johnsonma :
Both are responsible for the reduction of the middle class. When corporations can buy politicians you have a problem. Policies are made that benefits the 1% and leave the rest behind.
You're looking at the wrong side of the politician-buying equation. The problem with the buying of politicians is that the government is so large, so powerful, and so corrupt that you
can buy valuable things from it. Large companies buying influence through direct campaingn "donations" wouldn't happen if this was correctly termed bribery and thus made illegal. (They could run whatever independent ads they wanted to as that's free speech but ANY association with a candidate/official would result in massive bribery penalties, so they'd need to be
very very careful.) But, mostly the attempted purchasing of legislation would not happen if the politicians didn't have enough individual and group power or Constitutional authority to make buying legislation worthwhile. "Nope, Google, we can't have the DOT/NHTSA add a 100% surcharge to human-driven cars now that you brought out autonomous ones; we don't have the Constitutional authority to do so as car registation and insurance is a state issue..." would be a lovely thing to hear come out of a politician's mouth.
So there really is a 1% but it's made up of politicians and their cronies trying to grow their power, not simply "rich people" in general. Many people you would consider rich due to their income are small and medium business owners and professionals who don't have anywhere near enough money or influence to buy a politician. They get hit with the "soak the eeevil rich" taxes, the governmental regs, AND the bought-and-paid-for anticompetitive legislation from the real big guys in the field. They are often the staunchest anti-cronyism, anti-rent-seeking libertarians you'll see as a result of that.
chunkymonster :
Agreed both parties are responsible...without a doubt.
Tooling around the interwebs some more, I stumbled on this gem,
Why the American Middle Class Is Dying. It offers some explanation of the decline and makes relevant points like the loss of skilled labor, the decline of unions, offshoring of manufacturing, etc. It motivates me to help my kids to do well in math and science.
I can't help but think that now is a perfect time to pass a balanced budget amemdment and adopt a fair/flat tax. I dunno...
I read your article and it has a few interesting points:
- Manufacturing has been lost due to a lot of reasons. Greater automation leading to greater efficiency despite any other factors is certainly one, but everything from EPA, OSHA, and DOL regs to taxes to unions to the cost of mandatory healthcare have also been huge factors. The fact that it's cheaper to make something 6000 miles away and ship it here is testament to the fact that offshore labor is simply an arbitrage against the regulatory regime in the U.S.
- The U.S. education system essentially prepares students to take standardized tests. That's at least what is being taught and what a good chunk of time in school is spent doing.
- Employers are often "going fishing" with job requirements because it's a poor economy and there are a lot of "overqualified" people out there. Not very many jobs actually require information learned from a specific college degree yet most require "a" college degree just to try to weed out applicants. So I take the "we don't have enough qualified applicants" whining from companies with a mountain of salt. It would be more accurately portrayed as "we couldn't find anybody with the ridiculous qualification requirements we pulled out of our butt who was willing to work 80 hours a week in a 'disposable commodity worker' job for the pittance we wanted to pay them." Either that or they want more H1Bs and J1s or amnesty for illegal aliens to further increase the worker supply in hopes of driving down wages.
- The middle class is being pinched as regulations and taxes have made it very difficult to work in the U.S. The major cause of this is simply the cost of doing business is higher than the marginal benefit of expanding some current businesses and in starting others. Businesses aren't stupid, they won't expand or go into business only to lose money. Thus you have businesses here only doing relatively profitable stuff while the low-margin stuff that would lose money hand over fist over here is arbitraged out overseas and/or automated.
- You also see fewer people employed in total as businesses consolidate to try to take advantage of economy of scale and also oligopoly market power, both on the sales and labor sides. Two businesses collectively making a certain amount of revenues generally employ more people than only one business making that same amount of revenue. There also would generally be higher wages for employees as multiple businesses have to compete for workers and also lower prices in the marketplace as they have to compete for sales.
A flat tax or national sales tax ("Fair Tax") would not allow the government nearly the amount of social engineering, wealth seizure and redistribution, and crony payback that the current system allows for, so it will never happen under this government. Too many people would have to pay a significant amount of taxes, the "wrong" people wouldn't have to pay a ton more like they do now, and there would be far fewer loopholes for the politicians to give away for votes.
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