What Is Wrong with "Trickle Down Economics"?

[gturner]

why is $20 in a wealthy person's wallet somehow magically different from any other $20?

Well, just off the top of my head, and, granted, I'm just a mere plebeian, not a sophisticated economist writing in journals living in Kentucky like yourself, I can think of at least two:

1. The wealthy person can shelter that $20 elsewhere in a manner the poor person can't.

2. The wealthy person doesn't value that $20 the way the poor person does.

Care to ask for any more obvious answers that sabotage your Santa Claus beliefs?

Those aren't answers worth considering. The poor person can also blow the $20 on Chinese toys at Walmart, so $1 goes to the Walton family and $19 goes to China.

But wait, that would mean that the poor person with $20, who is rich by Chinese standards, is benefiting poor people in China because the government didn't take half of his $20.

And obviously the rich person doesn't value the $20 the same, because the rich person is going to save and invest it (even offshore accounts invest the money) instead of blowing it on beer and cigarettes.

If taxing the rich at confiscatory rates makes the poor better off, wouldn't having them all move to another country make the poor much better off? Then there wouldn't be their evil money circulating in the economy.

 

[Trekker4747]

So if not taxing the rich more is supposed to help "those $20" "make it rain" on the poor how come, well, it sort of doesn't happen? At all?

How come the rich have been getting vastly, vastly richer over the rise of inflation to skyrocketing levels while the middle and lower classes have pretty much seen their wages stay stagnant for 30-40 years? (Only going up along with inflation.)

The rich of today are vastly wealthier than their counterparts living 30-40 years ago. So when is that money going trickle down? When are the rich going to say, "Alright, that's enough. My family can self-sustain itself without needing any kind of income for the next 10 generations, time to give my employees much higher wages."

"Trickle Down" economics do not work because the rich never "trickle it down." They stash it in an account and let it just make them more money.

I make the same amount of money as my 1970s counterpart (respective to our economies.) Mitt Romney's counterpart made vastly less (again, respective to their economies.)

So when is trickle down going to kick in?

 

[stj]

In 18th and 19th century USA, the government was to a large extent a kind of fascist redistribution economy, stealing land by genocide and using the proceeds to finance the government with minimal taxation, while using slave labor to produce export crops. Plus there was a perpetual labor shortage, easy bankruptcy laws and protective tariffs. Banks could issue their own currency, which is on the conservative view a plus since they weren't central banks. But then, despite the existence of gold coinage, these weren't necessarily hard money.

On the one hand the lack of income tax and regulations were supposed to relieve the oppressed masses of the burden of government, which leaves the ninnyhammers and lobnoddies the difficulty of explaining how the business cycle operated as ferociously then as before the central banks conspired against those members of the master race amongst us. I suppose the high wage economy and easy bankruptcy for free men is supposed to explain that? At any rate, this camp wants maximal human suffering inflicted on the undeserving. Happily for them, there's always slavery to make the great days of the Republic (not a Democracy!) enticing.

On the other hand, when trying to tout the glories of the good old days, statistics about anything other than price levels show that the living standards of quite a few people were very much worse than today. Also, the trickle down economics of the late 19th century left the USA suffering economic malaise just as bad as that supposedly created by whatever nefarious policy or institution or group currently demonized by the conservatives. William McKinley, Gold Bug, didn't fail just because he was assassinated. Conservative economics survived him very well, and failed miserably, as it always has.

What we have seen is that the conservative thinkers will prostitute reason, always retreating into another web of misrepresentations, logical fallacies, red herrings, indeed, every strategem of deception. The only sincere thing we've seen is the Redbaiting.

Speaking of prostitution, the murderous neo-Nazi girl friend in the military is likely enough into the elaborate revisionist history of Vietnam, if not the main source. These are not random crackpot notions, but expressions of highly finished ideologies, systematically propagated throught certain institutions and sectors of society. The time will come when psychotic Amazon and her ilk will kill people who just aren't down with the program, not just people like me.

 

[gturner]

So if not taxing the rich more is supposed to help "those $20" "make it rain" on the poor how come, well, it sort of doesn't happen? At all?

How come the rich have been getting vastly, vastly richer over the rise of inflation to skyrocketing levels while the middle and lower classes have pretty much seen their wages stay stagnant for 30-40 years? (Only going up along with inflation.)

Median family wage stagnation started in 1965, before which their incomes were growing rapidly and consistently. Then Johnson's Great Society kicked in and the rest is pretty much history. Ford & Carter saw declines, Reagan gave them a bump up, but Bush I raised tax rates and their incomes declined again.

The rich of today are vastly wealthier than their counterparts living 30-40 years ago. So when is that money going trickle down? When are the rich going to say, "Alright, that's enough. My family can self-sustain itself without needing any kind of income for the next 10 generations, time to give my employees much higher wages."[/'quote]

Why would they pay the employees higher wages when there's not enough jobs to tighten the supply of workers? Wages follow the laws of supply and demand just like everything else, and with a nearly infinite supply of illegals from Mexico crossing the border, the supply isn't going to tighten anytime soon. We've added an entire quintile below the old one. Latino's already make up 15% of the workforce and that's expected to rise to 18% in just six years.

( http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/HispanicLaborForce/HispanicLaborForce.pdf )

This during a period when the number of new jobs isn't keeping up with the population increase, even not counting immigration. There's your stagnant wage problem.

As an example of supply and demand, there are only about 15 mining schools in the US, two in Kentucky. Not many people want to be mining engineers. Their graduates have higher starting salaries than Harvard graduates. Is that because mining companies love to give their employees money, or because its almost impossible to find a mining engineer to hire? It's doubtful that the requirements to get into a mining school like Eastern Kentucky University are harder than getting into Harvard, probably amounting to having a pulse and enough brainpower to take calculus - at EKU.

"Trickle Down" economics do not work because the rich never "trickle it down." They stash it in an account and let it just make them more money.

And why wouldn't anyone do the same? If the account pays a better return than adding an additional employee would, or if paying the employee more doesn't raise the companies net income (via productivity, etc), then investing the money in an account (the money doesn't just sit there, it gets loaned back out, which is why banks pay interest) is both a better decision for the investor, and better for the economy, because someone else is making more on the money than the rich would through hiring in their own enterprise (someone else is more efficient at using the capital).

Work is not charity. They're not going to pay you more if I'll do the same job cheaper, and I'll likely do the same job cheaper if there are more people looking for work than there are jobs to fill.

If the supply of low-skilled labor is expanding faster than the economy, wages will stagnate or decline. If the supply of skilled college graduates is expanding faster than the supply of jobs actually requiring skilled college graduates, then their wages will likewise stagnate or decline. If a welfare or unemployment system is indexed to the level of income of a certain percentage of the population, or to inflation adjusted measures like the CPI, then that level will set a floor where people will drop out of the workforce. Although this could raise wages by reducing the supply of workers, it also represents a pool of people who will re-enter the workforce whenever entry-level wages start to rise signicantly above the inflation/CPI indexed measure, expanding the labor supply and dragging wages back down toward the welfare + friction level. Wage growth at the lower-end then becomes sluggish, probably reflecting changes in welfare and unemployment policies and changes in the CPI measures more than anything else. Add in enough Mexicans and wages are stuck.

The high-end is a different matter, because the more diverse an economy becomes, and the bigger it grows, the more the bell-curve will extend to the right. Animal body sizes show exactly the same thing, yet elephants don't affect the number of mice, and mice aren't suffering because elephants evolved, or because elephants are really big.

Finally, the government itself is like an ultra-rich person, trickling money here, there, and everywhere. Seven of the ten richest counties in the US happen to be next to Washington, DC. Why do you think that is?

 

[gturner]

In 18th and 19th century USA, the government was to a large extent a kind of fascist redistribution economy, stealing land by genocide and using the proceeds to finance the government with minimal taxation, while using slave labor to produce export crops.

Hrm. Hard to make sense of that.

How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt?

First, you'd need to find a genocide, which is going to be hard considering that just about every incident generated reams of documentation and newspaper articles. Once you get past the trail of tears, there are some massacres with casualties in the low hundreds, and then it tapers out from there. The Indians actually won on the casualty count, and in 100 years of warfare out West, the US military only suffered 2,000 casualties while outgunned on unfamiliar terrain. That's 20 deaths a year, over an area the size of Europe. A typical Chicago suburb has higher death rates. Then there's the niggling problem that just about all the tribes we ever encountered have websites now. You're unlikely to have been exterminated in the 1800's if you're still posting on the Internet. (That's like a rule.)

Second, the farmers didn't pay income federal income taxes or any federal property taxes, so it would be kind of difficult for their farming to have been funding the government, and the federal government didn't make any appreciable money off the land at all, because we don't have a mechanism to do that. Even if you find gold on government land, they get pretty much zip. 95% of federal tax revenue came from tarriffs on imports, while cotton and tobacco were exports.

Plus there was a perpetual labor shortage, easy bankruptcy laws and protective tariffs.

And there was a labor shortage because everyone could just go out and start farming, prospecting, or opening a store instead of working for the man. There were a ton of things to be done and not a lot of people to do them.

On the one hand the lack of income tax and regulations were supposed to relieve the oppressed masses of the burden of government, which leaves the ninnyhammers and lobnoddies the difficulty of explaining how the business cycle operated as ferociously then as before the central banks conspired against those members of the master race amongst us. I suppose the high wage economy and easy bankruptcy for free men is supposed to explain that? At any rate, this camp wants maximal human suffering inflicted on the undeserving. Happily for them, there's always slavery to make the great days of the Republic (not a Democracy!) enticing.

Can you say that in English?

Speaking of prostitution, the murderous neo-Nazi girl friend in the military is likely enough into the elaborate revisionist history of Vietnam, if not the main source. These are not random crackpot notions, but expressions of highly finished ideologies, systematically propagated throught certain institutions and sectors of society. The time will come when psychotic Amazon and her ilk will kill people who just aren't down with the program, not just people like me.

Um, she was raised in the Soviet Union, in Soviet state schools, and was of course a member of the Komsomol. Her Communist credentials are way better than yours, since she lived the dream. Her grandfather, a highly decorated officer who flew bombers for Stalin, spent years in a labor camp because a foreign tourist stopped him on the street and asked him directions, and he gave them. That's one of only many reasons why she has a violent hatred of communists, and why communists have to be so heavy handed to stay in power. If they're not, everybody just leaves, either crawling through barbed-wire fences or floating on inner-tubes, or things get real ugly and they violently revolt. It was a cruel, harsh system that made people very angry and prone to violence, as any Youtube video of Russian traffic incidents will show. (Those are a genre unto themselves).

There was a joke Gorbachev used to love to tell.

A man was standing in line for vodka for hours and the line wasn't moving any, even a little bit. He got so frustrated that he blew his top and said, "That's it! I can't take it anymore! I'm going to the Kremlin to assassinate Gorbachev!"

A few hours later he comes back sheepishly and says, "The line to assassinate Gorbachev is worse than this one."



As for the history of Vietnam, you do realize that it's all documented, don't you? In fact, some of what I know comes from the archives of reel-to-reel tape recordings of the MACV headquarters. They ran a tape recorder - always.

In terms of tactics we should consider it two different wars, split at 1969. In terms of strategy we were always behind the 8-ball because we spent too long treating it as a minor side-show, and then commited a host of fundamental errors.

Fortunately, understanding what was done wrong contributed enormously to later US military superiority, as junior officers in Vietnam went back to the classics and obscure manuals to regain forgotten insights into their craft. Understanding what really happened is crucial to this task.

 

[horatio83]

Why would they pay the employees higher wages when there's not enough jobs to tighten the supply of workers? Wages follow the laws of supply and demand just like everything else, and with a nearly infinite supply of illegals from Mexico crossing the border, the supply isn't going to tighten anytime soon. We've added an entire quintile below the old one. Latino's already make up 15% of the workforce and that's expected to rise to 18% in just six years.

There is no law of supply and demand. Virtually all industries are oligopolistic to some degree and right now we are in an underemployment equilibrium, there are millions of people who wanna work even at lower wages but cannot find any work. Why? Marx' reserve army of labour is a good explanation, if there is unemployment getting fired implies a loss which incentivizes workers to not shirk. Stiglitz' old article neatly formalized this idea.

Furthermore economics and politics cannot be neatly separated and markets are connected. Capital is more flexible than labour (at least until we have a United Earth) and capital in the hands of people implies oligarchal political power. Both factors have made worldwide capital markets basically anarchic which gives this production factor an advantage over labour. Hence the stagnating wages for middle-class folks and the sky-rocketing rates of return for rich f*cks.

That you switch everything around and blame the moderate amount of labour mobility (Not to mention the ignorance of facts: the US population growth rate is declining. As all right-wing anti-immigration rhetorics it is just plain racism, don't let the dirty brown Mexicans in.) instead of capital mobility (which implies capital tax evasion and so on) is nothing new. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

 

[stj]

In 18th and 19th century USA, the government was to a large extent a kind of fascist redistribution economy, stealing land by genocide and using the proceeds to finance the government with minimal taxation, while using slave labor to produce export crops.

Hrm. Hard to make sense of that.

No it's not. Refusal to accept the notions of reason and honesty in debate are grave moral failings but they aren't the same as stupidity. It's quite easy to make sense of.

How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt?

The first question is a blatant appeal to racist self-love. As for the second, the proceeds were direct revenue from sales, particularly from before the Homestead Act and land-grant system. After those it was by nature of indirect subsidy of capital investment (primarily railroads and education, but also state governments in general.)

First, you'd need to find a genocide, which is going to be hard considering that just about every incident generated reams of documentation and newspaper articles. Once you get past the trail of tears, there are some massacres with casualties in the low hundreds, and then it tapers out from there. The Indians actually won on the casualty count, and in 100 years of warfare out West, the US military only suffered 2,000 casualties while outgunned on unfamiliar terrain. That's 20 deaths a year, over an area the size of Europe. A typical Chicago suburb has higher death rates. Then there's the niggling problem that just about all the tribes we ever encountered have websites now. You're unlikely to have been exterminated in the 1800's if you're still posting on the Internet. (That's like a rule.)

We are supposed to be the victims?!?! Well if our population levels hadn't recovered from the days of Jamestown and Plymouth I might agree with you. Destruction of a population by ethnic cleansing from all the lands that can support population reproduction (much less growth) constitutes genocide. The internet gibe relies on the notion that it isn't genocide unless you actually succeed in killing every single member of the target population. Not only is this kind of thinking personally contemptible, but it is a grand example of how conservatives, despite all their witless drivel about utopianism, truly are the ones who lack both sanity and decency. Not only is the conservative project of exterminating peoples evil, but it is an impossibility, a true utopian project.

Second, the farmers didn't pay income federal income taxes or any federal property taxes, so it would be kind of difficult for their farming to have been funding the government, and the federal government didn't make any appreciable money off the land at all, because we don't have a mechanism to do that. Even if you find gold on government land, they get pretty much zip. 95% of federal tax revenue came from tarriffs on imports, while cotton and tobacco were exports.

You should stop using slavery apologists as the Gods of your so-called thinking. In 1836, land sales provided 48% of federal revenue. Source, found in three minutes: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj6n3/cj6n3-11.pdf
I chose this one because Cato Institute was a libertarian think tank, at least until conservatives realized libertarian propaganda could undermine its real program. Incidentally, lest people not know, evil urban, multiracial places like New York have their federal revenue redistributed to places like Kentucky and WV. Your bottomless well of self pity has overflowed, right up to your eyes and blinded you yet again. You knew the 95% figure was bogus, just as you know your other so-called facts are bogus.

Plus there was a perpetual labor shortage, easy bankruptcy laws and protective tariffs.

And there was a labor shortage because everyone could just go out and start farming, prospecting, or opening a store instead of working for the man. There were a ton of things to be done and not a lot of people to do them.

As you well know, driving the native peoples off, only to wither away, was essential to the opportunity you exalt. The current conservative politicians and judges have effectively rewritten the Constitution on bankruptcy, but these were different times. Refresh my memory as to the presidents who went bankrupt?

On the one hand the lack of income tax and regulations were supposed to relieve the oppressed masses of the burden of government, which leaves the ninnyhammers and lobnoddies the difficulty of explaining how the business cycle operated as ferociously then as before the central banks conspired against those members of the master race amongst us. I suppose the high wage economy and easy bankruptcy for free men is supposed to explain that? At any rate, this camp wants maximal human suffering inflicted on the undeserving. Happily for them, there's always slavery to make the great days of the Republic (not a Democracy!) enticing.

Can you say that in English?

I did. Pretending not to understand is the easy way to duck a question you can't answer without exposing everything you said as a lie. Your central bank conspiracy theory of business cycles is refuted by the entire history of the US before the Federal Reserve, and you know it. You've always known it. You are just parroting your masters' lies because you think you are the ones whose superior will (over squishy rationality) will make you (except it will only be your overlords!) the new rulers of the world.

Um, she was raised in the Soviet Union, in Soviet state schools, and was of course a member of the Komsomol. Her Communist credentials are way better than yours, since she lived the dream.

Your naive belief that you are a master of rhetoric would be pitiable were your racism not so repulsive. First, since she is a virulent anti-Communist, having lived in the USSR, she has anti-Communist credentials.

Second, she could and did survive quite handily, to our sorrow in this country. I would be more impressed if she put her political virtue to work in the new Russia, where somehow the average lifespan has decreased from the murderous days of Communism.

Third, an anti-Communist who joins the Komsomol only does so for personal advantage, despite the need to be a professional liar in order to advance. Komsomol is not the Pioneers. The problem for you, is that she's always going to be a professional liar, in her new career in the US military too. You yourself have demonstrated why you cannot trust her, much less your second-hand report. Frankly your notion that workers are or were routinely shot in the USSR pretty strongly suggests the careerist is amusing herself by feeding you shit, since you have a taste for it. You might blithely concede that you were just lying to appeal to the other members of the thread, I suppose. You would still be manifestly self-refuted!

I will grant you that you are sincerely ant-Communist. I firmly believe that if you and I were in the USSR during the worst days of Stalin's dictatorship, however, that you, as a stooge who repeats propaganda indifferent to all fact and lgoic, would have been happy to conform. But I would have been executed as a Trotskyist. But you assess everything in terms of your (mostly imaginary) personal advantage, and I do not.

As for the history of Vietnam, you do realize that it's all documented, don't you? In fact, some of what I know comes from the archives of reel-to-reel tape recordings of the MACV headquarters. They ran a tape recorder - always.

In terms of tactics we should consider it two different wars, split at 1969. In terms of strategy we were always behind the 8-ball because we spent too long treating it as a minor side-show, and then commited a host of fundamental errors.

History written from one source with an obvious bias? How pathetically inadequate! Tape recordings make it a primary resource, not the gospel. Incidentally, the expectation that everyone would be privy to these tapes is stupid. Your apparent belief that you can play "gotcha" with unknown sources is even stupider.

Fortunately, understanding what was done wrong contributed enormously to later US military superiority, as junior officers in Vietnam went back to the classics and obscure manuals to regain forgotten insights into their craft. Understanding what really happened is crucial to this task.

I'll believe this when the US actually wins another of the multitude of wars it starts. Leaving the battlefield a smoking ruin in the official hands of a third party may be spun as victory, but, it isn't. If I were as heartless as you, I would be well-satisfied with the US' loss record. Instead, humanity's losses are too great for anything but grief.

But why am I talking about humanity? Conservatives hate humanity.

PS Yes, world economy is basically anarchistic. Looking at the world economy we see a picture where Marx's view is vindicated, in contrast to the factitious views propagated by looking only at the US or Europe.

 

[gturner]

Why would they pay the employees higher wages when there's not enough jobs to tighten the supply of workers? Wages follow the laws of supply and demand just like everything else, and with a nearly infinite supply of illegals from Mexico crossing the border, the supply isn't going to tighten anytime soon. We've added an entire quintile below the old one. Latino's already make up 15% of the workforce and that's expected to rise to 18% in just six years.

There is no law of supply and demand.

And right there you reject business and economic reality, so you have to substitute a wacko conspiracy theory.

Virtually all industries are oligopolistic to some degree and right now we are in an underemployment equilibrium, there are millions of people who wanna work even at lower wages but cannot find any work. Why?

Because we've made it illegal to work for lower wages, and also made it unneccessary by setting welfare and unemployment benefits higher than the return they'd get from working at the lower wages.

Marx' reserve army of labour is a good explanation, if there is unemployment getting fired implies a loss which incentivizes workers to not shirk. Stiglitz' old article neatly formalized this idea.

And that's just dumber than f**k. Do you really think emplioyers raise wages to make firing people more fun? Do you?

Furthermore economics and politics cannot be neatly separated and markets are connected. Capital is more flexible than labour (at least until we have a United Earth) and capital in the hands of people implies oligarchal political power. Both factors have made worldwide capital markets basically anarchic which gives this production factor an advantage over labour. Hence the stagnating wages for middle-class folks and the sky-rocketing rates of return for rich f*cks.

Why not just blame it on space aliens beaming mind control signals to our reptilian overlords?

That you switch everything around and blame the moderate amount of labour mobility (Not to mention the ignorance of facts: the US population growth rate is declining. As all right-wing anti-immigration rhetorics it is just plain racism, don't let the dirty brown Mexicans in.) instead of capital mobility (which implies capital tax evasion and so on) is nothing new. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Shifting production to overseas to take advantage of cheaper unskilled labor puts more downward pressure on the domestic labor market, which should shift focus to jobs that require someone doing something here (like cleaning hotel rooms). But wait, those jobs tend to be filled by Mexicans.

 

[horatio83]

Dumber than fuck? Now that's a funny description for a paper which is among the most quoted ones in economics. You might wanna read it instead of showing your ignorance over and over again.

 

[gturner]

How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt?

How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt? How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt? How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt? How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt? How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt? How did we steal land by genocide, and what the heck are the proceeds? Dirt?

The first question is a blatant appeal to racist self-love.

say what?

As for the second, the proceeds were direct revenue from sales, particularly from before the Homestead Act and land-grant system.

Sorry, but the federal government wasn't selling land and had no property taxes. Pioneers claimed lands without paying anyone a single dime except for a few brief periods and places where they could buy it from the federal government at a cost that, adjusted for inflation, was about $20 an acre in current dollars.

After those it was by nature of indirect subsidy of capital investment (primarily railroads and education, but also state governments in general.)

Is it a source of revenue or an expense? Please get your story straight.

We are supposed to be the victims?!?!

Yep. In terms of numbers killed, the whites lost. Fortunately the total number of killings was lower than what Napoleon would throw away on a flank to create a diversion.

Well if our population levels hadn't recovered from the days of Jamestown and Plymouth I might agree with you. Destruction of a population by ethnic cleansing from all the lands that can support population reproduction (much less growth) constitutes genocide.

Sorry, but again, you're out in the weeds. Except for the Cherokee, we never actually tried to move anyone very far (compared to their ranges), and usually just left them where they were. What we did do is have them settle, instead of having a tribe of a couple hundred people claiming personal rights to a hunting range the size of France, a range that in many cases could barely support a couple hundred people trying to survive by hunting.

Much of our Indian policy was run by Indians from back East, you know.

The internet gibe relies on the notion that it isn't genocide unless you actually succeed in killing every single member of the target population.

Nope, it's that in most cases we didn't kill anyone at all, and even in the horrendous cases (aside from the Cherokee) we only killed a couple hundred, during wars lasting a decade or more, and only hit those levels a few times. Again, note that while we were outgunned and in unfamiliar terrain, we only lost about 2,000 soldiers in a century of fighting in an area the size of Europe. If that level of violence is genocide, then there's never been even a peaceful human conflict, even amongst soccer holligans, that couldn't be called "genocide".

Not only is this kind of thinking personally contemptible, but it is a grand example of how conservatives, despite all their witless drivel about utopianism, truly are the ones who lack both sanity and decency. Not only is the conservative project of exterminating peoples evil, but it is an impossibility, a true utopian project.

That's why conservative don't try it, only communists do, killing people by the millions and tens of millions intentionally. The notion that Americans committed genocide against the Indians didn't even arise until the late 1960's, when the communists were desperate to portray Americans as butchers like they were, because the world definitely noticed that we didn't seem to kill people and they used mass murder and genocide as a matter of policy, from starving millions of Ukrainian peasants to death to killing classes of people they thought too inferior for socialism, to executing hundreds of thousands of Polish officers, to starving tens of millions of Chinese peasants, to purging Cambodia of millions based on education and class.

We had a different idea. Teach the indians how to farm, machine, fly fighter planes, and command aircraft carrier task forces, and most of all, marry them! That's why so many Americans who've been here a while, with the rare exception of Elizabeth Warren, have Indian ancestry. A large percentage of my friends say they're part Cherokee (other's are full-blooded Indians from other tribes) - and they're the tribe that suffered the worst - through a screw up by trying to move them during a severe drought, which caused even the officer in charge to scream bloody murder and let everyone forage along the route. Now they run hotels and casinos.

You should stop using slavery apologists as the Gods of your so-called thinking. In 1836, land sales provided 48% of federal revenue. Source, found in three minutes: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj6n3/cj6n3-11.pdf
I chose this one because Cato Institute was a libertarian think tank, at least until conservatives realized libertarian propaganda could undermine its real program.

If you actually read your link, you'll see that the sales raised $112,000 dollars the first year, eventually rising to $250,000 a year, and later reaching a million a year by 1820. Woohoo! In today's dollars, that's $15 million dollars a year (million, not billion) - in federal revenue, from land sales. Think about that. All that land, and they couldn't have have fielded an NBA team with the proceeds.

Incidentally, lest people not know, evil urban, multiracial places like New York have their federal revenue redistributed to places like Kentucky and WV. Your bottomless well of self pity has overflowed, right up to your eyes and blinded you yet again. You knew the 95% figure was bogus, just as you know your other so-called facts are bogus.

No, that comes from data on import tarriffs, which was how the US government was funded for over a century.

From
http://www.eoearth.org/article/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_States

Tariffs were the major source of U.S. government receipts from the beginning of the nation up to the early 1900s. For example, in 1800, custom duties comprised about 84% of government receipts.

If you have Jstor access you can take a look at charts here:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.23...2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101203842061

Or just hit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history

which has a table of tariffs as a percentage of government revenues. 95% in 1792, 95.4% in 1805, 97.9% in 1825, 91% in 1850.

As you well know, driving the native peoples off, only to wither away, was essential to the opportunity you exalt.

If we wanted the native peoples to wither away, we'd have left them as stone-age hunter-gatherers without access to cars, houses, and medical care. I'm sure a communist would've either done that or just eliminated them as being too primitive for socialism, but we knew that their lifestyle was untenable and could not morally let it continue.

Note to bleeding heart leftists - you also had a huge say in Indian policy, and took great personal interest in them and looked to their long-term interests, knowing that watching their children starve through the winter, decade after decade, because of a bad hunting season, while sitting back spouting something about the Prime Directive, just isn't morally acceptible. Nor is denying them access to education and medical care, nor would be denying them access to cars, airplanes, TV, and radio, even if you'd have gotten a thrill watching stone-age hunter-gatherers in a real-life version of "Survivor."

Indians also had a great interest in their welfare, and often Eastern Indians were in charge of US policy to try and figure out how to best settle and educate Western Indians, as Indians aren't stupid (which is why we elected one as Vice President of the United States).

I did. Pretending not to understand is the easy way to duck a question you can't answer without exposing everything you said as a lie. Your central bank conspiracy theory of business cycles is refuted by the entire history of the US before the Federal Reserve, and you know it. You've always known it. You are just parroting your masters' lies because you think you are the ones whose superior will (over squishy rationality) will make you (except it will only be your overlords!) the new rulers of the world.

As I said, Marxism is a bizarre conspiracy theory. The only thing he didn't write in was reptilian mind-control devices or Goa'uld symbiotes. It's that stupid.

<snip> Long paranoid delusional diatribe follows

... Vietnam ...

History written from one source with an obvious bias? How pathetically inadequate! Tape recordings make it a primary resource, not the gospel. Incidentally, the expectation that everyone would be privy to these tapes is stupid. Your apparent belief that you can play "gotcha" with unknown sources is even stupider.

They're in the public archives, just like all the tapes from Kennedy, Johnson, etc. People are free to go and put on a headset and listen.

 

[gturner]

Dumber than fuck? Now that's a funny description for a paper which is among the most quoted ones in economics. You might wanna read it instead of showing your ignorance over and over again.

It's not one of the most quoted ones in economics, and posits that all those managers, across all those industries, are engaged in a vast conspiracy to inrease unemployment so that firing a worker remains a credible punishment for shirking.

Now how, exaclty, does it benefit a manager to fire a whole bunch of people to raise the national unemployment rate, just so the few workers he has left try to work harder? How does a manager find out about this vast conspiracy? Is there a secret handshake? Do you have to have a secret decoder-key to use on any of the thousands of management books we churn out every year?

Perhaps something a bit more rational would better explain unemployment rates.

These guys ( http://citeseer.uark.edu:8080/citeseerx/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.2689 )
did it with only two inputs. Oil prices and interest rates. And their theory matched the data, and even predicts Obama's high unemployment rate, and they did it without positing that managers are engaged in a vast conspiracy to punish people, which pretty much falls apart anyway given how many managers like their employees. Do you really think the college senior running the campus bar fired the junior to affect long-term unemployment rates, so the under-age sophmore (drinking a pitcher illegally), once hired, would be frightened into serving the 2 for 1 drink specials more quickly, and with a bigger smile?

Wouldn't this require us to believe:

A) The manager is counting on the fact that the new hire was tracking fractional percentage changes in the national unemployment rate, down to his region, age-group, and employment sector (and keep in mind, the job is serving beer to drunk co-eds). There's what, a 10% chance of that?

B) That the new hire is even smart enough, or cares enough, to understand the data. There's what, a 10% chance of that?

C) That the new hire will continue to focus on the fluctuations in the national labor market instead of the customer's boobs. There's what, a 1% chance of that?

D) That even if the new hire performs well, he'll get fired if the national unemployment rate drops, because even though it indicates a rise in the number of beer-swilling customers, the manager has to try and restore equilibrium. There's what, a 0% chance of that?

 

[stj]

Is it [public lands taken from the Indians] a source of revenue or an expense? Please get your story straight.

Since the federal government didn't pay out money from revenues for land grants to railroads and colleges, they weren't expenses. Of course you know this. You also know that for the citizens, state governments and railroads, they were effectively revenue. You just want to quibble about a literal meaning of revenue and focus exclusively on the federal budget because you know this refutes yet again all your contentions. US growth did not come about because of adherence to conservative economic policies. Part was based on taking land from Indians and part from slave labor. Overall government policies ignored all contemporary notions of conservative economics. Trying to claim the economic history of the US as justification for your crackpot rationalizations for cruelty is yet another Big Lie.

Speaking of which, as a Kentuckian you surely know of Daniel Boone and his struggle with the Shawnee Indians. You also know that the Shawnee were respectively deported to Missouri, then finally Oklahoma, where survivors may or may not have websites or even a casino. Once again, your claims are merely the lie direct.

Your honesty and decency is best attested I think by your claim that "hundreds of thousands" of Polish officers were slain by Communists. This is an outrageous lie, even by your standards as it is literally impossible: The Polish army wasn't that big. Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_size_of_Polish_army_in_world_war_2
This is particularly disgusting as part of a maniacal tirade that ignores the anti-Communist who really did intentionally slaughter whole categories of people!

The only government that currently plans a possible genocide is most decidedly not Communist.

 

[Mars]

Is it [public lands taken from the Indians] a source of revenue or an expense? Please get your story straight.

Since the federal government didn't pay out money from revenues for land grants to railroads and colleges, they weren't expenses. Of course you know this. You also know that for the citizens, state governments and railroads, they were effectively revenue. You just want to quibble about a literal meaning of revenue and focus exclusively on the federal budget because you know this refutes yet again all your contentions. US growth did not come about because of adherence to conservative economic policies. Part was based on taking land from Indians and part from slave labor.

Slave labor was a great hindrance to the development of the USA and almost caused its destruction as you know during the Civil War. When Europeans first can to the Americas there were millions of Indians, then a plague brought unknowingly by European settlers killed off 90% of that population so there was a lot of empty space between those remaining Indians, as far as settlers could see there was land available which they could farm and settle, and so they moved right in. Later on there were conflicts between the way the Indians wanted to use the land and the way settlers wanted to use the land.

Settlers wanted to establish farms, while Indians wanted to continue their traditional hunter/gatherer lifestyle, the problem is hunter gatherers use a lot more land to obtain the same amount of food that a farmer can produce on his farm. The farmer scratches his head and wonders why the Indians need so much land for so few people, their are many people back east who want to move west and establish their own farms as well, and somebody says the land belongs to those Indians, the Farmer scratches his head and wonders why so few Indians get so much land, while people back east are waiting to become land owners themselves, instead of peasants working somebody else's fields. To the peasants back east it seems unfair that the Indians get so much land and they are deprived of it, so they want to redistribute some of that land away from the Indians so they can have some of it and their own farms as well. Does this sound familiar? Under another name this is called land reform. Generally socialists want to take land away from the lord of the manor and parcel it up equally among all the peasants who formerly worked the fields, but when that argument is used against Indians as the former Land Owners, well that seems different. It is one thing to redistribute plantation land among the former slaves that worked the fields, and another thing entirely to redistribute land from the indians.

Yes, you were right, the early part of American History is about the United States filling a power vacuum in the North American continent, part of it was created by the great plagues that killed off the Indians, another part was due to the Indian's tribal societies vs the more organized national society of the United States, and of course guns did better than bows and arrows, the steam engine and local motive conquered the west and brought in more settlers who build fences and farms.

One wonders what the World would have looked like if the British held back from colonizing North America, would the French have done any different, or the Spanish, or the Dutch if not the British? I think there was very little chance of the Indians being left alone once they were discovered by Europeans, it was only a matter of which Europeans did the colonizing.

Overall government policies ignored all contemporary notions of conservative economics. Trying to claim the economic history of the US as justification for your crackpot rationalizations for cruelty is yet another Big Lie.

As a practical matter, it was hard to buy land from the Indians, who did not recognize land ownership in the first place, there was no legal framework recognizing Indian land ownership and after the great plagues, there were fewer Indians to occupy the same amount of land, the land that was not occupied went wild, produced a lot more game, and made Indian hunters more successful, as the Indians had children they moved into the newly emptied lands, but then so did the children of pioneers enter that land. Indians claimed it from their ancestors but the pioneers saw no one there when they claimed some of it for farming, and now the Indians move in and say it is theirs. So the pioneers are then supposed to pack up their things and abandon their farmhouses and fields that they planted because some Indians showed up and told them they should leave. You can sort of suspect how the settlers saw this as unfair, that the farmland they put so much work into should go back to the Indians, and so they resisted, and there were conflicts between the two groups, no one was entirely in the right and no one was in the wrong. The Indians saw it as their reclaiming land previously lost to their people by the reduction in their numbers from the plagues, the pioneers saw it as holding on to something that have worked so hard on, naturally they both were going to fight for it.

Speaking of which, as a Kentuckian you surely know of Daniel Boone and his struggle with the Shawnee Indians. You also know that the Shawnee were respectively deported to Missouri, then finally Oklahoma, where survivors may or may not have websites or even a casino. Once again, your claims are merely the lie direct.

Your honesty and decency is best attested I think by your claim that "hundreds of thousands" of Polish officers were slain by Communists. This is an outrageous lie, even by your standards as it is literally impossible: The Polish army wasn't that big. Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_size_of_Polish_army_in_world_war_2
This is particularly disgusting as part of a maniacal tirade that ignores the anti-Communist who really did intentionally slaughter whole categories of people!

The only government that currently plans a possible genocide is most decidedly not Communist.

And what did the Communists want? They wanted to redistribute land from the Polish land owners, they also wanted to redistribute land away from Poland itself and they did, and in return the redistributed land away from Germany and gave it to Poland as Compensation. Are the Communists any better than the settlers who wanted to take away land from the Indians?

 

[Locutus of Bored]

This clusterfuck of a thread has turned into a barely relevant to the topic back and forth series of tl;dr rants between a few people with some frequently disturbing ideas and historical interpretations. I suggest you guys take it up via IM if you want to continue. Closed, gratefully.

Take heart, though, there's a thread on religion and spirituality now, so I'm sure you guys can pontificate at great length there too.