re: #463 RogueOne

I’ve made the argument before on here that, outside of truly massive government intervention such as WWII armament or Soviet-style planned economies, you can’t really measure the impact of economic policy in the short term.

What you can do is point to longer-term trends. In the past 100 years, there have been two peaks of wealth concentration in the US: 1929 and 2007. In addition to that, the past 30 years have seen a massive disinvestment in both infrastructure and education, both of which are vital to long-term prosperity.

If no-one has any money, no-one can buy anything and the economy goes in the shitter. Currently, the bottom 40% of households in the US control, I believe, 0.3% of the total wealth.

If you want a truly robust economy, you need to give more or less everyone a stake in it. When people are asked to define the “American Dream”, this is what they usually come up with: that if you work hard and play fair, you get to live a pretty decent life. You can’t tell me that no-one in that bottom 40% is working hard and playing fair, and yet, if something relatively minor happens (they go to hospital for a minor procedure and get a staph infection) they are literally fucked, and their families too.

The Republicans want to transfer yet more wealth to the top 0.1%. The Democrats, for all their flaws, are not quite as bad. If you make less than $250K a year and vote Republican, you are being played for a fool.