Quote Originally Posted by Hlleonard View Post
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I believe the post you are referring to was in response to a question by Mr. waterdog "I can't imagine the shape this country would be in without strict rules and regulations" , there are third world countries all over the planet and I believe a signpost of most of those is a lack or at least a limited middle class which was the point of my response to him... In those countries, there is very little concern for the safety and well being of the folks in the lower class as more is always better and if you happen to be in the upper class, the only place to get more is from the lower class folks... I have no doubts about the wealthy paying the lions share of the taxes collected by the federal government nor do I doubt your statement about the number of folks who pay no taxes, I'm not sure why we give folks the credits you referred to which is way beyond the taxes taken out of their weekly wages during the year (child tax credits, earned income credits) but if you set all that aside and concentrate on the middle class, which using your numbers pay 30% of the tax dollars collected, not a math mathematician or financial annalist but it seems to me like a dollar earned by the middle class is taxed heavier than a dollar earned by either of the other two classes of folks, it looks to me like a reduction in the middle class will result in less dollars in the tax till with no tax cuts of any kind... I believe a loss of the middle class will move us to a place nobody in our country wants to go... I'm not sure I would do anything regulatory to move wealth from the upper class to the middle class which seems to be what you inferred, that might be called socialism or something like that, but deregulation within the government seemed to cause what is referred to as the boom and bust in the housing market and as a result, the rich got richer and the rest suffered the consequences... The only way to preserve the middle class is through better pay days and not worse ones... Trade unions were the best friend the middle class had and I don't know if there is anything that can replace those.
Actually, as I understand it, the housing collapse was caused by the likes of Barney Franks and Chris Dodd who changed fannie and freddy loan terms. 5% or even 0 down, and serious relaxation of credit worthiness. Seriously under qualified buyers got into tons of toxic loans, and those loans got sold around till nobody would buy them anymore. So the housing collapse had little to do with DE regulation, and much to do with vote pandering by congresspeople.

BTW, the Obama administration is still (very quietly) pushing the lending practices that got the collapse rolling to begin with.

I didn't know trade unions were gone. Don't they make up a large portion of Democrat financial support and voter base? If they are dead, then the party they support has not done a very good job for them have they? Also, there are those who believe unions have inflated wages/benefits to the point where companies move manufacturing operations out of the country to remain competitive.

When I started at he company I'm at, there were 40+ manufacturing facilities in the US, but our competitors were already mostly off shore. Now we have maybe 10 facilities in the US, and most of those are for product distribution.