Obama and GE Redistribution of Wealth

these ceo's make perfect obamabees as well

many former big corp ceo's are white house staff now.

tis true...and I am one of many taxpayers out there who is NOT happy about this.

we're kinda fucked regardless to the party in office

sure redistribution of wealth by choice is all fine and good. as a mandate it sucks

Do you have a choice whether or not to buy food?
Do you have a choice whether or not to have running water and electricity?
If you drive a car, do you have a choice whether or not to put gas in it?

For the overwhelmingly vast majority of all people, the answer to all three of these questions is no.
All three of these things redistributes your wealth to the richest, wealthiest individuals in the world, the Corporate Executives of super-massive trans-multi-national for-profit industrial factory farm, power and electric industry, and oil industry corporations, by far and away the most profitable companies in the history of human civilization.
For the poor and middle class, the redistribution of their wealth is ALREADY, and always has been, mandatory.
Progressives and Liberals, by definition, are attempting to reverse this process to at least some extent, however minute. Liberals and Progressives are taking the greatest steps in recorded history to attempt to obligate the uber-rich and uber-wealthy to distribute more, if not very much more, of their own personal wealth to those who have the least of it.
Rich people are not inherently philanthropic nor benevolent, no more so than poor people, and so, just like middle class individuals, they will only ever do anything if it is in there own better interests. For people who care about nothing, and no one, except wealth and riches, they will only do anything if it is less EXPENSIVE, or more cost-effective, than the alternative.
So naturally, what Liberals and Progressive have been attempting to do is to make it however significantly substantially CHEAPER as they can for millionaires and billionaires to distribute a fairly relatively minute amount MORE of their ludicrous personal wealth to those in the most desperate need than they otherwise would, than it would be NOT to give money to the poor.
The executives of oil, power and industrial factory farm industry corporations have made it abundantly, even painfully, obvious that they could not possibly care less about the needs of the poor and middle class if they tried, even if they wanted to, which they do not.
Therefore, the only way to get people who care about nothing BUT money to do anything right is to do it with economics.

As long as their has been wealth there has been the redistribution thereof. What Liberals and Progressive have been attempting to do is reverse the direction of the distribution from bottom to top to bottom to top.
The only reason that such a common-sense approach is a difficulty at all is that it flys in the face of what the uber-wealthy view as being their best interests, and so the rich dedicate truly staggeringly massive quantities of their money into persuading the gullible and susceptible to suggestion, [who have recently taken to calling themselves the "tea [bagging] party"], that any and ALL redistribution of wealth is "socialism", and is therefore thereby inherently pure evil (i have yet to encounter even one of these people who can give me even so much as one reason why Socialism is in any way shape or form a bad thing).

interesting theory as is your theory on when life begins but both full of holes. most of the rich work hard to get there. some are philanthropic others not, but they are under no obligation to fund the lazy. on a spirtual level it would do them good to share some of their abundance of wealth with the less fortunate but still are under no obligation and should not be mandated to do so. just like its really their own wealth its also really their own karma. if i were a wealthy man i myself would freely give what i saw fit to the less fortunate in ways i deemed appropriate. even in my current limited economic situation i do what i can even if its just helping lift something heavy for an elderly person at the grocery store or mowing the lawn of somebody who cant. i find it vulgar to share and or brag about ones own personal good deeds as do many, so i will leave it at that. i highly doubt youve really spent much time talking to even one tea party member, but if youd like to find out why socialism is a bad thing all you have to do is study history. granted on paper it looks good but in reality its never worked and never will.

funny, the rich don't seem to feel that way about the Bush tax cuts, and that is the biggest redistribution of wealth this nation has ever undergone.

i never claimed all folks down on their luck are lazy but many are. it is difficult for a lot of folks especially the un or under educated to reach beyond minimum wage and i feel empathy for those who really try and have difficulty achieving any thing remotely resembling success. i work 1 full time job and 2 part time jobs to make ends meet and pretty much live paycheck to paycheck. i at times can find myself envious of those who are better off but i dont begrudge them nor expect them to pay my nor anyone elses way. for the most part i am happy with my life which i live reasonably honest. we would all like more money but its no ones elses responsibility to provide it for me. i pay my taxes and if i ever had to i could collect unemployment or food stamps. they are there and meant to provide support to those truly in need. the problem is that too many who arent collect on it and the rest of us pay. if we could clean up government subsidy fraud it would probably save us more than ending obama's wars. combine ending the wars along with ending fraudulent welfare, uninsurance claims and we would be in a good place. everyone should pay their share but successful and wealthy people should not be punished for being so.

trust me, successful and wealthy people are NOT being punished, and what you don't understand about the workings of the US economy could fill volumes.

but hey, I appreciate your honesty, just don't go corrupting the little one

ian, you sound like you've been reading by blog. I have been saying the same things.

http://wp.me/p1BBT6-e

"most of the rich work hard to get there."
inherited billions= hard work?

"they are under no obligation to fund the lazy"
Poor=Lazy?

"under no obligation and should not be mandated to do so"
Taxes =/= Mandate?

you have not-unsurprisingly twisted and distorted misconceptions of how the world works
The uber-wealthy are the least-spiritual people on the planet, and generally don't tend to believe in any such thing as karma

I'm surrounded on all sides by teabaggers every time i return home back to North Central Wisconsin [middles-of-go-forsaken-nowhere'svile hicktown USA], but you don't have to talk to teabaggers, (speaking [you can't really call it a "conversation" as such] to people with such a poor grasp of the english language and of proper english language spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization, tends to give me a headache, and trying in vain to grasp or comprehend the depth of such profound self-imposed willful steadfast ignorance about everything from history to science makes my brain hurt just trying to think about it) just watch the Saudi-Royal-Family-owned-and-operated Faux "News" Channel Network, to know that the Reactionary Radical Fanatic Extremist "Teabagging" Party "thinks" that Socialism is evil.
The top ten most successful and prosperous nations, in every single last measurable and quantifiable standard, on earth in the 21st Century are all, every single last one of them, socialist unitary constitutional parliamentary representative democracies.
The United States of America, for the majority of the past decade a religio-military-imperialistic capitalist-corporate-industrial authoritarian autocratic parliamentary oligarchy, has not been in one of the top 20 (i believe we're number 25, just barely within the top 10%, the ninetieth percentile) for the better part of the past half century.
Name to me please one of these alleged supposed "failures" of socialism in history, i can't think of any.

i believe the problem you have in bumfuck wisconsin is a regional anomaly due to a lot of in breeding. so the goof ball tea party folks that you run into are just a reflection of all the folks from your region of the country. no poor does not equal lazy but lazy certainly equals poor. im willing to support the former but not the latter. do what you want with your own money, youre free to do so. but dont try and fuck with mine. peace...Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery.

In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter initially succeeds but eventually collapses, socialism may show early signs of success. But any accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies of central planning emerge. It is the initial illusion of success that gives government intervention its pernicious, seductive appeal. In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery.

A pyramid scheme is ultimately unsustainable because it is based on faulty principles. Likewise, collectivism is unsustainable in the long run because it is a flawed theory. Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives.

In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is based on the theory that incentives matter!

Under socialism, incentives either play a minimal role or are ignored totally. A centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where property is owned by the state, is a system without an effective incentive mechanism to direct economic activity. By failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent with human nature and is therefore doomed to fail. Socialism is based on the theory that incentives don’t matter!

there is no disputing that the redistribution process is experienced by most of us almost daily. it is we who are deciding where our money is best redistributed, not some government entity making bad decisions for us. now i am just a man of moderate means but i would like to think if i came up with an idea that would make myself a wealthy man and i worked hard to achieve that goal that i would not be punished by having someone taking most of it away from me. where is the incentive to be successful when in the end you work hard and end up having little to show for it?

i try and keep my corruption in house

Congoboy, you can still strike it rich. Look at the graph. Redistribution has been going on since Reagan, taking from the poor and giving it to the rich. Were not playing Monopoly here, were one person wins the game by holding all the money. In the absence of a progressive tax system, wealth naturally gravitates towards the wealthy. That is not sustainable. A progressive tax system simply re-balances the flow so that consumers continue to have enough to consume. That is hat made our country so great, was this relatively well off middle class. If you take that away, we'll just go backwards a 100 or so years, to the day where were all poor and a few are born rich. At that point you can forget having a good idea. If you are not born with wealth, you will never know it. Is that what you want?

[soh-shuh-liz-uhm]
so·cial·ism
–noun
1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

Please Cite to me one example of when, where, and how Socialism has "delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny" or "proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery."

Socialism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive.
Germany is the most technologically sophisticated, per capita wealthiest, highest-standard of-living nation in the Western European World, as well as the manufacturing mecca of Eurasia.
Germany has a Unitary Social Democracy.
France and Italy, respectively, have the second and third most millionaires and billionaires of any countries outside of the United States.
France is a Socialist Democracy. Italy is a Unitary Republic.
Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland all have the highest per-capita standard of living of any nation in the world.
All Five a Socialist Republics.

Again, cite one example of socialism "failing".

If you want to see a failure of pure, sheer unadulterated capitalism, you don't have to look to the United States.
Just look at China. China has well over three times the Population of the United States, and has been striving monomaniacally for the whole of the entire 21st Century thusfar to attain, for each and every one of its over 1 billion citizens, a standard of living that is no longer enjoyed by the vast majority of people even here. In the 21st Century, China has striven, through 1990's methods, to give its population the prosperity enjoyed by the United States in the 1950's.
Most experts estimate that China will have bankrupted itself by mid-century. Unlike the United States, which has been thriving with a National Debt since the Second World War, China, when bankrupt, will instead collapse its own infrastructure (much as America began to do during the Great Depression) and default as an international trading marketplace.
In essence, by the 2060's Capitalism unchecked will have reduced East Asia to the Pacific Equivalent of the Dust Bowl.
It is sheer CAPITALISM that is unsustainable.

On the other hand, The United States has bankrupted itself by exponentially multiplying its World War II Military Expenditures in order to "fight" a Cold War against the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and then Multiplying exponentially its Cold War Defense Budget in order to fight a "War Against Terrorism" [War itself is, by definition, a form of international terrorism] by invading and occupying foreign nation overseas in the Middle EAst and West Asia Halfway around the World which could not have ever possibly posed any sort of threat to anything or anyone in the western Hemisphere, unprovoked.
However, unlike China, which is on a tunnel-visioned monomaniacal one-way high-speed freeway toward default; the United States has options. We can either follow the model that eventually bankrupted and imploded the Soviet Union, where overspending on the Russian Military in a vain attempt to compete with the United States in the Thermonuclear arms and space races drove the USSR into a hole in the ground by the 1980's;
OR we can follow the model adopted by our Western European allies, wherein Universal Health care, progressive public education, tax rates comparable to those in the US in the 1950's, and robust innovation in sustainable technology products manufacturing industries have produced an era of prosperity not seen since America under Eisenhower.

[kom-yuh-niz-uhm]
“com·mu·nism
–noun
1. a theory or system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.

America could not be Communist if we tried, even if we wanted to. Communism and Capitalism ARE mutually exclusive.
Every Communist country on earth in history either has failed or is failing.
the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam...
That's it, really. There really haven't been that many, and most of the ones that there have been haven't lasted long enough to be mentioned.

Socialism and Communism are NOT synonymous, nor are they interchangeable.
Every one of the most prosperous nations on earth is socialist.
Every one of the communist nations left on earth are amongst the LEAST prosperous the world has ever seen (Cuba and North Korea just to name two).

Communism has failed.
Capitalism alone will fail.
Capitalism paired with Communism is failing.
Socialism Works well.
Socialism paired with capitalism works better.

I use the terms "liberal" and "progressive" as though they mean the same thing, because, in the dictionary definitions of those terms, "progressive" is a synonym of the term "liberal", and "liberal" is a synonym of the term "progressive".
Look them up for yourself if you don't believe me.
I use those terms as though they mean the same thing because they do.
I use the terms synonymously because they are, in fact, synonyms.

Anyone who believes that ALL liberals vote for ALL Democrats knows very little or nothing about politics at all.
Anyone who believe that ALL Liberals vote any one way is badly deluded.
anyone who believe that ALL Democrats are either Liberal or Progressive needs to check again.
And anyone who believes that no Republican has ever been elected by Liberals is extraordinarily ignorant of the history of politics in this nation.
Liberals would most definitively vote for any Republican, if only there were any such thing as a Liberal Republican anymore.
The Teabagging party has made sure that no such candidate can be viable.
Just because, under the dogmatic doctrine of the teabaggers, no Republican can be in any way shape or form at all liberal does not mean that "Republican" and "liberal" are mutually exclusive.
A Republican signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865. VERY Liberal.
Republicans ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Both of them extraordinarily Liberal.
Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Quite the Liberal thing for them to do.
By the Teabaggers definition, even the supposed model for all contemporary Republicans, Ronald Reagan, was a VERY liberal President, as was the Republican President who achieved many if not most of the accomplishment the Teabaggers attribute to Reagan almost thirty years before, Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950's.

You know what an ANTONYM of both Liberal and Progressive is?
"Conservative".
"Conservative Progressive" is an oxymoronic contradiction in terms.
Conservatives vote AGAINST Progressives no matter what.
And Reactionary NeoConservatives such as the Teabagging Party oppose Liberal anything.
The fact that so many of the Teabaggers self-proclaim to call themselves "Libertarians" demonstrates just how profoundly and resoundingly ignorant they really are of the meaning of that term.
Libertarianism, by definition, is an ideology to the left of Liberalism ,just this side of Socialism (Which the very same teabaggers, as ignorant of the rest of the world as they are of its history, believe is pure evil).
ANYONE who is genuinely Liberal can get both REAL Libertarians and genuine Progressives to support them.
Just as ANYONE who is genuinely Progressive can quite easily get all genuine Liberals and Libertarians to support them.
Just because they can, doesn't mean they will.
The Faux-"Libertarian" Reactionary NeoConservative Teabaggers have so thoroughly corrupted, twisted, and distorted the meaning of the word "Libertarian" that is makes me forced to wonder sometimes from time to time whether or not, in the age of the Teabagging Party, there are any actual REAL genuine Libertarians left.

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i'm not arguing that our tax system doesnt need some updating. your tax ideas and argument make sense. i'm for a flat tax myself. but you know the man who dies with the most toys wins!

I have shown in analysis that in the absence of tax, money flows quit rapidly yo the wealthy. Flat tax is the same. I just shifts more of the burden to the poor and middle class.

The person who dies with the most toys huh. I'd love to meet the SOB who shows up at the pearly gates saying, man what a drag those kids were; Wish I could have spent more of my time making money.

The person who dies with the most toys is dead.

but he still wins

wish i could spend more time makin kids

If that's your idea of winning, your either very young or...

or very sarcastic or facetious

you are full of what most people flush

thanks, i enjoy helping people grow

darlin, do not be taken in by this non-crusader for anything of value. His charm is surface, his heart is....well, you can figure that out on your own by reading his comments.