It's a recovery only if you're rich

Is this a recovery for the middle class?

  • Yes. This recovery has lifted all boats

    Votes: 4 4.9%
  • Not by a long shot. The middle class is in danger of disappearing.

    Votes: 60 74.1%
  • I don't know.

    Votes: 7 8.6%
  • I don't care.

    Votes: 10 12.3%

  • Total voters
    81
Quote from ElCubano:

like you pointed out...many of these people don't have the time to dream about being a tibetan monk or about how happy it is too spend precious moments with their family...they are just in one gear and that is SURVIVAL.

You are not closing the sale with me. You know, I've watched the documentary of the homeless families in Anaheim that live in motels and saw the 60 minutes special last night on the homeless families of Seminole county in FL that live around Disney World. I'm always amazed at the stuff they are cramming into that motel room. The computers, the gameboys, the big TV's. I'm not blaming them for buying stuff, just saying that a large part of these people lived a little bit beyond their means.
 
Quote from nitro:

The Crimson Tide quote was meant as an analogy, that in a global economy, the "true enemy cannot be defeated" (to paraphrase CT), i.e., "Free Market Capitalism" (FMC).



People in Tibet etc don't have to pay rent that is 60% or more of their "paycheck", don't have to drive to work and pay $4 a gallon to get there, don't have to work four jobs so that their children go hungry, and the list is endless. Their problems may be titanic as well, but what does that have to do with FMC? Examples like these always leave me exasperated. If I wanted to live like people in Tibet, I would move there! Also, if FMC has its way, Tibetians will not be allowed to live this way for much longer, they will be assimilated soon as FMC is a virus!



Well, I don't know anyone that thinks about these things more than I do and if somehow that comes across differently on these boards, then I have no idea which of my almost 16,000 posts caused your confusion. Again I am exasperated at your line of reasoning because your responses show you don't understand the problem. It isn't my "happiness" that is at stake on first approximation, it is a runaway system that dehumanizes people in the work place, and worse, has no moral center, and that is when you are one of the lucky ones and have a job!. This is the desease, the symptoms of which have been discussed in countless numbers of threads on ET over the years.


What? Dude, seriously, it isn't I who says these things. I am getting really exasperated now, because I have no idea what hole you live under to say this stuff. Here, I don't want to do the work for you:

http://www.shadowstats.com/


I have misrepresented myself. I have nothing against Capitalism per se, only FMC.


It was horrendous by any measure.


Well, that people want to trade instead of going to work should tell you something. To you it seems to say that people are lazy. To me it says that the consciousness of our species is evolving, and that this endless work only to exist, compounded with such inequities where rules apply to one set of people and not another, is no longer acceptable. If instead of blaming people that are complaining, we listened to them, we might all proceed forward.


What pain are you going through? You have a job. The examples with the Nazis is almost as good as your examples of Tibetans.


I am now completely exasperated. You don't understand. It may be my fault. The problem as I see it is a duality that feeds on itself between the system itself and people. But you are trivializing the "chicken and egg problem" of which causes which, and that in fact it must be people that are the problem and the root cause. A system attains a life of it's own once it is set in motion, and the whole point of this thread is that FMC, a faceless enemy, is at the root of all this evil! Economics is not an ethical system. It only tells you what the most efficient way to allocate resources is. Without a moral center, which it has become in the system of FMC, it becomes a mortal enemy of all freedom loving people.


Many systems are emergent. If we want to discuss the economics of the Yanomamo, then maybe we could learn something. But I live in a world that is controlled more and more by FMC. If FMC has it's way, the Yanomamo will be assimilated soon too anyway because their way of life, through the glasses of FMC, is not efficient and we are not extracting maximum value from their life. Maybe you will stop and read, listen, and get the message of this thread. Maybe not.

Read the book I suggested on the previous page, it may broaden your perspective and understanding of current issues that are being lived by tens of millions of people.

There is too much to respond too here now but let me just say that we have nor practiced free market capitalism in this country since 1913. Free market capitalism is what we need. What we have now is a frankenstein model of capitalism and government together with the fed.

You want to solve all the ills of the world Nitro, then start pushing for free floating interest rates. Let's see what money really costs when it can float on it's own power. Only then will we have true equality in this country.
 
Middle class families in the 60s lived in 1250 sqft homes with two or three kids. One tiny car, one land line phone, one TV, a tiny fridge, no pool. It's called living within ones means.

Today? 3000 sqft McMansion, two cars, TV in every room, a fridge the size of a van, a kitchen fit to run a diner, an olympic size swimming pool and of course an iphone for every child. But the middle class is moaning how terrible their life is and how much better the good old days were. Talk about distorted perception.

Some of these whiners ought to talk to their grandparents and ask them how tough and humble life was two generations ago.
 
Quote from Maverick74:

You are not closing the sale with me. You know, I've watched the documentary of the homeless families in Anaheim that live in motels and saw the 60 minutes special last night on the homeless families of Seminole county in FL that live around Disney World. I'm always amazed at the stuff they are cramming into that motel room. The computers, the gameboys, the big TV's. I'm not blaming them for buying stuff, just saying that a large part of these people lived a little bit beyond their means.

try outside the US....I am not referring to joe sixpack who consumes 30 times more than the rest of the world.
 
Quote from ElCubano:

try outside the US....I am not referring to joe sixpack who consumes 30 times more than the rest of the world.

I've stated on this board countless times that our prosperity in this country over the last 60 years has come at the expense of the rest of the world. Mean reversion time my friend.
 
rich get richer....but pay more taxes and hire more people
to work for them...so creates more jobs? but that's on the global level... probably not hiring overpriced staff from the U.S.

cycle of death...how we dig ourselves out?
 
MUST READ:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43695970

What is the party of the poor? Certainly not the Democrats? Tea Party? Nope, no one gives a shit. Where is the new Karl Marx?

I understand that in a country such as the US, if you are not working it is mostly your own fault (sometimes that fault is the culmination of years of poor decision making). Still, there seems to be something structurally wrong with the world...
 
nitro, you keep looking at economics and government as some sort of religion, that there simply must be some sort of higher power to bring order.

Freedom does not promise you anything materially, neither does nature and if you can't handle that then you need to join a commune and live with your imaginary security.

Americans have screwed themselves pretty good, what children we are demanding big daddy government make everything all better.

Yes the american children want same government that thought trade with China was a good idea, that now owns 3 wars, who could not foresee 2 fat tail economic events in 8 years, who thrashes around desperately trying to puff up another blow-up-doll economic bubble, who has now hopelessly indebted us to the point that we all know there isn't a happy ending, who has promised over $60T in future unpaid for entitlements.

You nitro are the problem, you want your economic order and justice, you want a government chicken in every pot. Out of such demands rises such people as Vladimir Lenin and Adolph Hitler.

What I'm asking is... are we happier, as a human race? Is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology? We shop at home, we surf the Web, and at the same time we feel emptier, lonelier, and more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history..." - Palmer Joss, Contact

God I hate pointy headed navel gazers.... science and technology is the ONLY thing keeping us from living in mud huts and fighting for our food. It has what has allowed people like the person who invented that quote to sit around all day and talk about how great it must have been living in the trees.

Purely delusional and indulgent crap. Now that we all know what it is like to have the comforts of modern science and tech, how come I don't see any of you wankers running to live in the amazon with that tribe of whatever they are?
 
I've stated on this board countless times that our prosperity in this country over the last 60 years has come at the expense of the rest of the world. Mean reversion time my friend

not buying it at all, in fact the opposite is probably more realistic. Germany, Japan, China, and Mexico have all risen by trade with us over the last 60 years and sometimes by direct investment.

US-Canada was largely a self contained economy in the 50's. We were innnovative, creative, productive, and not burdened with debt. I do not think we exported our way to wealth since there was nobody to get wealth from.
 
Quote from Butterball:

Middle class families in the 60s lived in 1250 sqft homes with two or three kids. One tiny car, one land line phone, one TV, a tiny fridge, no pool. It's called living within ones means.

Today? 3000 sqft McMansion, two cars, TV in every room, a fridge the size of a van, a kitchen fit to run a diner, an olympic size swimming pool and of course an iphone for every child. But the middle class is moaning how terrible their life is and how much better the good old days were. Talk about distorted perception.

Some of these whiners ought to talk to their grandparents and ask them how tough and humble life was two generations ago.

Butterball you nailed it.
 
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