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America divided – this concept increasingly graces political discourse in the U.S., pitting left against right, conservative thought against the liberal agenda. But for decades, Americans have been rearranging along another divide, one just as stark if not far more significant – a chasm once bridged by a flourishing middle class.
Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, believes the ongoing death of “middle America” has sparked the emergence of two countries within one, the hallmark of developing nations. In his new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Temin paints a bleak picture where one country has a bounty of resources and power, and the other toils day after day with minimal access to the long-coveted American dream.
In his view, the United States is shifting toward an economic and political makeup more similar to developing nations than the wealthy, economically stable nation it has long been. Temin applied W. Arthur Lewis’s economic model – designed to understand the workings of developing countries – to the United States in an effort to document how inequality has grown in America.
The 2017 World Economic Forum had the answer: "The people who have not benefited from globalization need to try harder to emulate those who have succeeded," and, "'People have to take more ownership of upgrading themselves on a continuous basis.'"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @11:20AM (35 children)
Funny, isn't it, how our middle class has disappeared despite ever increasing social programs. You'd think the two weren't in a causal relationship or something.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:02PM (6 children)
And we all think you'd know better but you keep proving us wrong. How do you manage to fail so hard? Its like the study that pointed to a problem school where some people had the bright idea of investing millions in a new athletic center. Unsurprisingly academic success was unaffected, but it sure made a nice piece for some "people" to point and say that money is not the problem with education. Thus they can continue expanding class sizes and getting rid of silly elective courses like art, music, and languages. I mean really, those who can't do teach? Amirite??? /barf
Same thing for your stupid statement here. Many countries have proven that socialized healthcare and education makes for a better country. Keep shitting in the milk son, one day it'll turn into chocolate milk just for you!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:16PM (1 child)
Nice strawman there.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:41PM
Not a strawman. You asserted that the American welfare system is ineffective. GP stated that the ineffectiveness is due to mismanagement and used the fact that welfare elsewhere work just fine and dandy to support his assertion.
This is a legitimate argument.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:23PM (3 children)
Bollocks. The school district with the highest per-student budget in the US (Washington, D.C., no surprise there) is also among the lowest-achieving in the western world.
Are you merely stupid, or another shill for the education establishment?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:45PM (2 children)
The point was that it depends on how it is spent. Guess that plane took off a little early, try looking up next time.
Many countries have proven that providing safety nets for all citizens results in better life outcomes and successful economies. The US mismanages the minimal social programs it does have and spends a ton of money on unnecessary bureaucracy. Thank you GOP for slowly destroying everything good. The UK is having a similar problem, their conservative party has taken an hard austerity line and is busy trying to ruin the NHS so they can privatize it and make tons of money for some rich people.
You bigoted retards have such simple minds, you can only see the most superficial layers of societies problems. Gee if they just stopped buying iPhones they wouldn't be poor!! God DAMN you types are just a little too smart for your own good.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:26PM (1 child)
You are full of shit.
Many? Name few. Better life outcomes? How better? what metric are you using? Longevity? Life-satisfaction? You are just babbling and saying nothing. You are full of shit.
Yes of course, that is what big government does.
No, you have the wrong party. It is the DNC that always increases the amount of social programs, i.e. the big government. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=democrats+increase+social+security [duckduckgo.com]
Yes because NHS was doing so fucking well before Conservatives came into power. Here is a handy article from 2001 about "NHS on Verge of Collapse" https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-75669477/gp-service-on-verge-of-collapse-warn-doctors [questia.com]. If you must know Tony Blair (Labour) was the PM then. As a matter of fact you can find an article with a headline "NHS on Verge of Collapse" or some amalgamation of those words for every fucking year. If NHS is so great, why is it always almost failing?
Oh of course, the refuge of a failed ideology. When you can't counter the truth with facts resort to attacking the individual.
Yes in essence this is 100% correct. If they stopped making bad financial decisions, they could amass wealth. It may be a bit abstracted to the "iphone" widget, but that is so it is simple for a unsophisticated minds to comprehend. But first, they would be able to realize how to maximize their earning potential. Then if they found it to be insufficient for wealth generation, they would invest into increasing their earnings potential. And I'm not talking about a PhD in Multi-cultural Trans-actualism or some other bullshit with meager job prospects, I'm talking about things that are in demand, or will be in 5 years.
Main reason poor are poor is because they are terrible at playing the economic game. This is where the disconnect comes between the mostly Right and silly Left comes from. If a player is losing a game because they are too dense to understand the rules, changing the rules won't help them. They will fail with the new rules, and you will just make everyone else, who knows how to play the game and worked hard really fucking mad. But because they succeeded before, they will succeed again, even with your stupid new rules.
Giving people who squander limited resources more resources only leads to more squandered resources. NOTHING MORE. If we gave every poor person in the U.S. $100K tomorrow for example, by year's end their bank accounts would be back at 0, and they will have tons more of debt, this I can guarantee.
My good is just fine, thank you. As is the good of my family, because I work very hard to ensure it is so. Also, I think I am only sufficiently smart, or perhaps just smart enough to know how much smarter others are. It would be extremely hard to be too smart.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:51PM
As per usual all the conservative tool can do is tear things down without actually having anything to support the argument.
US is #13, lots of heavily socialized countries ranking near the top: http://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-happiness-index-2016-just-ranked-the-happiest-countries-on-earth [sciencealert.com]
US #17 for economic freedom: http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking [heritage.org]
Heeey, we come in #7 with US News https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/overall-full-list [usnews.com]
But still behind quite a few countries with socialized healthcare... So lets see, who fits the bill for crazy conservative?
Oh right, that would be yoouuuuu! I attacked an entire group of people. A large percentage of conservatives are open bigots, a larger percentage have some serious latent bigotry, and a massive percentage have blatant hatred for people they think are sub-human. You guarantee that every poor person in the U.S. would completely squander $100k in a year? Wow, way to slam the point home.
As for the "too smart for you own good" it refers to being smart enough to see some things, bring up arguments that might sort of work, but just not smart enough to see your own bullshit. Thus, you fall for propaganda that gets tax breaks for the rich, protective regulations rolled back at the expense of consumers, the environment, workers, etc. You vote in evil shitbags and think its some sort of righteous fight for morality where you get to fuck over all the people you're told to hate. Hence, too smart for your own good. Just smart enough to convince yourself the bullshit is real, just dumb enough to not taste it as you crash into a truck full of it.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:08PM (18 children)
Which "social programs" increased? If they are directed mainly at the middle class, then that may be odd. If they are directed mainly at the poor, then increasing pay-outs would be the natural concomitant to an increase in the number of poor people. Perhaps cutting taxes on the wealthy will help.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:14PM (17 children)
Start back in the 50s. Graph the size of the middle class. Then graph the increases in/creation of social programs.
I'll sit here and wait while you figure out if they do have a causal relationship, it is a negative one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:23PM (9 children)
Again, which "social programs" are you alluding to? Please name them. One will do.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:57PM (6 children)
OK, the "War on Poverty" starting in the 60s. Take a trillion dollars from the middle class, give it to the poor classes. Predict what will happen, predict what the leftist narrative will be, then look at the actual results.
The results have been so negative that if we had shoveled the cash into a fire at least we'd have kept warm.
"Well, if taking one trillion from the middle class to give to the poor didn't work, we gotta try taking ten"
Lets say you got a culture that is dysfunctional. Could abstract it away from the politics and discuss business. So you have a dysfunctional unfit corporate culture. The way to turn that around is to ... turbocharge it with VC cash? Naah that just makes a bigger crater when it crashes. Pretend there's nothing wrong until the collapse? Well that will maximize your individual extraction of wealth from the system and has a long tradition in business. Talk about something else? That has a long business tradition, if the revenue is collapsing then to distract the rank and file we'll issue draconian dress codes and fill our empty working days with diversity training.
I mean... think about it. The healthiest, longest lived, best educated, richest black population on the planet isn't in Africa, its in the USA. The most successful black city on the planet is Detroit, which is an absolute paradise compared to, perhaps, Mogadishu. Possibly the "best" hispanic spanish speaking city on the planet isn't in Venezuela or Cuba; its Miami.
It should be pretty obvious to someone living in a slum in Detroit that if they're unhappy with being dirt poor compared to majority americans, emulating the culture of Mogadishu is somewhat less likely to lead to success than emulating the culture of some random white suburb.
Throwing money at that problem never fixed anything ever in the history of humanity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:12PM
War on Poverty [wikipedia.org]
But let me guess, its wikipedia so its automatically wrong somehow. You're brain is crammed full of Fox news level propaganda. You should really attend college uzzie, if only to test your pet theories against people with actual in depth knowledge who are more willing to try and educate you. "Go fuck yourself and here's a link if you want to be less stupid" is about all I'm likely to do for you. Maybe some others will be more tolerant and polite, but you've probably pumped that well dry. Educate yourself before the sinkholes come.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:57PM (4 children)
--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty [wikipedia.org]
The Brookings Institution is quoted as saying
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act [wikipedia.org]
From the above I gather that the "War on Poverty" encompassed several programmes, some of which have been curtailed.
> The results have been so negative that if we had shoveled the cash into a fire at least we'd have kept warm.
Looking at the accompanying graph of the number of people in poverty and the poverty rate, I see that the poverty rate had been declining prior to the legislation's inception. After the legislation, the rate continued to decline for a bit, then varied within a range that was lower than the previous levels. The number of people in poverty did increase greatly beginning in 2000 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 had taken effect in July 1997). It's not obvious from the graph that the programmes were effective, nor is it obvious that they were harmful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:06PM (3 children)
I think the take away from the wikipedia article of this section :
Much like climate data people with an axe to grind can find numbers that support almost anything.
Yet, fundamentally, from a very high alititude view, the program has failed. It actually cost more like $15T not $1T and the result is we have about as many poor people as we always used to.
A successful program is you spend $155B to get an international space station, and if you have a medium to large telescope you can see it up there. Or a successful program is you pay an inflation adjusted $750M and you get Hoover Dam. Or you pay roughly $30M inflation adjusted dollars and you get a Washington Monument. Or the Manhattan project. Or the physical Pentagon building (not the pentagon as an abstract DoD analogy but the bricks and mortar). Or for that matter services. The cost of the regime change in Panama was $163M. Personally I think it would have been wiser to pay Noriega a bribe of half of that to leave, but whatever. Or services sometimes "fail" the regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq were miserable failures yet remarkably expensive.
The war on poverty was orders of magnitude more expensive. Now orders of magnitude more expensive than hoover dam would be an alaskan land bridge to Russia. Or order of magnitude more than the cost of the ISS would be colonies on Mars. Or order of magnitude more than the cost of the war on terror would be the cost of fighting Iran. The point is multiples of fabulous expenditures should be absolutely stupendous results.
So given the last paragraph, whats the stupendous earth shattering result of blowing $15T on "poverty"? Well, maybe, as long as the spigot keeps flowing probably the poverty rate is a small percentage lower in the very short term. But generally speaking, piling up the money and burning it would have had more effect. I'm not seeing much of a return on investment here. I'm not even talking about running a long term profit by "eradicating poverty" but I'm not seeing much of a result from the investment.
$15T should have more of a result. Well, it is helping destroy the middle class by trying to fund it... which might have been an original goal anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:17PM (2 children)
Yes. Time progressed 5 decades, the world population doubled, the USA population increased, and the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same. Monetary power got consolidated into fewer and fewer hands. Yet the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same. The economy of other countries has shot up like a rocket, going from isolated enclave to world-dominant player (e.g. China) -- yet the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same.
Sounds like a pretty stupendous result to me.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:06AM
How again is poverty measured? There's usually two ways. The first is that we decide the poorest X% are poor. The second is that someone pulls a number out of their ass, calls it a "living wage" and uses that. The number is usually chosen relative to what people usually make and generally tends to a set fraction of the population making less than that number. End result is that the usual ways of defining poor people results in the same number of poor people no matter how wealthy the society is. So I believe you can't use number of poor people as a measure of how well a society is doing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:54PM
Well, wait, that flat line is kinda my point, that the number was kinda flatline before the $15T spent, and kinda flatline after the $15T spent. So apparently we could spend anywhere from $0T to $150T and we'd get about the same flat line, so how about trying on $0T for a thought experiment?
For a similar comparison, the number of terrorists in the middle east is slightly higher after the trillions spent on the war on terror than before. Therefore it failed.
In practice welfare funding is exactly like public high school funding where any theat to the gravy train results in ridiculous threats of cuts "Oh well no more football team". Likewise probably 1% to maybe even 10% of the poverty spending is legit, but any threat to the program growth rate is met with threats to cut all the funding to the few deserving recipients.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:30PM (1 child)
All of them. Welfare, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, etc... Anything that takes from the wealthy and middle class and gives to the poor.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Weasley on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:59PM
Yet, despite all this wealth redistribution to the poor, somehow the upper class now has more of the money, and the lower class is filling with former members of the middle class.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (4 children)
And what was the upper tax rate in the 50s and what direction has that gone since then?
http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-tax-rates [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:27PM (3 children)
Oh, you think you get more money by having higher tax rates on the wealthy? Interesting. Naive, but interesting.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)
No, Comrade Marx thinks he can make everyone equal by making everyone poor. But he should know by now some people are more equal than others and even in a society with 0 cash there will be wealth disparity. He is just denying reality, it is a leftist coping mechanism for the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:21PM
And yet one of us posted a link with facts and data and 2 of us resorted to basic logical fallacies like strawmen and ad hominems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:45PM
Yes, actually. We all know about the Laffer curve, but to suggest that US tax rates are at or above the peak of the Laffer curve is ridiculous.
You are the naive one. You are the one promoting the interests of people far wealthier than you at your own expense.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:41PM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-fact-the-lack-of-pirates-is-causing-global-warming/#1e731833a679 [forbes.com]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:05PM
Your premise is ridiculously flawed [srcf.net].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:39PM (3 children)
There is a causal relationship, but not the one you are suggesting. The rise in social programs is a result of the disappearing middle class (or growth of the poor if you prefer), not the other way around.
Why is the middle class disappearing? Nearly 40 years of wage stagnation. It ain't the poor taking all the middle classes' money.
http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ [epi.org]
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:50PM (2 children)
You should consider the possibility this is not an either/or.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_circle
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:10AM (1 child)
I know several people who will never get a job or even seek one out. They are just fine living in section 8 with food stamps. One of the I know recently got a windfall of 15,000. It was gone in 4 weeks. Not on bills or making better of their life. It was squandered on 200 dinners every night, large TVs, and whatever else they could think of.
These programs help thousands. But thousands are also trapped in it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:31AM
Sounds like a very good reason to revamp our welfare system by making it better, not making it harder. All the people I've met and heard of who were trapped are those who have to turn down jobs because it would cost them more to actually go to work. This is because they would lose their benefits as soon as they work above a certain threshold, but that threshold doesn't mean they'll have enough money to live on.
Welfare systems should be designed to help people success, right now the concern is more tightly focused on making sure scammers and abusers don't work the system. Sadly these policing attempts don't even work that well except to make the honest people suffer and get trapped.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:42PM
FTFY!
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:01PM (1 child)
That doesn't look like "ever increasing" to me. [usgovernmentspending.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:35PM
It's because your source lies by using percentage games. "Eight percent improvement in GDP FOREVER!" is the blatant fallacy.
Compare to actual hard year-to-year numbers, feel free to adjust for inflation and also count that into your numbers because inflation by money-printing is indistinguishable in terms of purchasing power from a tax.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:45PM
It's not funny, you've got causation backwards. The fact that the middle class has been drastically reduced is causing the increase in people who make so little that they qualify for government assistance.
We've done less than nothing to improve the situation over the last nearly 40 years because of people like you that got yours and are too greedy and self-entitled to think what would happen if you ever get sick or if you hadn't been so lucky when you were younger. Somebody born into poverty or in a family with DV isn't going to be so fortunate to put all that effort to things that show up on their balance sheet.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday May 23 2017, @09:28PM
The middle class started disappearing when Reaganomics started removing the social programs that had lowered the poverty level to the lowest point in our history. We're still stuck on Reaganomics and the middle class is still getting clobbered. The poor are not getting the money, although there are increasingly more of them. GDP and wealth has increased since 1980, but it has almost all gone to the upper class.