Corporate profits way up, quality of life for us, way down

Beeks wrote: How does that work, we hear over and over that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rates in the world? If your theory were to work, then Europe (where corporate taxes are allegedly lower) would have a greater corporate investment back into their businesses, and a corresponding rise in employment.

Look, I'm not the anti-corporate jackass that Teddy thinks I am, I have money in the market too. Corporate profits vs. continued investment vs. job growth vs. quality of life is way more complicated than I can get my hands around. But, there does seem to have been a change over the past decade or two that emphasizes profits above all else, no matter what the harm to the economy and to the workers and their families. Is it my imagination that there used to be more of a balance, and a correlation between corporate profitability and employee prosperity?

Like most of the libs around here, you will never get the big picture as long as you go through life with this attitude.



American business long ago gave up on worrying about providing jobs for Americans when they realized that the very people whom they employed were voting for politicians who spent their days tightening the noose around the business community's collective neck. From taxes to bull.... regulations to ridiculous employee entitlements to environmental crap. Add to this the other aspect of doing business in America called lawyers, how long did they actually think they could force business to put up with it? The one thing that eluded the workers, their unions and the leftist politicians was the golden rule that is as old as time. "Those with the gold make the rules". Bet the dumbass union bosses and puppet politicians never bothered explaining that little detail to the masses.
When they say lower taxes will increase jobs it typically means the corp hands out more money to owners, investors and employees who all turn around and spend it or re-invest it. Either way it translates into work and jobs for others not connected to the corp.

Like I pointed out earlier, a business isn't a social welfare program. Its sole purpose is to make a profit. Americans decided to create a hostile environment for business to operate, so they simply took the FU cue to go elsewhere in order to remain in business. The short sighted narrow vision of those who have never created a job for other people combined with the greed of a nation of working class people with a delusional sense of entitlement has brought us to where we are today. Business people adhering to the letter of the law like a captain navigating a rocky shoreline, and exploiting whatever loopholes were placed in the law by the perfidious politicians who drafted them claiming they were doing it for the people, when in reality they were really working for the highest bidder.

Darwin said it is all about survival of the fittest. John Wayne said it better. "Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid".

With each passing generation post WWII Americans have been deluded into believing they are smarter than a 5th grader and therefore entitled just because they have a pulse. Hence the out of control spending of credit as a substitute for the lack of compensation they received upon entering the work place. But the reality is they have actually been systematically dumbed down by design. And how clever to make them think they were getting smarter. No resistance. Then you reach the point of no return. The non-surgical lobotomy leaves the subjects without the capacity to recognize the seriousness of their predicament and by default no desire to change it. Informed people cannot be sold the bill of goods they have bought into. But they are to be forgiven. They don't know any better. Now when nobody wants to hire them, the people's whores have to find an expedient scape goat to blame their plight on so the masses can have somewhere to focus their displeasure.

CORPORATIONS!!! :VeryScared: EVIL CORPORATIONS!!!!! If it wasn't for them there would be no USA the way we know it today. Instead just a country full of peasants, pestilence and no prosperity. Thankfully we do have a country that up until a very short time ago was still the only place on Earth where anyone with the drive and desire could rise above the station in life they were born to and become one of those with the gold. But now we have entered an era where those in leadership talk down to the masses and tell them that the ones who seek to better themselves through hard work and desire are wrong. Instead they seek to enslave them with token trinkets in order to addict them to the idea that the govt is to whom they should turn for their needs. Desires are not permitted unless they are free.

:thumbsup:

Keep blaming corporations for offshore moves when you consider the following. http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/1471
Add union wages, benefits, and so on, and its a wonder we still have any here.

Ronbo wrote: [Over the past 2 years I have made greater than a 60% rate of return in the stock market.

r i

Ronbo, 60%/yr is beyond outstanding. Do you mind sharing what sectors you are playing in?
After a disastrous '08 we have done very well the last 2 years in small cap energies.

You know what they say, if the basic assumption is wrong then the null hypothesis is wrong. Quality of life is related more to attitude than anything based on experience. The assumption that corporate health is tied to our quality of life is BS. If more people have a "I can attitude" and a dedication to succeeding, I submit that their quality of life would be higher. You have to be willing to take a risk, willing to not give up when life gets tough and willing to take responsibility for yourself. I see that sadly lacking in the population as a whole. Far too many exhibit the feeling of entitlement. No one is entitled to more than what they can and are willing to achieve. You also need to accept, that even if you work your ass off, you may still not succeed to the same extent that others do with a similar effort. We are not all created equal. If that were the case, I would have had the vision of a Bill Gates. The problem is I did not have such visions, so like you, I'm stuck with what I was able to achieve. Based on what I started with my quality of life has improved greatly. As one of my classmates wrote on Classmates.com "You've come a long way's baby." I earned it the old fashion way, I worked for it.

Rockdoc Franz wrote: You know what they say, if the basic assumption is wrong then the null hypothesis is wrong. Quality of life is related more to attitude than anything based on experience. The assumption that corporate health is tied to our quality of life is BS. If more people have a "I can attitude" and a dedication to succeeding, I submit that their quality of life would be higher. You have to be willing to take a risk, willing to not give up when life gets tough and willing to take responsibility for yourself. I see that sadly lacking in the population as a whole. Far too many exhibit the feeling of entitlement. No one is entitled to more than what they can and are willing to achieve. You also need to accept, that even if you work your ass off, you may still not succeed to the same extent that others do with a similar effort. We are not all created equal. If that were the case, I would have had the vision of a Bill Gates. The problem is I did not have such visions, so like you, I'm stuck with what I was able to achieve. Based on what I started with my quality of life has improved greatly. As one of my classmates wrote on Classmates.com "You've come a long way's baby." I earned it the old fashion way, I worked for it.

Good points, possibly why so many new small businesses are started by immigrants, they come here not for the entitlements but the opportunities.

neptunechimney wrote:

Ronbo wrote: [Over the past 2 years I have made greater than a 60% rate of return in the stock market.

r i

Ronbo, 60%/yr is beyond outstanding. Do you mind sharing what sectors you are playing in?
After a disastrous '08 we have done very well the last 2 years in small cap energies.

An assortment of mutual funds offered through my 401K.

Life is cyclical - we're at the bottom of this cycle. What next? I guess we should be glad the weather has been kind the past several years.

Science Chic wrote: The quote I highlight below is the one that caught my attention while reading this article (I haven't read the book mentioned). Certainly there are many differences between 1929 America and 2010 America, but if the wealth imbalance continues, is this an inevitable precursor to a greater collapse? The main problem I see is that the opportunity to earn wealth/pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness has become imbalanced. The wealthy, especially those who run big corporations, over the last several decades have gained increasing political clout and gotten personal and corporate laws passed that favor them at the expense of the middle class. If you look at the list of Forbes wealthiest people, and check out the hedge fund guys and see what they made the majority of their money in during the last year: it wasn't stocks, but precious metals (one guy bought 16 tonnes of gold! and made $4 Billion last year alone!). So are they looking to the future and seeing a crash, or just hedging their bets? It worries me...

I have no problem with people working hard, making a lot, and keeping what they earn. What I do have a problem with is when the average middle class person works hard and can't do enough to get by because they bear a greater burden - in job availability, taxes paid, and higher education getting further out of reach so that they can improve their situation (and the rich don't have to work any harder, but get to keep more). If this is an incorrect assessment, I'd love to see the data proving otherwise. I've found some indicating that it's uncertain how important inequality is so maybe a crash isn't inevitable, but I don't see anything indicating that there will be an improvement in quality of life for average Americans either, especially with the current state of corrupt, out-of-touch politicians.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/149586/ ... ve_america
Will Only Another Great Depression Save America?
The economic crisis is really a political struggle between the rich and the rest of us.
January 20, 2011

In their important new book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson paint a grim picture of the nation's present state of affairs.

The authors, political science professors from Yale and Berkeley, respectively, critically assess the current situation. "The Wall Street of well-heeled bankers are thriving," they note, "while the Main Street of ordinary workers struggled amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression." They detail how, since the early '80s, the U.S. has "drifted away from a mixed-economy cluster and traveled a considerable distance toward another: the capitalist oligarchies" of Latin America.

They provide four valuable insights.

First, the current crisis is the result of four decades of economic and social restructuring driven by the demands of the rich and super-rich, especially the financial services sector, to capture more of the nation's wealth.

Second, this capitalist class has effectively taken control of the political process, capturing the Republican party and, to a lesser extent, the leadership of the Democrats as well.

Third, they have built a well-financed operation of think-tanks, lobbyists, astroturf shills, co-opted consumer groups, obsequious religious leaders, media bloviators and regulatory bureaucrats to make their message America's shared, self-evident truth.

And fourth, as a result of the first three factors, ordinary Americans, who they identify as the middle class, have not only lost their economic shirts, but their political influence and interest in politics as well.

At the heart of this intensifying class war is growing income inequality.

One example the authors offer is most illuminating: "The share of [national] income earned by the top 1 percent of Americans has increased from around 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007." Going further, they add, "the only time since 1913 … that this share has been higher was 1928." More alarming, they note that the average annual income of the nation's top 1/10th of 1 percent (some 10,000 households) jumped from $4 million in 1974 to $35 million in 2007.

Other analyses, like those at the Economic Policy Institute, push the statistical data even further. The EPI argues that in 2006, the top 1 percent controlled 23 percent of all income and that today's super-rich have regained the position they held just prior to the 1929 stock market crash when they controlled 24 percent of all income . As the Great Recession grinds on, few can anticipate that the share controlled by the top 1 percent has not increased.

The great post-WWII income normalizer was the progressive income tax and, in the intervening decades, is disappearing. Between 1963 and 2003, the top bracket saw their tax rate decline to 35 percent from 91 percent.

In the short-term, over the coming two to five years, a meaningful, if modest, recovery may well take place. The jobless rate could decline to 6 to 7 percent, consumer-spending increase modestly, home purchases pick up and the stock market continue its upward tilt. However, the quality of life for the vast majority of Americans is likely to further deteriorate, with more people chasing minimum-wage jobs...If, as can be realistically anticipated, America slowly devolves into a second-tier country, will it come to resemble France, Netherlands or Finland (which would not be bad) or is something far worse likely? In either case, what can be expected in terms of the quality of life for the average American?

The Economic Policy Institute: http://www.epi.org/ They have much research to explore...
About: http://www.epi.org/pages/about_the_econ ... institute/
Source Watch: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... _Institute

EPI in the news: http://www.economist.com/node/17957381? ... d=17957381
Unbottled Gini
Inequality is rising. Does it matter—and if so why?
Jan 20th 2011

You can understand why people might regard this as unfair: the top 0.1% do not seem to be working 80 times as hard as everyone else, nor are they contributing 80 times more to welfare. But that is a matter of public opinion, and mostly of politics. The question of the economic impact of extreme inequality is separate. Recent evidence suggests it may not be as damaging as many imagine.

But recent research does suggest two other reasons why the rise in inequality is a problem. One is that rich economies seem to provide disproportionate and growing returns to the already wealthy. The other is that inequality may literally be making people miserable by increasing stress and the hormones it releases.

Nor is it certain that income inequality is the right problem to focus on. What seems to affect levels of stress hormones is not income, but competition for status, a broader, fuzzier notion. Evolution has primed humans to seek high status. Losers in competitions for esteem may well suffer. Societies with fierce status competition may well be unhealthier and more violent. But it is the disparities of status, not of income, that matter.

Economists have long argued that inequality is a much less important problem than poverty. The recent research linking inequality to widespread social ills has not decisively overturned that view: the evidence is still mixed, at best.

The claim that inequality now matters more because of brands and status competition may turn out to be more robust. Such concerns could seem peripheral compared with global woes such as poverty. But inequality is local.