SamFisher, facial engineer. Let's all be stupid. It's much more fun. It's the end of the world anyway. Viva la revolution! WWIII!!
Germany declaring war on the United States provides a legitimate reason for fighting in the European theater in WWII. This despite the fact that the American people were misled prior to the war. In other words, lying about the war did not make the war a mistake. Bush lied about weapons of mass distruction in Iraq, but that does not mean that the war in Iraq was a mistake. There can be other justifications, and the lying about weapons of mass distruction should have no bearing on them. That makes the comparison completely relevent.
StupidMoniker - I am far closer to Friedman than Stiglitz when it comes to removing market restrictions. I'm pro-deregulation in almost every sector. I'm disgusted by tarriffs and agricultural subsidies. I want to price roads and flatten out the tax code (but with a much bigger standard deduction). That said, there's increasingly convincing empirical evidence that increases in the minimum wage actually lead to REDUCTIONS in the unemployment rate. The theory is catching up to the evidence too. Josh Angrist, Alan Kruger, David Card and many others top notch labor economists have done really neat studies of the minimum wage/employment relationship, and the results are very thought provoking. Nobody really argues that raising the minimum wage is bad because prices will go up. Any increase in prices is bounded by the elasticity of labor supply and the marginal product of labor, so it's not likely to be a big deal. Historically, the arguments against the minimum wage have been that it actually hurts the poor by reducing low-wage jobs. However, these arguments seem to hold less and less water in light of the empirical literature. I'm not saying that you can raise the minimum wage ad infinitum and get these gains. But marginal increases in the minimum wage have the potential to reduce unemployment and help the poor at the same time. Frankly, I think this one's a no brainer.
Someone showed me a great quote yesterday: Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. Surely the lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions, and any new recession would break all deficit records. It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. -- John F. Kennedy, 1961
Ugh. Right wing mythology that just won't die. JFK reduced the top rate (above $500,000) from 91 percent to 70 percent and sliced rates at $50,000 and $75,000 from 59 percent to 50 percent and from 75 percent to 62 percent, respectively. You don't have to be a Republican to see that 91, 59, and 75 percent is too high, even for the wealthy. That the Dead-enders on the Supply Side/Laffer Curve wing always trot out this Kennedy quote as if JFK would be in agreement with their attempts to shift the rich's fair burden to the backs of the middle class and poor shows how desperate, discredited, and braindead their ideas are. JFK was good government, W's cut was folly, as can be seen in the budget numbers since he took office. Also, when JFK says "budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions," he could not have anticipated that a periodic recession would occur when actual wild-eyed spenders in the guise of "fiscally responsible" Republicans would cause slow economic growth by their actions.
I wouldn't talk about myths if I were you. http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/04/26/PM200604264.html From APR's Steve Moore. There's a similar analysis done by the New York Times, but they hide it on their subscription site and I only could find secondary sources. You can argue that it's because of the growing gap between the rich and poor, but the result is the same.
That has only been a recent phenomenon (last 2 years or so) due to the growing gap that you cited. When the tax cuts were first implemented in the first few years the effect was to increase the share of the burden on the middle class.
