re: #86 Obdicut

That’s nice. However, as the Gilded Age showed us, and our current cycle is repeating, a society can have great prosperity without it being equitably distributed, thus leaving out wide sections of society from empowerment and enfranchisement.

I had the Gilded Age in mind. The industrialists of the time may have wanted a workforce of disenfranchised serfs; what they got is a trade union movement among (great-)grandparents of Reagan Democrats.

All you’re really doing is saying “A rising tide lifts all boats, even civil rights, rising tides are great things”, and I’m saying “A rising tide doesn’t even raise all boats”. When that tide is a prospering economy.

No, I had explicitly decided not to mention Jack Kennedy’s expression. In fact, a rising tide does not lift boats with holes.

If what you mean is a president who can help raise worker’s wages and reduce the obscene disparity in pay between CEOs and workers in this country, someone who can enact taxation and government spending to correct the economically disastrous stratification of wealth that we’re seeing, then sure, I agree— yet somehow I doubt you meant that.

The President does not enact taxation and spending; Congress does, with emphasis on the House.

I view the taxation “debate” as a false dichotomy in which both parties collude. I would take it more seriously if it were accompanied by discussion of policies which abet concentration of wealth. Two examples that immediately come to mind are too-big-to-fail financial institutions and excessive protections for intellectual “property”. There is corporate welfare in general, of course.