creative in a way that helps your fellow human beings, as determined by the votes of your fellow human beings, you get richer. We call those votes "dollars".
If you are "creative" in ways that don't help your fellow human beings, nobody votes for you, and you don't get rich.
we donâ(TM)t want desperately poor people
The percentage of desperately poor people in the US and the OECD is nearly zero, one of the great achievements of even moderately free markets.
Plus even if society is very encouraging of creativity, things just go wrong for many individuals, like addiction or bad parenting or malnourishment (cheap sugary foods donâ(TM)t count) and emotional and psychological stresses, and so on.
These are all issues within the control of individuals and individual choices. Socializing the costs of such choices makes those problems worse over time.
How or why the West developed is debatable
No, not really: it's pretty well understood.
but ideologies donâ(TM)t seem to be a way forward here.
Great you realize it. And what is the absence of ideology? Letting individuals make their own choices, respecting their private property, and respecting their right to self-determination.
A corporation finds politicians with views naturally aligned to their objectives and helps those politicians get into office.
How?
The key is more public funding of science so private donors can't have such a big influence.
Government science panels have often been hijacked by special interests, sometimes industrial, sometimes NGO. You're just pouring gasoline on the flames.
Your lie is a lie, you are just claiming the government is there to do, only what YOU want it to do.
No, I'm claiming what is fact: that the US government is a government of limited, enumerated powers. That is the kind of government that people agreed to under the articles of confederation.
The government is there to do what ever the people want it to do.
Not the US government. The US government is explicitly one of enumerated, limited powers. In most areas, it is constitutionally constrained not to do what the people want it to do.
I want big government, I want massive government, I want a government that incorporates every citizen into it's structure and seeks to represent and ensures their voices are heard and their desires from government are sought to be met. I want a huge representative government of the many, not some tiny authoritarian government of the minority, oppressing the majority.
Look, we agree that we have a problem: many American corporations are like fiefdoms and are in cahoots with corrupt politicians. Coca Cola or Apple can't oppress you; they don't have the guns or goons to do it. All oppression of the majority necessarily originates with the government. That's why the solution to the oppression of the majority is not, as you suggest, to give corrupt, oppressive politicians even more power, it is to strip them of power and thereby remove their power to oppress.
It is people like you who are responsible for the increasing oppression of the majority because you want to ever increase the power of the oppressors. You are useful fools and tools for the oppressors and you are so easily manipulated.
I want tiny corporations of course, no company to be valued over say a billion dollars, else they lose they limited liability status, can go over a billion but all investors are fully liable for all debts, simply to much to risk for the rest of the community otherwise.
"Crony capitalism" is a misnomer. Nobody has to give favorable treatment to their cronies for property-owners to exploit non-property-owners. That's just capitalism. That's what capitalism is: a market distorted in favor of those who own capital.
In a free market, the market is certainly "distorted in favor of those who own capital": that is the whole purpose of a free market. That's because the only way you can get capital in a free market is by producing stuff other people actually want. So, in a free market, the more useful you are to your fellow human beings, the more capital you accumulate.
What you call "crony capitalism" is just capitalism.
"Crony capitalism" isn't capitalism at all, it is technically known as "rent seeking". Under crony capitalism (and its variants, progressivism, fascism, and socialism), you get more capital and/or more power by colluding with the government, regardless of how useful you are to your fellow human beings.
A free market where capital is widely distributed in a decentralized way, not held by one class of people to the exploitation of another, is market socialism.
You and many people before you: We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system! And with my inclination to practical action it seems obvious to me that we have to put a better, more just, more moral system in its place!
... and that is capitalism’s fault, not an attack on capitalism. Capitalism wants most people owning nothing and being beholden to the property-owning elites.
The reason Americans are so deep in debt is that that's government policy: the Fed and the Keynesians in government are keeping interests rates artificially low and the government has made it a key priority to extend credit to everybody in the country, for anything from student loans to homes to cars. And when people default on those bad loans, the government bails them out.
Free market capitalism doesn't do that because it makes no sense for greedy capitalists to sell stuff to people who can't pay.
So you're half right: the "property-owning elites" want to create a nation of debt slaves, but the "property-owning elites" only have that power because anti-capitalists give them that power. I suspect you are among the people creating this system.
Politics in the US since Ronnie Raygun (may his memory be dust) became President have been more regressive than progressive.
A simple look at government spending and the size of federal regulations says otherwise.
More specifically, the stagnation of middle-class incomes and the sluggish growth are clearly the result of more regulations (labor, environmental, health care, etc.) and more public spending.
Though Reagan paid lip service to the problems of big government and the need to return to a liberal democracy, Reagan little to actually rein in progressivism.
If it were that simple, then IMDB could filter those reviews easily. In fact, if you go on YouTube, there are plenty of reviews by people with a long time presence that go into detail of what was bad about Black Panther: acting, CGI, plot, politics. Yes, it seems like many people genuinely hate the movie.
Making a movie for women isn't sexist. It doesn't hurt men. The problem is movies being reviewed almost exclusively by people who are not the target audience and who don't understand them.
The people making these movies deliberately took movies targeted at male audiences and then put in an all-female cast. I think it's not surprising that "the wrong" audience watches them and then gives them a low rating.
Furthermore, not being in the target audience doesn't mean that people have nothing to say about it. The Birth of a Nation was targeted at (and a favorite of) white males like Woodrow Wilson, but African Americans certainly had every right to comment on it and criticize it.
Mindy Kaling, on negative reviews of all female Ocean's 11: "If I had to base my career on what white men wanted I would be very unsuccessful,” said Kaling in an interview with Yahoo. Larson informs us that more than 63 percent of reviewers are white and male.
Yeah, and for a film like Ocean 11, that's probably the usual target demographic, and that demographic doesn't like having political ideology shoved down their throats when going to a movie, nor do they identify with an all female cast.
“I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about ‘A Wrinkle in Time,'” Larson added. “It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.”
I suspect the average struggling 40-year-old white dude knows a lot more about hardship than a lily-white, ultra-privileged, ultra-wealthy, ultra-bigoted actress like Brie Larson.
But anyhow, there is the problem - White males.
Well, it's a problem you have to learn to live with because we aren't going away and we're not going to change. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the wage stagnation has been pretty much across the board including at employers where the vast majority of employees never have received benefits.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here or where you get your data from. The papers I have seen on wage stagnation evaluate averages, and those averages are accounted for by benefits and regulations. I doubt you have detailed data about who did or did not gain.
Quite the opposite: people have a hard time demonstrating that regulations are effective or beneficial to employees. When they try to, they usually fall prey to neglecting opportunity costs, and count concentrated benefits while ignoring diffuse costs.
Oh, indeed. And the money leads straight to people who advocate Keynesian interventions and regulations: they are almost always motivated by someone enriching themselves. And progressives are even more guilty of this than conservatives.
The antidote to this crappy system is free market capitalism.
Yes, funny isn't it. Now go look up who is promoting Keynesianism. Hint: it's not advocates of free market capitalism.
Just to be crystal clear here: both parties push for laws that inflate the stock market and housing prices because that's what the politically powerful middle class with their mortgaged homes and 401(k) stock portfolios wants.
Part of that is ever greater government spending in the form of Keynesian stimuli of aggregate demand. What that translates into is that government makes credit really cheap in order to tempt poor people to go deep into debt in order to buy more crap (student loans and minority housing loans are particularly pernicious instances of this). Again, both parties are doing this. It's evil and it should stop, but it doesn't look like it will any time soon.
But my point is: stupid and evil as those policies are, you have a choice. You don't have to take on credit, and you can partake in the benefits of the stock market. Furthermore, no matter how stupid politically motivated spending policies of both parties are, lower taxes are always beneficial to the individual.
We already established that that is false: high-income earners made more money and the government got more tax revenue.
Bush went to Obama and said "let me know what you want to do". The bailout was entirely Obama's call.
Quite right; which is why I said benefits and regulations.
Employers don't do this calculation on a per-employee basis, they look at their total costs and their total employee population. If their costs go up, they are primarily going to try reduce the impact on the most valuable employees while converting their least valuable and most easily replaced workers to part-time employment with no benefits. It's another example of how well meaning progressive regulations (mandatory benefits) end up having bad consequences for the most vulnerable.
This is a post-2000 phenomenon and unrelated to Reagan. Such as it is, it's a good thing, since, as you point out, record profits drive up the market. And that is something every American can benefit from by buying stocks.
"Tending towards"? Those states were totalitarian. Their stated objective was total control of the economy and individual lives for the common good.
I agree. But look at Europe. Government spending is responsible for about half of all economic activity. Children are subjected to mandatory indoctrination in government-run schools, there are massive government-established media, essential services are nearly monopolized by the government and/or strongly regulated (healthcare, retirement, education, utilities), many kinds of speech can land you in jail, the Internet is becoming increasingly filtered and controlled, and even the means to personal self-defense have been taken away. European political elites regularly and publicly thumb their noses at the will of the people or the ability of individuals to take charge of their own lives. If that isn't authoritarian, what is? The US is following closely behind, although it's not yet quite as bad as in Europe.
The only justification for government action under the US Constitution is that the action is one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution. If you are referring to the "general welfare" clause, it is not a justification for action, it is a limit on actions: among those actions justified by enumerated powers, actions are additionally limited to those that are for the "general welfare" (as opposed to special interests or select groups). Obviously, little of this is followed anymore, with the US following Europe on its authoritarian path.
What do you think motivates politicians, government officials, and NGOs? A Buddha-like concern for humanity? Of course not. What motivates politicians is the same thing that motivates business leaders: power, money, and fame. What differs is how they get it: business leaders get it by making better products, politicians get it by identifying new areas in the lives of citizens where they can pass laws and regulate.
One of the most effective way of doing that is in the face of some crisis. When they get together, it's not a "cabal intent on destroying rights", it's a group of people collaborating in getting more power and money; individual rights are simply collateral damage. And if there is no real crisis at hand, some far out, unlikely problem gets turned into an existential threat. This isn't some wild speculation, politicians and political strategists tell you this explicitly (Rahm's quote "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." comes to mind, but there are many others), and economists have been studying this for a couple of decades ("public choice theory").
Once this process gets started, it creates powerful special interests and voting blocs. For example, there are nearly a million people working in renewable energy in the US; if the US changes government policies, those people lose their jobs; guess who they are going to vote for. People employed, directly or indirectly, through social welfare programs number in the tens of millions (and are doing a lousy job); who do you think they are going to vote for?
And this is Reagan's fault... how?
Furthermore, if your retirement went "POOF" in the mid-2000's, you didn't invest it right.
Yes, courtesy of Obama, a massive crony capitalist scheme. The ACA was another massive crony capitalist scheme that made American workers worse off.
That's not what these regulations are doing. What they are actually doing is forcing workers to give up wages in return for benefits many of them don't want and wouldn't want to pay for if given a choice.
Again, almost all of it has gone into mandatory benefits and regulatory compliance.
Perhaps. At the same time, Wakanda's wealth derives from control of natural resources, which is a rather left-leaning narrative.
And even what you mention doesn't strike me as "right leaning". Saying that "black people (as a group) are responsible for improving lives of black people (as a group)" is some kind of weird progressive, segregationist racial theory.
American conservatives say that "individuals are responsible for improving their own lives", period. Race simply has nothing to do with it.
It's not a question of "fairness", it's a question of comparing apples to apples.
The basis of modern European government is that the state has the right to infringe on individual liberties and property rights for the common good. This is implemented by a political elite that rejects both classical liberalism and popular political choices. How is that not already authoritarianism? What is your definition of authoritarianism?
How can something that is explicitly stated be a "conspiracy theory"? Proponents of the Paris accords have acknowledged explicitly that the Paris accords are just the starting point for further measures because, by themselves, they are insufficient. That is, environmental regulators and governments will require even more power in the future to put their climate policies into action. I'm just using clearer language to describe this process.
Look, I agree with you: workers are not better off. While they were promised better benefits, they did not get better benefits and their salaries stagnated. What they got was costlier benefits. Benefits right now make up about 35% on top of salaries, and that does not even count the numerous costs of OSHA compliance and other regulations.
Yes, 10% less. And 10% differences are huge for hours worked, just like 10% wage differences.
Well, I'm glad that you see it that way, because progressives and socialists usually keep arguing that higher tax revenues and more government spending do help the middle class.
Given how spectacularly well the stock market did under Reagan and his successors, I disagree: the benefits of Reagan's policies extended to a large portion of the middle class via stock portfolios and retirement plans. The "owner class" is anybody who actually bothers to save; you don't have to be wealthy to save and benefit.
You're just giving examples of what isn't in dispute, namely that the Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to state a preference against a protected. A violation can be determined simply by reading the ad.
Targeting is a completely different activity from putting discriminatory language into an ad. That is, with targeting, the ad contains no discriminatory language, it simply doesn't reach certain demographics. Nothing in the Fair Housing Act, nor any case law that I can find or that you cite, seems to prohibit targeting an otherwise nondiscriminatory ad.
I didn't say they were "better", I said we force employers to spend more money on it. Usually, things that people are forced to spend money on end up being worse.
But we do, in fact, work fewer hours.
Now how about answering my question. You implied that Reagan's supply-side economics was responsible for the stagnation of the middle class. Reagan's supply side economics delivered what he promised: more tax revenues from high income earners. So, you still haven't explained how getting more tax revenue from high income earners is responsible for the stagnation of the middle class over subsequent decades.
How is that a racial discrimination issue? Are you saying that I'm not allowed to advertise expensive products to rich people and cheap products to poor people anymore?
Well, then you should have no trouble citing a case, because I can't find any.
And you don't need to sit in the sun for hours to get skin cancer either.
And a large percentage of adults in the West carry gene variants that lead to low vitamin D levels even with normal sun exposure. That's not surprising given that vitamin D is supplied by eggs, cheese, and fish, meaning there has been little selective pressure against deficiencies, and it may be in the process of becoming an essential vitamin for many humans.
Vitamin D is also generic and trivially cheap, at around two cents per day. The idea that recommending supplementation is due to some corporate scheme drumming up support for expensive drugs is laughable.
Yes, it clearly is: increased job safety, better benefits, more time off, more job security, etc. all have costs, and those are all costs that come out of the pay of workers. When you account for these intangible benefits in terms of dollars, the middle class has experienced significant income growth.
Reagan's tax cuts on high-income earners worked as expected: they increased tax revenue from high income earners. That's a win whether you favor more government spending and redistribution or more private sector activity because it increased both.
Now, tell me, according to you, in what way did getting more tax revenue from high-income earners cause the stagnation of the middle class?
Crashes are a sin of governments and fiscal policy, which turn moderate market fluctuations into disasters.
As for the very wealthy, they come in two varieties: the robber barons, who enrich themselves through government, and the entrepreneurs, who enrich themselves through creating stuff other people want to pay money for. Government creates robber barons (that's what the term originally comes from: the railroad and stell magnates who enriched themselves through government).
That's why free market capitalism rewards creativity richly: if you are creative in a way that helps your fellow human beings, as determined by the votes of your fellow human beings, you get richer. We call those votes "dollars".
If you are "creative" in ways that don't help your fellow human beings, nobody votes for you, and you don't get rich.
The percentage of desperately poor people in the US and the OECD is nearly zero, one of the great achievements of even moderately free markets.
These are all issues within the control of individuals and individual choices. Socializing the costs of such choices makes those problems worse over time.
No, not really: it's pretty well understood.
Great you realize it. And what is the absence of ideology? Letting individuals make their own choices, respecting their private property, and respecting their right to self-determination.
How?
Government science panels have often been hijacked by special interests, sometimes industrial, sometimes NGO. You're just pouring gasoline on the flames.
For many people it doesn't.
Compensating for low vitamin D levels with sun exposure is asking for skin cancer.
No, I'm claiming what is fact: that the US government is a government of limited, enumerated powers. That is the kind of government that people agreed to under the articles of confederation.
Not the US government. The US government is explicitly one of enumerated, limited powers. In most areas, it is constitutionally constrained not to do what the people want it to do.
Look, we agree that we have a problem: many American corporations are like fiefdoms and are in cahoots with corrupt politicians. Coca Cola or Apple can't oppress you; they don't have the guns or goons to do it. All oppression of the majority necessarily originates with the government. That's why the solution to the oppression of the majority is not, as you suggest, to give corrupt, oppressive politicians even more power, it is to strip them of power and thereby remove their power to oppress.
It is people like you who are responsible for the increasing oppression of the majority because you want to ever increase the power of the oppressors. You are useful fools and tools for the oppressors and you are so easily manipulated.
Straight out of the 25 Point Program.
In a free market, the market is certainly "distorted in favor of those who own capital": that is the whole purpose of a free market. That's because the only way you can get capital in a free market is by producing stuff other people actually want. So, in a free market, the more useful you are to your fellow human beings, the more capital you accumulate.
"Crony capitalism" isn't capitalism at all, it is technically known as "rent seeking". Under crony capitalism (and its variants, progressivism, fascism, and socialism), you get more capital and/or more power by colluding with the government, regardless of how useful you are to your fellow human beings.
You and many people before you: We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system! And with my inclination to practical action it seems obvious to me that we have to put a better, more just, more moral system in its place!
The reason Americans are so deep in debt is that that's government policy: the Fed and the Keynesians in government are keeping interests rates artificially low and the government has made it a key priority to extend credit to everybody in the country, for anything from student loans to homes to cars. And when people default on those bad loans, the government bails them out.
Free market capitalism doesn't do that because it makes no sense for greedy capitalists to sell stuff to people who can't pay.
So you're half right: the "property-owning elites" want to create a nation of debt slaves, but the "property-owning elites" only have that power because anti-capitalists give them that power. I suspect you are among the people creating this system.
A simple look at government spending and the size of federal regulations says otherwise.
More specifically, the stagnation of middle-class incomes and the sluggish growth are clearly the result of more regulations (labor, environmental, health care, etc.) and more public spending.
Though Reagan paid lip service to the problems of big government and the need to return to a liberal democracy, Reagan little to actually rein in progressivism.
If it were that simple, then IMDB could filter those reviews easily. In fact, if you go on YouTube, there are plenty of reviews by people with a long time presence that go into detail of what was bad about Black Panther: acting, CGI, plot, politics. Yes, it seems like many people genuinely hate the movie.
The people making these movies deliberately took movies targeted at male audiences and then put in an all-female cast. I think it's not surprising that "the wrong" audience watches them and then gives them a low rating.
Furthermore, not being in the target audience doesn't mean that people have nothing to say about it. The Birth of a Nation was targeted at (and a favorite of) white males like Woodrow Wilson, but African Americans certainly had every right to comment on it and criticize it.
Yeah, and for a film like Ocean 11, that's probably the usual target demographic, and that demographic doesn't like having political ideology shoved down their throats when going to a movie, nor do they identify with an all female cast.
I suspect the average struggling 40-year-old white dude knows a lot more about hardship than a lily-white, ultra-privileged, ultra-wealthy, ultra-bigoted actress like Brie Larson.
Well, it's a problem you have to learn to live with because we aren't going away and we're not going to change. Sorry.