#2 I didn’t say only 10% of Americans own stock. I said 90% of all stocks are owned by a tiny minority. Throwing money into the stock market by cutting corporate taxes will slightly benefit the 70% of Americans who own stock, but it will even further push the median net worth lower than the average as it inefficiently gives the majority of the money to the 1% who own most of the assets.

#3 Do you understand the concept of average and median values? The median net worth has been moving further and further below the average net worth which clearly demonstrates that the gap between the bottom HALF (not just the poorest) and the very richest is increasing. I’m not sure where you find a fallacy in there — if you don’t understand medians, just let me know and I’ll back up and try to make my point another way.

No I don’t see any problem with the rich getting richer. I also agree that the poorest will always stay right around zero. When the bottom half gets pushed further and further from the average, the majority of the people are not benefiting from the current economy or policies.

#4 I quite agree a market driven economy is a decent system and doesn’t require manufacturing jobs. The point was that unlike countries like Ireland who attracted manufacturing jobs by slashing corporate tax rates, there are very few corporations that the US CAN attract by cutting corporate taxes. I’m not saying corporate tax rates should stay high because of this — you just brought up that many countries become wealthy through cutting taxes, and I was pointing out that such a strategy has only worked in specific cases and America is not currently in an analogous position.

I don’t necessarily think that you are a bleeding heart liberal, but I believe that you are too pessimistic and have bought into some liberal assumptions.

I have no doubt you could raise the average standard of living by throwing more money at shareholders, but it would be purely caused by inflating the wealth of the top 1%. The median standard of living would continue to drop.

As for slashing taxes to become wealthy, that only works if the economy is poor and tax cuts can attract existing companies from other countries as recently happened in Ireland. Of course, we’re largely losing industry to countries that have some of the worst health care and living conditions in the world. We can’t just attract companies from the rest of the EU as Ireland did — we’d have to compete with China and Singapore. I shudder to think of how poorly we would have to treat the majority of Americans to be able to attract industry from THOSE countries!

After all that, I’m sure I’ve been painted as a bleeding liberal in your mind, but I should be clear that I’m a big fan of tax cuts and I quite agree that our government is too inefficient at the moment to justify the current levels of spending. I’m just not impressed by partisan arguments saying that tax cuts are always good or that universal health care will act as a panacea. To every policy, there’s a down-side and at the moment, I’m afraid that we’re looking at a larger problem in the sheer number of under-saving, aging baby-boomers than in losing basic manufacturing to Singapore. I’d LOVE to say they just need to live with their mistakes, but the reality of what it means to allow our elderly to choose between food, shelter and health-care makes me think twice.

Not only is the average American grossly underfunding their own retirement, they’re putting the vast majority of their money into the stock market through tax-advantaged retirement accounts.

No matter how stupid in economic terms, there will be a huge number of uninsured seniors living on social security alone even if the stock market does well! If the stock market does poorly… there will be a whole lot of competition among 70 and 80-year-olds for jobs that aren’t physical and don’t require recent education or qualification.

At some point, the large number of poor elderly with failing health will become too large to ignore. At some point, simply letting them wallow in their mistakes turns into a human rights violation.

I hate the tax cuts as much as the next guy, but the problem is a combination of the move to put responsibility for retirement onto the workers and a few generations that haven’t been taught that saving isn’t really a choice any more. That makes propping up the stock market by stimulating spending a necessity if the government wants to avoid the high costs of starting a universal pension.