Thread: Obama Proved Last Night who benefits from Government spending

Originally Posted by sangha

I dont see Boo starting topic after topic about his one pet issue.

given your response we can figure out what your pet issue is?

Originally Posted by ashurbanipal

No, envy implies rightful ownership. You don't envy the thief the goods he has stolen or the con artist the money they've bilked from others.



I honestly don't think there is one. The only solution is for as many people as possible to learn the appropriate lessons so that those will be carried into the future. But short of killing a bunch of people, there is no solution any more.

yeah the typical left wing response-rich people stole their wealth

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

yeah the typical left wing response-rich people stole their wealth

Who was it that proposed that all gold (real wealth) be turned in to the government (FRB) and issued instead, fiat debt based fractional reserve currency?

Was it the monied interests... or the working class?

Who consolidates assets and holdings (real wealth) in every recession and depression, the rich, or the now working poor?

Who developed complex financial schemes with zero real value like derivatives instead of solid asset backed trading... the rich, or the working class?

How is real wealth created? Is it created by stock trades? By printing more worthless money (called inflation that has devalued our fiat currency 97%)? Is it created by looting pension funds to finance mergers that destroy competition? Or is it created by the investment of workers of the most precious commodities possessed by every man woman and child... TIME AND LABOR?

You do realize that while productivity continues to rise among the working class, their wages have been stagnant... if they get to keep their jobs, at the same time that cost of living is going up rapidly, while executive bonuses and pay packages have skyrocketed, right?

There is more truth to the leftwing mantra than there is to your off handed flippant dismissive response.

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

so you agree with me

the rich fund programs and the rest of Americans use them

cutting taxes is a benefit for the rich

increasing spending is a benefit for everyone else

so all the crap that the reason why the rich should pay more is because they benefit most from the government is nonsense

their duty is to fund everyone else's benefits

Thank you for blasting you're own point out of the water. As you say cutting taxes is a benefit for the rich, so if they pay higher taxes the gov't gets more revenue and it helps out our debt situation but they make a sacrifice. If increasing spending benefits everyone else, and we cut back the gov't has more money and it helps our debt situation, but they make a sacrifice.

If you really believe what you just said, I don't understand the point of this topic. We all agree everyone should share some the burden, and this seems like both a way to generate more money and from both parties normal base.

Originally Posted by Occam's Razor

Whoa.... hold on there... The majority of spending increases have benefited the rich. Some examples for you to chew on...

The bailouts that rewarded disastrously managed houses of finance, instead of letting them fail and fresh blood enter the market. Not only did every damn one of them keep their jobs while issuing pink slips to the rank and file, they kept their wholly undeserved bonuses. How... exactly, did everyone else benefit from that, and the rich did not? To the tune 1.4 trillion...

No bid, cost plus contracts inflated the cost of war by several orders of magnitude, going from a projected cost of $60 billion to $1.3 trillion. Haliburton stock increased over a 1000 percent during this period, while energy companies reaped huge profits. Tell me... how did this war profiteering benefit the working class and not the rich?

The creation of a housing bubble fueled by easy loans and refinancing that fueled one of the only two economies we have left, consumerism accounting for 70% of our GDP. When the bubble burst, who was the first to be protected? The homeowners? Or the companies that pumped money in the form of personal debt into the economy to skew the growth numbers by offering unscrupulous loans, selling essentially junk securities as AAA investments in the form of mortgage bundling, foreclosing on properties and vastly consolidating land holdings as real assets into a few hands (that is, consolidating real wealth, not debt currency), wiping out weaker competitors in a down market only the richest finance manipulators could survive (with taxpayer help).

Federal Environmental Clean-up Fund - cleaning up a century of pollution left behind by corporate behemoths that just walked away from them.

I'm sure others can give you more examples... but these are a few.

Lastly, the very rich in this country, from the founding of the income tax system until 1980, paid no less than 70% of their income in taxes... and still built fabulous mansions, owned private planes, ten stall garages filled with cars, islands... etc. These were arguably the years of maximum prosperity in the united states, with a family of four surviving very well on a single average income.

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

You sort of lose credibility saying the very rich PAID NO LESS THAN 70% of the income in taxes

You completely do not understand marginal rates with effective rates

LMAO... this is your response?

Completely ignore the facts listed above and waffle about on some non-sensical hairsplitting between "marginal and effective rates"... what the hell does that even mean and how does it refute any of the points made above?

What a freakin joke!

Originally Posted by Turtledude

yeah the typical left wing response-rich people stole their wealth

Well, I think in most cases, "plundered" or "bilked" is a little more precise. But I've been up close and watched how the process works. I've been party to negotiations with city councils and county supervisors for businesses to receive tax breaks, and in many cases, direct payment of tax dollars in the promise of locating there, which they then never fulfill. You wouldn't believe how much money flows from even the poorest locales up to multi-millionaires that way. And while the poor continue to pay sales tax and property tax, the wealthy then receive much of that money without ever fulfilling their end of the bargain.

Or to go at it from the extreme other end, the last I heard, the BIS estimated that the total notional value of outstanding derivative instruments was 1.14 Quadrillion dollars (hint: that's more than the total annual GDP of the entire world). That's all money that's just made up, out of thin air. I can't do that, and neither can you. Banks and large companies with financial wings can, and they use it to manipulate markets and purchase things of value while contributing literally nothing. And when the house of cards starts to collapse, again, they receive subsidies or bailouts. And though some of those are in the form of loan which are ostensibly paid back, the way a bank pays back a debt isn't the way you or I would pay it back. They most usually just trade derivatives.

Banks can produce "money" in other ways as well, and again, they use it to manipulate all kinds of things, including (especially) the political process. And the result is invariably bad. Remember Enron? Thousands of people lost their jobs and their life savings in that debacle. What we tend to forget is that Worldcom, Tyco, Lehman Brothers, Arthur Andersen, and others led to similar destruction for people who were working hard, saving money, and doing what they had been told would lead to prosperity. How many others lost money not just in tax dollars paid directly to companies being bailed out, but in lost value in their investments? How many lost value in their homes?

Or, if you go look at the books in HUD or the DoD, you'll see massive amounts missing. Billions and Trillions of dollars. I remember watching the hearings on CSPAN over 2.3 trillion dollars missing, over 15 years, on the books of the DoD. It turns out that the Pentagon had turned over its accounting to the companies to whom it had granted contracts. The systems they established were byzantine to say the least, and when questioned about what they did when an internal audit discovered the money missing, they replied that they made an adjustment to their books. It's obvious where that money went.

Or, we could talk about the privatization of what had previously been public property. So get this: those same banks and large corporations mentioned above use their influence to indebt state and local governments, who are then obliged to sell off public property--property we, the people, paid for--to pay those debts, which need never have been incurred in the first place. It's such a common pattern I have a hard time believing it's all down to misfeasance.

We could discuss banks and corporations using their money to buy political influence that led to the policies of globalization, leading to a huge loss of jobs here (this is something that both Smith and Ricardo warned against, BTW, and no one in modern times has been listening). And because of these policies, the pillage and conning of the American people is dwarfed by what has been taken from other countries.

We could discuss the fact that the social security fund is mostly a bunch of IOUs from congress. That's actual money made by people who were working, being taken out by politicians, who use it to line the pockets of the wealthy.

Or we could discuss what I think is one of the most serious problems: the stagnation of lower and middle-class wages even during unprecedented increases in productivity. While not technically theft, in light of the other stuff I've mentioned here, its just acting in exceptionally bad faith on the part of employers.

I could go on and on about this. But the common theme is pretty simple: the wealthy use their wealth to acquire more wealth, at the expense of everyone else. They buy political influence and use the financial system to their great advantage in a system to which not all have equal access. The result is the massive transfer of wealth upward that we've seen over the last four decades or so. How this can be described as anything other than plunder and bilking is beyond me.

I'm sure you'll ask me to back some of it up. Much of it should be common knowledge. I refer you to David Korten's book "When Corporations Rule the World" for some "connect the dots." Here are some links on some of the less well-known points that will get anyone who cares to research the issue started:

The War On Waste - CBS News

http://www.hud.gov/offices/oig/data/reform.pdf

#9 Privatization of America

http://crgp.stanford.edu/publication...ons/Orr_IJ.pdf

Howard Schweber: Geithner's Dragon

Federal Reserve made $9 trillion in emergency loans - Dec. 1, 2010

Fed audit: $16 trillion in loans to banks in less than three years « Hot Air

So, to answer your point directly: it may be a "typical left-wing response." That doesn't mean it isn't true--and here, it happens to be entirely true.

duplicate post

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

yeah the typical left wing response-rich people stole their wealth

The typical rightwing response - the rich earned their bailouts

Originally Posted by Wiseone

Thank you for blasting you're own point out of the water. As you say cutting taxes is a benefit for the rich, so if they pay higher taxes the gov't gets more revenue and it helps out our debt situation but they make a sacrifice. If increasing spending benefits everyone else, and we cut back the gov't has more money and it helps our debt situation, but they make a sacrifice.

If you really believe what you just said, I don't understand the point of this topic. We all agree everyone should share some the burden, and this seems like both a way to generate more money and from both parties normal base.

You described the nonsense perfectly. TD doesn't want the rich to pay more, so he wants to lower their taxes so they end up paying more

Originally Posted by ashurbanipal

Well, I think in most cases, "plundered" or "bilked" is a little more precise. But I've been up close and watched how the process works. I've been party to negotiations with city councils and county supervisors for businesses to receive tax breaks, and in many cases, direct payment of tax dollars in the promise of locating there, which they then never fulfill. You wouldn't believe how much money flows from even the poorest locales up to multi-millionaires that way. And while the poor continue to pay sales tax and property tax, the wealthy then receive much of that money without ever fulfilling their end of the bargain.

When Giuliani was the mayor of NYC, he gave a number of large corps tax credits in exchange for a promise that they wouldn't move their HQ's out of the city, and that they would increase employment in their HQs in the city by a certain amount. Five years later, a civic organization did a study and found that none of those corps had increased employment (some had even decreased the # of employees working at their HQ) but they were still receiving the cash credits.