Grey Champions and the Election of 2016

[Warren Dew]

(11-21-2016, 05:28 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

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.
 
I'm surprised if your measure of inequality doesn't catch these details.

Can you cite your method of inequality measurement and the data you used to obtain these results?

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.

I was looking at a graph of total income in the top 0.1%, top 1%, top 5%, and top 10%.  I can't find that graph on the web, but you can back it out from here:

https://infiniteidenticalpsychopaths.fil....png?w=700

It's based on IRS data, and you can find numerous similar graphs with a google image search if you don't trust that particular site.  For people in the top 10% but not in the top 1%, there's a massive increase in income share at the crash at the cost of the top 1%, but they lose that benefit to the bottom 90% in WWII.

The situation since 2000 is less clear in that graph, but you can see it if you examine all the curves carefully.  The 'bouncing around without really moving much' is visible in the curves for the top 1%.

As for why it matters that WWII was a crisis war, because it was on a much larger scale.  Both money and life expenditures were about 5x larger than in WWI.  WWI is a tiny blip compared to WWII for the U.S., both economically and socially.

I've already made my points with respect to most of the rest of your post, except for this point that is exceptionally naive:

Quote:If he were actually a billionaire he would pay a shitload of taxes.

Billionaires pay virtually no taxes.  Warren Buffett pays an effective tax rate of less than one tenth of one percent.  See this article from the WSJ for a numerical analysis:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405...1587258988

The idea that people rich enough to buy politicians would allow those politicians to charge them taxes is naive in the extreme.