He who has the most toys wins.

Well a lest he has wealth friends to help him through the tough times. The rest of us will not so much as a hand out to the 99ers and others that have been left behind. I’ll be amoung the 99ers late 2011, hopefully they haven’t stolen SS by then.

So Cowen is the male version of Megan McArdle? One McAdled was enough. Doesn’t Cowen realize that George Mason was one of the original(like Paine) of the DFH’s.

Thank you, masaccio.
Richistan’s class warfare against the rest of us has been the driving force
in American politics for a generation.
And academic wh*res like Cowen are the (well paid) foot soldiers.

It occurs to me that the reason the wealthiest rule the world is because of money in the political system. It makes more sense, (to them) to go for the people with the ability to donate the most money, rather than the small donors, who Obama found strength in and promptly abandoned. The politicians and super wealthy have become welded into one incestuous ruling caste and the only way I see out of it is to take money out of the equation in politics.

This might partly explain why the Bush tax cut extension sailed so easily through Congress. Mostly all personally benefit from the extension. From NPR the other day:

The median income of US House members is $986,000 per year.

The median income of US Senate members is $2.5 million per year.

Somewhat OT, but if O is hoping that the newly incentivized CEO class will lead the economy to great heights, or at least high enough to get re-elected, he may be disappointed. They’re heading to the exits in the stock market: Insiders betting that rally will soon reverse course

Michael Hudson claims that the looming depression is a feature of their plan, not a bug.

To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem. That’s what they’re trying to bring about, because you need a depression if you’re going to lower wages by 20 percent.

As noted poet Bob Dylan sang some forty years ago, “money don’t talk, it swears…”

o/t:

Re: Biden’s stupid and vile assertion that Julian Assange is a “hi-tech terrorist.” Wrong, Joe. You and Obama are the world’s biggest terrorists, murdering poor Muslims in at least five countries now. Julian and Wikileaks are just shining a little truth onto your lies and coverups about A and I.

Go Cheney yourself, Joe Biden. You are just another worthless lying war criminal, like Obama, Clinton, Gates, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Yoo and Rove. May you all rot in prison after being taken to The Hague for your war crimes trials.

from zero hedge and politico….
Our troubles have just begun. We are going to the slaughter if we aren’t loud about it.
‘The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.

The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.’

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/next-stop-obamas-political-suicide-tour-announcing-social-security-cuts-during-state-union-a

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=EB5E9565-C4A8-7E36-747EADB1F4AAB099

Cowen conflates these people with the fabulously wealthy

No, he’s quite clear about keeping them distinct, and does so in the paragraph preceding the one you quoted.

The Bush/Obama tax cuts discuession of the past couple weeks never once included revisiting the taxing of unemployment benefits, implemented during Reagan’s reign (I think). It seems to me that if anyone could use a tax cut, surely the unemployed could.

The moneyed class has ruled America from the beginning. Until the system collapses, they will continue to rule. The working class used to support their lifestyles, now it’s the outsourced slave labor. The rest of us are just fucked.

And, by way of Yves Smith, the rich are different from you and me: They don’t get foreclosed on.

great read (the Michael Hudson interview).

and great read of this Cowan chap,
rec’d.

There are real dangers to inequality in wealth distribution and arguments regarding this from a practical standpoint make sense to me. Many people in here, however, argue the (VERY loosely defined) ‘[un]fairness’ of wealth inequality.

The difficulty with wealth distribution in the United States is the mapping of contribution to society with quality of lifestyle. Admittedly, people in the highest economic echelon are NOT giving to society at the same level they are taking. But what about those at the lower income levels in the United States?

Global GDP is about $58T (2009). The world population is closing in on 7B making the per capita GDP about $8,500 per year with the median even lower. Most Americans enjoy a quality of life and income far above the world average. If we are going to argue that it isn’t fair that the rich should have so much compared to the average American, isn’t it also unfair that the rich and average Americans have so much compared to the average person in the world – especially when you consider that (for most) the largest factor in their wealth is where they happen to have been born.

If the arguments on wealth distribution are based on principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, shouldn’t we be calling for increases in taxes across the board (especially for the rich, but it would apply to almost everyone in the U.S.), a massive downscale of lifestyle for all Americans including government services, and use that money to provide a huge donation to the truly poor in this world?

Obama’s favorite line from a George Bush speech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4daYJzyls

In Obama’s defense, he started out with a ton of wall street money. His first chief of Staff was Daschle’s CoS. He was an establishment guy who basically lied.

Does anybody remember his criticism of the Clinton’s administration for being too close to Wall Street? I thought that showed guts and truth at the time, but it was just one of many lies that Obama has told.

The reality is that we can put an end to this over night and begin a new era if the American People merely cease cooperating with their own castration.

I wrote a piece this morning on the squatter movement for instance and how it could be employed to challenge the status quo over the record foreclosures we are seeing in the country . Please stop by and post your opinions on this idea.

As Chris Hedges said on thursday ,”Hope is action.”

http://my.firedoglake.com/freeman/2010/12/19/space-invaders-or-maybe-the-banks-dont-know-squat/

These problems need to be addressed by actions . The only conversation worth truly having at this point is on strategies of direct non violent non cooperation .

Our planet and the nation demand no less.

Lets stop commenting on the news and star making some !

http://my.firedoglake.com/freeman/2010/12/17/dancing-with-tyrants-or-why-civil-disobedidience-is-now-the-only-way-forward/

“a massive downscale of lifestyle for all Americans”

I understand what you’re saying, but how do you downscale hunger and homelessness? These numbers keep growing and I see no hope of improvement.

Eh?

there are over 7.8 millionaire families

Hmm, how about
there are over 7.8 million millionaire families
There. Fixed.

It’s nice of Tyler Cowen to stereotype those who are critical of wealth in this country. Not all of us have the academic sinecures that he imagines. And not all of us are blind to the intellectual hocus pocus that economists like him use to bless the corporate host.

If he’s so damn smart, why did he do nothing to sound warnings about the impending disaster coming in the housing market early on? If Hale Stewart could see it and Stirling Newberry could see it, where was he and his academic status?

There is nothing more disgusting than a kept economist. Politicians whore out for the money; kept economists whore out for the status of being printed in the “right” publications. It’s a shame to see Tyler Cowen whore out so cheaply; he ought to have held out at least for a major article in the Wall Street Journal or a gig on FoxNews.

I’m tired of the snake oil salesmen.

Yep. A person who has a 2500 sq. ft. house in the right neighborhood in California could be a millionaire and not be able to touch one dollar of that stupendous wealth.

Such choice mockery you deliver to the Feudal Class!

I hope you’ll enjoy this as an auditory treat: “Son qual nave ch’agitata” as delivered by Cecilia Bartoli

There is some wisdom here. Professor Cowen says that the main source of the problem is outsized and unreasonable profits in the finance industry. Part of that business involves proprietary trading, where the profits are a zero-sum game. Those profits come at the expense of the middle class.

Anyway, this post isn’t about fairness exactly. It is about the ways that our society is manipulated for the benefit of the hyper-wealthy.

One piece of evidence for that is the criminal charges and investigations on insider trading on Wall Street. Another is high frequency trading gains. A third place is derivative creation and trading. There is other evidence to the same effect.

Thanks, I made the correction.

If the arguments on wealth distribution are based on principles of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, shouldn’t we be calling for increases in taxes across the board (especially for the rich, but it would apply to almost everyone in the U.S.), a massive downscale of lifestyle for all Americans including government services, and use that money to provide a huge donation to the truly poor in this world?

No. The problem is not to be solved by taxing ourselves into more “equal” misery. The solution for us and for the “third world” is to overthrow the neo-liberal financial regime that acts as a parasite on them and us. Money needs to be in the proper relationship with real resources. It’s about equity in dividing the pie but it’s more than that as well. If we had a properly functioning government/finance system we would be increasing our level of resources by investing in all manner of things such as green tech, education, public “information superhighway” stuff, etc. Under such a regime, our standard of living would be steadily rising. The problem is in the perversity of having a government/finance system that will not spend/create credit for productive purposes. Taxation does not create money, but government and banks do. There are limitations of real resources and adjustments must be made taking that into account. It is generally true, I believe, that if poorer countries, like Haiti, say, could develop their resources on their own terms they may not become rich, but I see no reason why they couldn’t raise their standard of living considerably.

But why would the wealthy governing class change the rulz to make themselves less powerful. nah ga happen.

The US is a cowboy capitalist haven and will be for the foreseeable future.

That’s probably true, but change does happen. For example, in Denmark, in the 18th and 19th century, some of the privileged people began to realize that the feudal system wasn’t working for the country as a whole and began initiating reforms, at first quite modest, that eventually transformed their country into a modern democracy. I agree that our elites aren’t close to such a realization.

Okay, doing the math:
15,100 families is 0.01 percent.
That means there are roughly 151 million families in the US.
And if there are 7.8 million millionaire families, that’s 0.5 percent of the total.

So why the fuck should fewer than one percent of the families get big tax breaks? Especially the 0.01 percent sitting on top of the pyramid scheme?

Reminds me of an uncle who retired from being a business executive as a ‘paper millionaire’ – his wealth was all on paper.

From someone’s sig lines over at Dkos:

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal
ailment of all republics.” — Plutarch

“The people have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to
want & the courage to take.” — Emma Goldman

Regardless of California neighborhood, the owner you describe is more likely to be upside down on his 2,500 SF home than not.

Real estate has the unfortunate former advantage of being a tangible, domestic asset. All the serious money has been on the move into intangible, foreign investment for quite a while now. Your future federal government debt liability funded, private sector financial corporate bailout at work.

The Piketty-Saez number isn’t exactly .01%. Actually there are about 115 million households in the US, and about 6.8% have a net worth in excess of $1 million.

Prof. Cowen, do decent men support indecent warfare?
You wrote, “It isn’t personal. I have it on good authority that Blankfein, to take an example, is a perfectly decent man.” Our country is and has been killing innocent people, even people whose governments have not done us harm, ever since the end of WWII. From 1945 to 1989, the Cold War was the excuse. We made some “mistakes” because we were embattled with the USSR, many excused. Yes, mistakes that killed millions in southeast Asia, Iran, Africa, Central America.

That excuse does not cover the uncounted numbers we have killed in bombings and invasions all over the world and are now killing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. We rattle the sword in east Asia to this day. We are and have been the biggest threat to world peace since Ghengis Khan.

Do the multi-millionaires, billionaires who rule us not have responsibility for this blood-bath? Are they really decent fellows, just richer than most of us can dream of being? Do they control only the depletion of our economy, the drive to do away with Social Security COLAS, Medicare and those programs entirely? Is being reluctant to pay taxes their chief fault?

Not that he is in office I believe Obama has abandoned the small donor and is going for the corporate donors.

That is why he feels it is fine to declare war on all of us so often or is it his guilty conscious emerging?

I have it on good authority that Blankfein, to take an example, is a perfectly decent man.

I’d question that, and whoever the “good authority” is, and what their definition of “decent man” is.

Me? I think he’s the scum of the earth.

Amazing, the fact that we had a stable banking sector for well over 40 years completely misses Cowen. Cowen must be well paid to ignore obvious things like… Glass Steagall.

If reforming our death trap of an economy depends on stooges like Cowen, appropriate political remedies will never be found. In fact, they wouldn’t be acknowledged if delivered to him on a silver platter. Although I’m sure he’d appreciate the silver.

The previous paragraph simply says that people are more envious of people down the hall than the fabulously wealthy who they don’t speak about. How is that making the distinction that you claim he does?

“massive downscale of lifestyle for all Americans including government services, and use that money to provide a huge donation to the truly poor in this world?”

The single best thing that we could do for the 3rd world would be to simply shut down the IMF and World Bank.

What part of the average American lifestyle is it which you think could be downsized in order to help the 3rd world?

Book Salon up with Daniel Galvin’s Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush hosted by Ari Berman

The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.’

As one commenter on ZeroHedge put it, “fucker (meaning Obama) has a death wish”. Sure the guy was being figurative, but politically speaking, this would be true. It would also be beautiful, to finally get Obama clearly, all the way, out of the conservative economic closet.

At times the late George Carlin was more prophet and philosopher than comedian. He hit the nail on the head and summed up the situation with unmatched precision and humor right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q

There was a cliche joke in the cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s in which the “rich uncle” literally had his house wallpapered in worthless bonds from the 1929 crash.

Great clip! I do love George Carlin.

The ‘helpless’ feeling comes from ‘parents’ and the ‘groups’ that you hang with.

I think I’ll make my post a diary entry, instead. ;-)

Didn’t know what he was using for number of households – I knew it had to be less that 150 million (because that’s just two per), but I didn’t know how many to figure for. So I used the numbers he was giving.

I doubt that globalism is the sole, or even the major, cause for every problem in this country. It’s been sliding since Reagan, if not before, even if the slide was too slow to notice.

Huh????

Because it’s the Perverse Golden Rule:

Those with the Gold, make the Rules.

It is axiomatic that power flows to wealth. Wealth and power go together like Shit and Stink. Without power, there is no wealth and without wealth there is no power. Each attracts and accumulates the other. It’s almost a bond on the sub-atomic level. And just as difficult to break.

The average American household consumes far more than the world’s average person in terms of food, clean water, medicine, energy (including fossil fuels), education, travel, technology, entertainment, luxuries, and myriad government benefits – from the military, space exploration and infrastructure to welfare, social security and national parks. If the American middle and upper class made sacrifices in any or all of these it could be used to help lift the truly poor in the world to a more equal playing field.

Just to get an idea of the scope, according to Forbes, Americans (in 2009) spent over $25B on jewelry (about $85 per person), more than $40B on air travel (about $135 per person) and over $100B on consumer electronics ($335 per person). Combined spending in these three categories by American consumers equals the entire GDP of all of Eastern Africa – a region with virtually the same population as the U.S.. In one year, that money could be used to open over 4,000 academies like the one that Oprah Winfrey opened in South Africa! And that is just the start… Americans spend almost $400B in restaurants – cutting this in half could be used to produce 100 desalination/power plants to provide 5-10B gallons of drinkable water each year.

If I said it once I’ll say it again…

If / when the “tea partiers” brake Social Security you’ll be
working to one measure or another in a casino economy, rather
like Sierra Leone’s alluvial diamond diggers, whose pay is
typically the promise of retaining tiny amounts of whatever chips of
diamond they may or may not find from time to time.

However, based on the Federal Reserve’s and the Bush and Obama Administrations’ handling of the banking fiasco, you’ll in one
manner have it worse than the diggers in Sierra Leone. The
bailout of the largest banks was a case of heads they win, tails
you lose. I haven’t yet thought of an analogy for that in the case
of Sierra Leone.

Most Americans are familiar with Monopoly (R). Just tell the
“tea party” crowd that’s what their movements’ bankrollers want.

http://sites.google.com/site/evernewecon

Cowen paints the problem the intellectuals have with the wealthy as jealousy. It’s too bad that the professor is not a historian.

[T]he Marxist thesis [is] that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy. No bourgeois, no democracy

From The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 418 link
Progressive tax rates really are in the best interest of the super-wealthy. The balance has been upset, and the hollowing out of the middle classes and impoverishment of the masses will eventually spark a revolution. If all that is left are the very poor, the outcome may be bloodier, and the fuedal lords will be stripped of their property and maybe their heads.

If you are going to keep copying and pasting the same comment, you should correct the spelling. It’s break, not brake.
We already have a casino economy, and what exactly are the comparisons with the Fed and diamond diggers in Sierra Leone, especially if you haven’t thought of an analogy yet? If the diggers take the diamonds out they are shot on the spot, that’s not their pay.