[wagglebee]

The Economist reports that in the U.S. “the gap between rich and poor is bigger than in any other advanced country.” And it’s growing.

The truth:
The rich in the US as a whole are richer than any other group in the history of the world.

The "poor" in the US are wealthier and enjoy a higher standard of living than nearly everyone else in the world.

[bmwcyle]

And how much of this is inflation of the currency?

[tiki]

Personally, I love to pay extrem wages to get people to do my dirty work. I love paying bloated union wages too. I guess that means I'm not rich.

[Physicist]

Although they are the largest beneficiaries of the American way of life, including the rule of law, when it comes to the issue of illegal immigration, the rich do everything they can to undermine the American way for the vast majority of other Americans.

...

Some of these bought policies may be for the purpose of making the rich even richer, most obviously the current regressive tax policies of the Bush administration.

The wealth of the very rich is never the product of free enterprise

...

As more and more people become poor or poorer and lose any reasonable hope of improving their economic status

...

Oh, yah. Conservative.

[webheart]

I don't know who this guy is, but this reads like the product of the stoned mind, where every little crawling of an ant generates a sense of wonderment, but after the high ends, none of it can be remembered.

[xjcsa]

Ugh...the usual truckload of tripe from this Buchananite rag.

[Penner]

Over one billion credit cards are in circulation in the U.S.—four for every man, woman, and child—and with 40 percent of families spending more than they earn, this keeps consumption rising, even as income may be declining.

Yep. Credit cards are the only thing keeping this economy going. The more the US moves from a producer to consumer society, the more it will resemble Mexico.

[Lloyd227]

"...Henry Ford paid his factory workers $5 a day, twice the going rate, with the aim of creating a broad middle class able to buy the cars they were building"

Anyone aware of DIRECT quotes from Mr. Ford regarding his reasons for paying a substantially higher rate? Because I believe this popularly accepted reason is pure spin and BS.

My understanding of why wages were dooubled was because Mr. Ford expected things done a certain way, he wanted to the ability to command that type of following and the ability to fire a man on the spot with ten good relacements standing in line.

This liberal "building the middle class" stuff is pure liberal delusion.

[Myrddin]

An anticapitalist rant if ever I saw one. Class envy through and through. Bitching about dropping estate taxes and capital gains taxes. The author has no concept of how capitalism works. The author does understand how socialist/communist politicians punish success using exorbitant tax schemes to steal the private property of the successful and purchase the allegiance of the "have nots" using wealth redistribution schemes.

[Tokra]

The contention that the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is based on figures from 1979 - 2001. I believe the Bush tax cuts have changed things - especially since the poor and middle class got much bigger tax cuts than did the rich.

[capitalist229]

the current regressive tax policies of the Bush administration

This where I stopped reading.

Remind me to never subscribe to the American Conservative.

BUMP

[TheLion]

Bttt!

[AHerald]

...learned conservative writer Kevin Phillips

Thanks. I haven't laughed so hard since the first time I saw a metrosexual caveman order the roast duck with the mango salsa.

[nicollo]

I should like to rid popular history of this falsehood:

In 1914, Henry Ford paid his factory workers $5 a day, twice the going rate, with the aim of creating a broad middle class able to buy the cars they were building.

The "aim" of the "Five Dollar Day" was to lower cost of production by inciting higher worker efficiency and, especially, to lower employee turnover which had been plaguing the new Ford assembly lines. That the goal was to create a consumer class of workers is utter tripe -- and the product of a deliberate revisionist history that Ford and his company and their willing biographers formulated long after the 1914 wage hike.

The Five Dollar Day has been used, as here, to justify so many "enlightened" policies, but never was it intended to create a buying class of worker-consumers. In fact, Ford deliberately couched the pay raise as a "profit-sharing" plan as a hedge against it not working. Also, he excluded unmarried men under 22 and all women from the wage hike.

Enlightened: hardly. Good business: you bet.

[Clemenza]

LOL!

Yeah, we need a "protected" economy where the "workers" rule supreme.

Its worked SO WELL in France and Belgium, hasn't it?