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Couple points, we have been socializing the risk and privatizing the profits for some time now. The competitive nature of America is not the idealized one you grew up with. In fact, we are a nation on the decline in the overall picture.

Secondly, massive wealth gaps cause social upheaval which lead to decreased opportunity. See the American gilded age and the era leading up the Great Depression. We keep needing to relearn this lesson. When CEOs make 500 times the pay of their average worker, there are problems. They certainly did not do 500 times the work regardless of how you calculate in college education.

Lastly, conservatives (yes. you are one, Bal, you know it) tend to focus on the "handout" aspect of wealth redistribution. This certainly is important to the short term ability to make ends meet for the laid off worker or the single mother or whatever. However, the more important part of wealth redistribution is funding start up grants for small businesses, investing in infrastructure, investing is schools, etc. These are the long term fundamentals that bring opportunity and competition which Republicans neglect especially in a down market (right now the banks won't give loans and are even afraid of loaning to each other so good luck if you need to make a capital investment in your business).

PS: wealth redistribution works both ways. For the past 30 years wealth has been redistributed upwards. Redistributing it downwards isn't socialism, it is resetting the tax code to be fair again.



If you're going to talk economics then you should at least apply the concept of supply and demand to CEOs. Despite what your perceptions may be of CEOs they are paid just like professional sports players because they have talents that are scarce among us. They are savy shrewd businessmen with decades of experience who have spent years making astute analysis while pleasing all the stockholders on the board. If they make the stockholders 1 billion dollars then you can't blame the CEO for getting paid 30 million (3%). If anything its royalties.

However I do agree with you on the tax break. The 39% marginal tax rate that Obama will make happen is really only going to hurt the .0001% wealthy. I mean even if you're lower upper class making say 260,000/year you're only going to pay about 500 dollars more as opposed to the current 34% Bush rate.

I don't necessarily think its our infrastructure we need to improve, but rather just offer more incentives in every area. The education system sucks not because of the lack of books but because the teachers are so low paid that they have no incentive to try to teach kids to learn. If they were making $100,000/year you could sure as hell bet theyd be more committed and excited to teaching more. We need to discourage our fuel consumption by offering more tax breaks or stimulus packages to people who don't emit a lot of co2 or use electricity. We need to do what China does and pay people more to have less babies. You don't hear a lot about single non married people in poverty do ya?

Keep in mind stretch wealth redistribution is an idea carried out by liberals (maybe such as yourself I don't know). The problem with liberals and if you take a look at say SF youll see that their second priority is to help out all the poor people but their first priority is to make sure the whole world knows that their trying to help out the poor people.

San Francisco has a thirdworld public transportation system thats inconsistent on time, overpopulated, littered with trash and crackhead degenerates yet we let the whole world know how our new solar system and energy cut backs will make us a greener loving city. Were filled with homeless and drug addicts yet we make sure to tell the whole world all about how accepting we are of one anothers.