Reddit reviews Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

In fact, judging by the summaries of those two books I would recommend to you, Winner Take All Politics and Oligarchy

Hacker and Pierson are even better at showing conservative explanations for growing inequality are hogwash. It is nothing but politics, somewhat under Democrats and greatly under Republicans policies are enacted that favor the super-rich. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416588701/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk

You might want to read this book.. It's not as long as it looks because a lot of it is footnotes at the end. They go pretty easy on Obama, easier than me anyway, and blame the Party of "No" and corporate money for the blocking of Obama's agenda. After reading that book, I still see in Obama a failure of leadership and resolve, but, yes, the Republicans and especially corporate money in the political process are also to blame. I think you blame the electorate too much--Obama and party leadership should have kept those fires stoked and given folks more of a reason to vote Democratic. But I think Bernie is right, real change will come from the bottom, not the "leaders".

Make sure to tell your friends a little to the north!

Yes, wealth inequality is a major issue and the thing we talk about a lot is that Congress has been the single biggest factor in increasing wealth inequality in the last 40 years http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701

Because the wealthy purchase our politicians and influence their decisions, Congress acts as a vehicle to transfer wealth from middle and lower income American households to the top 0.01% who fund their elections.

We've got to stop that. By accepting no more than $540, I'm setting an example for how I believe our Congress should work. Fix the money problem, you will start to see improvements in the way Congress does business. Fix Congress: Save this nation.

Your "wild goose chase" entails 3 seconds of Googling, but I would recommend Hedrick Smith's Who Stole the American Dream. There's a helpful timeline associated with the book here. Here's part of it:

>August 1971—Corporate attorney Lewis Powell sparks a political rebellion with his call to arms for Corporate America. Circulated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Powell’s memo warns that anti-business attitudes and government regulation are threatening to “fatally weaken or destroy” the American free enterprise system. Powell declares that business must arm itself politically, battle organized labor and consumer activists, and mount a long-term campaign to change the balance of power and policy trends in Washington.

>1971–1972—The CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, responding to Powell’s memo, organize the Business Roundtable, which becomes the most potent political lobbying arm of Corporate America. The National Association of Manufacturers moves its headquarters to Washington. In one decade the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doubles its membership and the National Federation of Independent Businesses (small business) grows from 300 to 600,000 members.

There's also some great stuff about it in Hacker and Pierson's book Winner Take-All Politics. Here's an excerpt. Also, their most recent book, American Amnesia, details the rise of the anti-government movement in the U.S.

I don't want to sound like a dick, but you're making assumptions and treating them as fact. There is no reason manufacturing jobs NEED to move overseas other than the top echelons of corporate America want it that way so they can maximize their profits at the expense of American workers. The supposed beauty and inevitability of neoliberal trade policies have been touted for so long by folks like Paul Krugman, that many have just assumed this is the inevitable way of the world. It isn't. This is not to say that free trade between equals in the global community isn't good and sometimes in fact necessary to spur on needed competition and efficiencies. But the idea that the American worker, as well developing economies overseas and their workers, must submit to free trade policies over all other tools of trade policy, such as tariffs, is simply untrue. There needs to be a more healthy mix of free trade and protectionism. Otherwise America and the world community devolves into a feudal system that does much to contribute to unrest, dissatisfaction and even violence all over the world.

The manufacturing jobs exist, they just don't exist in this country as much as they once did. Sure, some of these jobs are being replaced by automation. But free trade globalism and technology do not have to leave American workers or workers overseas ravaged. That happens as a result of political choices made in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere around the world.

Obama and Hillary have employed "incrementalism" in a vain effort to keep workers and others in need placated while they keep their richest donors happy. It doesn't have to be this way and it shouldn't be this way.

We can eliminate and/or redo trade deals. We can let workers have a meaningful seat at the table as these deals are negotiated. We can do much to restore the middle and working classes. That we haven't, again, is in large part a political choice.

Check out these books if you want, or at least know they exist. (https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701)

(https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986)

These authors don't have all the answers, but it's a good start.

I humbly suggest you read Winner Take All Politics, or if you're a voracious reader: Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. These will free you of some fetters.

I am never rude. I do press conservatives for answers supported by data. I was a former conservative from 1988 until about 2002. From that point I slowly evolved into who I am today: A working class citizen who digs into the data and supports a legislative agenda that supports the working class. By working class I refer to any and all citizens who earn their wealth through labor, not "rent seeking" (investments, real estate rents, copyrights, patents, inheritance, and so on)

>You really should look more into Marxist countries.

There are no Marxist countries. There are and have been totalitarian dictatorships run by individuals or groups with a deeply flawed concept of Marx.

> I’ve read Marxist philosophy and it’s no wonder why it leads to corruption and starvation.

I've read it as well and taken a college course on it and somehow missed that. Please explain.

> Try reading some threads on conservative subs at least.

I was a 20+ year subscriber to the National Review, charter listener to Rush Limbaugh, and subscribed to the Conservative Chronicles for about ten years.


I would recommend these to you:

Rigged:
How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.

Download is FREE here

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York.

Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance by John Kay

And of course, Piketty's book.

You may think it's common sense, but it's not all that accurate. When I get home i'lI edit in some books you should read.

EDIT:

Betrayal of the American Dream.

Winner Takes All.

The Price of Inequality This one in particular is great. It's written by Nodel Prize for Economics winner Joseph E. Stiglitz.

>Do you see how illogical that is? You are questioning the preferences of millions of people and instead trying to put your preferred value on somebody's labor.

Markets don't just exist sui generis and are also prone to failure, sometimes in surprising ways. A CEO's salary isn't just determined by his "skills" or by supply and demand; information assymetries; leverage; tax policies; and societal norms and customs also play a role. In the U.S., the average CEO makes 354 times more than the average worker. In Israel and Japan, two countries home to some of the world's more dynamic economies, the gap is 76 and 67 times respectively. Do you think that supply and demand and the skill gap explain the entirety of that disparity?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/the-pay-gap-between-ceos-and-workers-is-much-worse-than-you-realize/?utm_term=.7094064afc74

>Skill disparity. The further back in time you go, the simpler an economy was and the skill disparity between the most and least was less. The supply for the skills required at the time was higher and the price was lower. The more complex the economy gets, the more skills will be required for many of its positions and the higher that pay disparity will be.

I agree that skill differentials can help explain some of the disparities in income we see today. But I also think your argument offers a more compelling explanation for the differences in wages we see between now and 1850, not now and the 1970s. Do you think doctors have all of a sudden become vastly more skilled now than they were back then? As I said in my earlier comment, I think that tax policy, globalization (which you could certainly make a good argument has exacerbated the skill differential problem you cite), and the evisceration of unions explain the decline in workers wages relative to CEOs far better than just "the market." Put in other terms, markets don't exist in a vacuum, and each of the factors I've cited above had important influence.

>Source? If you bring up top marginal rates as your answer then I'd like to facepalm in advance. I'd like to see the source accounting for deductions and the income brackets of those marginal rates. I'll answer this one for you: you're wrong. Either way, how is this relevant to your point?

In 1953, the effective tax rate on income for the wealthy was 70 percent. The average effective tax rate, including capital gains, was 49 percent. Today, it's 29 percent.

Source:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-01-02/1950s-tax-fantasy-is-a-republican-nightmare

I get where you're going though, and I totally agree that the most effective way for the government to gain more revenue may not be to raise back income tax brackets back to where they were in the 1950s. We probably need a VAT, especially on luxury goods, and also to more aggressively tax obvious negative externalities (carbon emissions, cough cough).

>>The economy grew faster

Source: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual

If you put in a trendline, you'll see that GDP growth in the U.S. has trended downward from over 4% in 1950 to about 2.5% today. My point is that there's very little evidence that higher taxes on the wealthy lead to slow economic growth, despite what supply siders think.

>They still do. Real wages may not grow as fast, but total compensation does. Compensation is a lot more than just the salary.

Source? About what about real compensation? Real compensation per worker? By most measures, real incomes for the middle and lower classes have stagnated or decreased for the past forty years, while incomes of the wealthy have skyrocketed.

>>Absolutely. The way to do that is to vote and get involved, isn't it? Most money in public policy by the wealthy and corporations isn't used to get some advantage, its used to prevent encroaching regulations on their activities which is what government has been doing aggressively since around WW2.

If you include "attempting to accumulate market power" in your definition of "preventing encroaching regulations," I'd agree with you. Most modern corporations don't really exist in a competitive free market - they're either oligopolies (Google, Facebook, etc), local monopolies (the telecom industry), or directly dependent on the government to keep their businesses competitive and afloat (defense industry, agribusiness). Many "encroaching regulations" are designed to shield companies from competition.

For excellent further reading on how the wealthy use their wealth and their power to make themselves wealthier and more powerful that will answer virtually all of your arguments more eloquently than I possible could, please read:

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics
https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701

Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/1491591617

Anthony Downs, "An Economic Theory of Political Action in Democracy" :
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1827369?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

not as much as voters believe he/she does:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phs6CwnutoY

The "funny" part is voters do not give our Presidents the power to do the things we think we've elected them to do, then we spend $billions to find the next one...

If you really want to understand politics/government, then read "Winner Take All - Politics" http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer---Turned/dp/1416588701/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333930442&sr=8-1