Warren Dew Wrote:]Inequality trended up fairly smoothly in the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000, it was bounced around at a high level. There was a peak in 2000, another peak in 2007, etc. More recent peaks have been slightly higher but there is no longer a general upward trend.Can you cite your method of inequality measurement and the data you used to obtain these results?
I'm surprised if your measure of inequality doesn't catch these details.
Quote:US participation in WWI was not at the level of an existential war, as WWII was. They were two completely different things from the US standpoint. WWII was a crisis war for the US; WWI was not, any more than the Vietnam War or the Gulf War were.
Why should this matter? The economy doesn’t care.
Quote:The stock market crash was not an exogenous event that just happened to affect inequality. It was an endogenous effect with a random trigger. The high inequality levels had set things up for a crash. The crash did much of the redistribution from the top 1% to the rest of the top 10%, and WWII then redistributed to the remainder of the population.
The stock crash has relatively little effect. Stocks when down but bonds went up. Since the bond market was considerably larger than the stock market, it had to have held a larger fraction of elite wealth than the stock portion. Hence the crash did not affect the elite very much. You know this wasn’t their first rodeo, we had had many crashes and panics before. Elites were prepared for major stock declines. The stock market crash did have a major direct impact on elites, but it was NOT on their wealth. It was on their belief system and behavior.
Quote:Trump owns actual property like the industrialists.
You don’t know this. I very much doubt Trump owns much of anything. The man has intimated that he does pay income taxes. If he were actually a billionaire he would pay a shitload of taxes. What person running for office lies about NOT paying taxes if in fact he HAD paid taxes. Nobody, so I suspect Trump wasn’t bullshitting us, when he implied he pays nothing in income taxes. Trump has said many times that he is a master of debt and is a dealmaker extraordinaire. He has gone bankrupt three times. That tells me he plays things VERY close to the edge, he has to have balls the size of cantelopes (he sure acts it). Only a chump OWNS property. Smart folks use other people’s money to buy property which they then get the exclusive use of. I wonder if he ran for president in order to get out of a tight spot. We’ll never know, by the time he leaves office he will have raked in enough cash to make it all worthwhile. Well he will if he still has the cojones I think he does.