I received an anonymous comment the other day that casts some doubt as to whether a true meritocracy would benefit the middle class because of the vitality function (curve). In essence I have addressed this already on The Middle Class Forum in a post that brought up the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle theorizes that [...]
Earlier on this year I displayed graphs of trends since the late forties that our productivity has shifted towards the financial and service sectors and away from producing goods, and that the main impetus for this shift occurred in the seventies. There are consequences to be expected from such a shift in the economy. Here [...]
Continue reading about Economic Trends – Middle 20% since 1953
Up until this year our standard of living allegedly doubled since the seventies. When the costs of housing, health care and education all rise faster than the consumer price index, while wages increase more slowly, you have to wonder about the legitimacy of the indicators they use. Let us come up with our own.
I provide [...]
Someone responded with a terrific comment to the previous entry. Unfortunately, the person did not provide a name or residence, the requirements for commenting here. Since I could not approve the comment I’m cutting and pasting to address it here in a deflation follow-up.
“If you cause deflation in the MacMansions (which are blights on the [...]
Continue reading about Why Tax the Wealthy? – A Deflation Response
Both inflation and deflation are dirty words. Inflation is bad if the prices of goods go up much faster than the wages of labor. This has occurred over the past thirty years with expensive but essential items such as housing, health care and education. Some of this is due to minimum and median wages being [...]
Corporate backed media, think tanks and academics love to point out that the wealthy pay proportionally more in taxes. They accuse our tax system as redistributive, taking away hard earned money from the wealthy to provide entitlements to the less deserving. This is what echo chambers and news talk hosts regurgitate and this is the [...]
Providing economic trends data that you do not find often has been one objective of The Middle Class Forum. As the Forum Features indicate data has been provided for escalating housing costs, health care costs and wealth disparity, as well as other long term trends. But outside of an economic report card that included a [...]
This entry is part of a series focusing on Dr. George Reisman’s article, “The Myth that Laissez Faire is Responsible for our Current Economic Crisis.” The article provides a defense of laissez faire capitalism and states, correctly, that our economic system falls short of that ideal. But there is a good reason for that. As [...]
The last system characteristic on the economic report card is market stability. Stability depends on income and wealth distribution and the rate of inflation. Both high wealth disparity and high inflation hampers the ability to trade goods and services, the essence of market activity. The economic report card revealed instability due to both factors of [...]
One of my favorite sayings is “out of loss comes opportunity.” I once lost my job as a high school teacher at a bad time for my family. This was due to a logic-defying sequence of events initiated by budget cuts, the kind of sequence that makes one wonder if they are on a predestined [...]
