Quote (cambovenzi @ 6 Aug 2017 00:43)

TIL directly countering the talking points the other guy brings up is a strawman.

You might personally believe your additional commentary on the effects of their policy to be true, but that is NOT what he brought up.

Quote (cambovenzi @ 6 Aug 2017 01:19)

someone in the 20th percentile is vastly better off now than 25-30 years ago, despite a lot of government reasons for suboptimal growth, opportunity and wages.
The things you can actually buy with those wages, and the tech we have available to the poor has improved by leaps and bounds in that time. (as have the benefits as a percentage of compensation)

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Aug 5 2017 07:27pm)

technology has become better, but what about affordability of a house, or the percentage of the income that has to be spent on the rent? what about the costs of food? what about taxes? what about deductibles on healthcare plans? what about job security? what about affordability of college education? for someone from the 20% quantile, all those things have gotten worse. do fancier tvs, fridges and pcs really make up for that?

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Aug 5 2017 07:27pm)

technology has become better, but what about affordability of a house, or the percentage of the income that has to be spent on the rent? what about the costs of food? what about taxes? what about deductibles on healthcare plans? what about job security? what about affordability of college education? for someone from the 20% quantile, all those things have gotten worse. do fancier tvs, fridges and pcs really make up for that?

Quote (cambovenzi @ Aug 6 2017 01:22am)

a butchered narrow understanding of history that is irrelevant to the point.
She could have been the devil incarnate and she would not have been off base.
She does not have to be perfect or without any bad policies for the point to have great relevance to guys like knaapie carrying on about inequality.

How convenient of you to focus on your perception of her role in the recession rather than her widespread gains due to more economic freedom and the overall point that is not specific to her.

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he was trying to shame her as having an unjustifiable and bad record because of inequality. His key criticism was relative inequality, and overall gains were barely mentioned and given lip service, because that reality was too striking to ignore. It was an uninterested preface to his criticism, not the point.
She made the point that overall gains are far more important than relative inequality. Who gives a fuck if the rich are richer when everyone is much better off?

The obvious truth is that the leftists are hyper-focused on inequality rather than overall/widespread prosperity and sound economics. She hit the nail on the head.

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Its a classic example of leftist jealousy politics. Eat the rich. inequality! redistribute now!
Misidentifying the problem as inequality rather than lack of wealth leads to different proposed solutions that are illsuited to solving the real problem.

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The suggestion that those socialists would have had just as much growth and overall wealth increases without the inequality is beyond ridiculous.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Aug 5 2017 08:27pm)

technology has become better, but what about affordability of a house, or the percentage of the income that has to be spent on the rent? what about the costs of food? what about taxes? what about deductibles on healthcare plans? what about job security? what about affordability of college education? for someone from the 20% quantile, all those things have gotten worse. do fancier tvs, fridges and pcs really make up for that?

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Rose is right, people are substantially better off than they were 30 years ago…. [T]oday’s workers are earning more than their counterparts did 30 years ago.
Ignore the statistics for a second and use your common sense. Remember when even upper-middle class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long? When flying was an expensive luxury? When only a minority of the population had central air conditioning, dishwashers, and color televisions? When no one had DVD players, iPods, or digital cameras? And when most Americans owned a car that broke down frequently, guzzled fuel, spewed foul smelling pollution, and didn’t have any of the now virtually standard items like air conditioning or tape/CD players?…
A long life — it’s four years longer today than it was in 1975. A college education — 38 percent of young adults are enrolled today, compared to 26 percent back in 1975. A home — also more common today than in 1975 .. .
Some of the wage statistics that Mishel tosses around suffer from a number of limitations, virtually all of which bias the picture in the same way. The biggest one is that wages … are reported after the cost of increasingly generous and technologically advanced health insurance is factored out … . Health isn’t the only problem with the wage data; other benefits have grown as well — in addition to the fact that the wage comparisons rest on a measure of inflation that is almost universally believed to be biased and ignore the influx of immigrants who weren’t in the data back in the 1970s.

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Stagnationists often point to U.S. Census Bureau data as proof that the typical American family is little better off than when Reagan took office in 1981. As economist Martin Feldstein recently pointed out, that data show real median incomes rose just 0.3 percent a year from the middle 1980s through 2013, or about 10 percent total. Not flat, exactly, but pretty darn close. And that performance looks especially weak when one considers real per person economic growth rose by 1.8 percent annually over the period, reflecting widening inequality. Again, the rich got richer, everyone else not so much. It sounds convincing.

The problem is that Census data paints an incomplete picture. A University of Chicago poll of top economists earlier this year found that 70 percent agreed that the Census conclusion “substantially understates how much better off people in the median American household are now economically, compared with 35 years ago.” How far off are those numbers? Maybe quite a bit. Feldstein argues that they fail to take into account shrinking household size, the rise in government benefit transfers, and changes in tax policy. They also measure inflation in a way some experts thinks overstates the true rise in living costs. He notes that when the Congressional Budget Office took all those factors into account, it found median household income had risen by 53 percent since 1980, five times as much as the narrower Census figures.
And it could be even higher. A lot higher. A growing number of economists are questioning whether our existing measures of economic growth and inflation are suited to the digital economy. A recent Goldman Sachs analysis suggests we may be understating annual economic growth by nearly a third due to our inability to accurately measure how vastly improved software and hardware are boosting productivity. Likewise, government data ignores the consumer value of free internet services like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Put it all together, and Feldstein thinks real median household income may have risen by 2.5 percent a year over the past 30 years, not 0.3 percent. That would suggest a doubling of living standards over the past generation. And even those figures ignore welfare gains from rising life expectancy, which economists Charles Jones and Peter Klenow think could equal a full percentage point a year.

Quote (cambovenzi @ Aug 5 2017 08:16pm)

Quote (duffman316 @ 6 Aug 2017 02:55)

can relate, i've been raging for a year or so that i can't afford to buy a fully detached house in toronto :fume:

Quote (dro94 @ Aug 5 2017 09:04pm)

A butchered narrow understanding with no actual argument given as to the correct understanding, other than your subjective opinion. You can disagree with me but I always bring evidence to the table.

Of course all leaders will have somebad policies, it just so happened that a great many of Thatcher's policies were.

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The obvious truth is that overall prosperity and inequality should be inversely related. The right ignore inequality, just like Thatcher did. That's why we've got the worst class system of any rich Western country.

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I'm left wing and I'd take the rich getting richer if the poor got richer, even if the rich got richer by a far greater margin. What I'm saying is that it would be preferable to have implemented policies that would have had the effect of the least wealthy taking a higher proportion of income overall, which they didn't.

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Redistribution wasn't the actual topic at hand, either. It was wealth creation, which would preferably be shared between the rich and poor without the need for distribution through govt policy.

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Simon Hughes is a liberal democrat and far more aligned with centre - centre left politics than labour was at the time. You thought he was a Labour MP didn't you?

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I agree, the Labour party of the 70s and 80s was a joke. Thatcher curbed the unions and that was necessary at the time, given their strength.