athena – Ok. Thx on “plutonomy” article. I have not read it yet, so I will refrain from comment.

“Don’t give in”

Does this mean don’t look at arguments and viewpoints different from yours?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy Ok. Gotcha. FDL buzzword. Vast wealth in private hands by earned by founding and running companies is a good thing not a bad thing. Andrew Mellon founded the National Gallery. Bill Gates funds vaccine research on a massive scale. These people created the jobs we so need in this economy. We should encourage more [...]

athena – But real wages is measured in nothing but the standard of living they buy. Real wages = standard of living. And median real wages (= standard of living) have grown over the last 45 years, by about 50%. I grant that the top 30% of college-educated knowledge professionals have done even better than [...]

athena – Your reply makes no sense. Real wage is what you can buy with the dollars you are paid. If stuff is cheaper then your real wage is up even if the nominal number is the same. Standard of living is, after all, the point of a wage.

Health care costs have risen because of the government programs of Medicare and Medicaid. So Johnson’s War on Poverty probably increases poverty. Surprise, when the government writes open ended checks for things, their price rises rather than falls. Free-market reforms that lower costs is the right solution for health care, not government rationing or bloated [...]

“beast”

Ok, well, mostly free of personal insults directed at me. :)

By “talking points” you mean “decisive set of facts and arguments”. :)

Kelly – In short, you have no replies to my arguments. I recognize that this is a site hostile to my views, but I wanted to see what people would say. I have not personally insulted any person here, nor, I will acknowledge, as anyone personally insulted me. The exchange has been relatively fact and [...]

Cars today have many more features than 40 years ago, so of course they cost more.

Excess real estate inflation can be cured by eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction.

Health insurance from an employer should also be taxed as income.

stewart: Yes, the BLS numbers are partisan nonsense. Median real living standards in the US are up about 50% over the last 30 or so years by any reasonable measure.

According to the Economist (an establishment publication, hardly Austrian) wages for the *bottom* 10% increased about 30% over the last 30 years, about 1 percent a year after inflation. This corresponds to what we see visually, which is that even the lowest paid are doing substantially better (one third better in real terms) over the [...]

Stagnant Wages Myth: http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2007/11/lets-kill-the-s.html

I am not “obscuring” anything. There has been no decline in US wages or living standard in the last 45 years. There has been tremendous improvement and growth by almost all measures (education, longevity, population, house size), staggering growth for a mature economy suffering the ravages of Keynesian stagflation in the 1970′s. My controversial claim [...]

If you cannot accept that the typical American (including the absorption of 60-odd million immigrants) is better off than 45 years ago, then this debate is silly. Question: do the posters on here really believe the “stagnating wage” argument, or is this simply a piece of mud to throw during an election season? Again, the [...]

Cyvern is a video game from the early 1990′s. I believe it is short for “cybernetic wyvern” as the main shooter is a robot dragon.

Thanks for playing.

“No, as a minimum wage worker her income should count as any other–which means, probably another thumb on the scale downwards.” Yes, of course. Which is why “American” wages are not stagnating, despite your idiotic statistical charts and columns. This lower-than-average income position for the Vietnamese immigrant is not a sign of “stagnating” or “declining” [...]

If you cannot accept that the typical American, including large number of youth living independently in their 20′s and 10′s of millions of immigrants added to our economy (who of course start out in low wage low skill jobs and then either they or their children move up the economic ladder), is living better now [...]

The stock market crash did not cause the Great Depression. It caused a very minor blip in production. The GD was caused by government attacks on business as a populist political response. These attacks started with Hoover and continued with FDR. The economy recovered only with WW2, when FDR started to partner with business because [...]

Krugman is the proponent of a clearly failed philosophy and jumped the shark 3 years ago. To suggest he “refuted” anything is rather silly.