Summations Only

He didn't say farmers, he said small independent merchants. If, tomorrow, someone assassinated the President and every Democratic congressman and senator and everyone who's ever voted Democrat, what panic would that cause and what would it do to the economy and the stock market? That would be bad. And yet you think that the existence of Democrats is a bad idea. This perhaps suggests that the criterion of "if they were blown to bits tomorrow" is not the correct one.The protestors don't want Wall Street blown to bits, they want it better regulated so that Wall Street doesn't get another crack at destroying capitalism.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

TARP is not Wall Street or the rich. It is a bad government program. I did not support the GM and Chrysler bailouts. GM and Chrysler are not Wall Street or the rich, perse. They are two companies representing a relatively few rich, a minuscule part of Wall Street.As I said before, the loud mouth destructive and messy mob should be over at the Capitol where the idiots are who thought up TARP and all of this. They are the ones who got the nation in this mess, not Wall Street or the nation's industrious rich who make much of the American Dream happen, paying the lions share of taxes so that the sheeple out there not working can get all of the freebies like food stamps and two years unemployment/vacation etc, etc, etc, etc, etc....................

Hopeless.

That's a blatant false blind assertion. What evidence do you have that I don't want a two party system? I didn't name parties in my message. Bush et al supported the first bailout. It happens that the Democrats are the ones who are pushing for TARP and a whole lot of what are going to bankrupt the nation. The party needs a good house cleaning. Oh yah, sure, just what we need is more of the government medling in private lives and affairs that got us in the mess in the first place.You best go back to the science forums, Dr Adequate, where you can at least appear to be intelligent. You're posting inadequately, falsely and non-sensibly here.

Well, perhaps your stance is more nuanced then I thought. Are you for or against bankrupting the nation? Er ... it didn't. That's something you made up. I shall freely stipulate that even the most recondite aspects of science are clearer to me than whatever the fuck is going on in your head.

The one and only BUZSAW wonders: God, I hope so.....

Tell me, Buz. What does Wall Street do? Why do you find Wall Street so important that it is a good thing that the balance of our economy is in their hands?Mainly: what is Wall Street? In your own words, please. You are notorious for quoting definitions while lacking a working knowledge of the words you use.

Dont you Americans have tax cuts for the rich? If i pay 10% tax on my income and some ber rich guy from wall street pays 1% the guy from wall street would pay nominally more as in more cash but not his fair share.I think the more you earn the higher your taxes should be form 0% for the guys that barley make ends meat then 10% for the normal earners, 20% for the high earners, and 40% for the guys that earn an obscene lot of money. It would be way more fair then the way most systems tax especially the way Americans tax where the rich get freaking tax cuts lol.

Guardian Columnist on The Occupy MovementThe whole "occupy" thing arguably started elsewhere (Spain?). But the Wall Street protest seems to have been something of a firestarter/torch bearer.The more I read about it the less cynical and more hopeful it is a genuine movement for change I become.

Could you provide some evidence that the crisis is the result of government intervention?As I pointed out in my previous message, it's not banks that have their hands forced by the government but the other way around and so far, both parties worked as puppets for the big banks.More reading here:
http://digital.library.unt.edu/...es_d/IB87061_1987Jun29.pdf
You can see that the banks have sought (and obtained here) the repeal of Glass-Steagall in a ultimately bi-partisan effort that led to "too big to fail" along with the removal of leverage limits that allowed the bubble to grow in the first place (I'm still looking for sources for this one since I don't quite remember where I found it).I could try to find other sources and a better analysis but I won't do that if you're not even interested in responding to what I've shown so far, especially in my previous message.

Hello Frako Why is it more fair that the richer you are the higher the percentage? Why not 10% across the board regardless of your income? To me fairness is for it to be the same for everyone regardless of income.

Well, a couple of things.#1) You are talking about income tax, and that's not the only form of tax. Social Security taxes should also be taken into effect.If someone makes 10k a year and are taxed 10% for income and another 15% for various payroll taxes, they are losing 25% of their income.If someone makes 1 million a year, they are taxed 10% for income and only 1.5% for various payroll taxes because those top out at ~100k. They are losing 11.5% of their income.This makes it extremely hard for the person making very little money to save or invest. Meanwhile, the person making a lot of money has even more additional money to build wealth.#2) Such a system would need to void all tax shelters and loop holes. If we were to institute it without any changes, the rich would be paying basically nothing in taxes. Instead of having the shelter 25-30% of their income, they could merely shelter 10%.#3) It would result in a radical decrease in revenues for the government. Such a proposal would require extremely deep cuts in the military, SS and medicare/medicaid.#4) The number of people who become wealthy as a result of their own initiative is small compared to the people who become wealthy by having someone simply give them a lot of money.Trump, for example, got money from his dad. Lost it. Got more. Lost it. Got more and was successful.A tax system which rewards the pooling of wealth in the hands of the few will result in the few gaining more and more wealth while the working class loses out.That may sound "fair" to you, but when the working class gets hungry enough and sees that the top 1% has all the food - they are going to eat the rich.A flat tax sounds simple which is why it appeals to people in the Tea Party. To them "complicated" mean "bad" because only "a college boy could understand it". Education and Conservativism don't exactly play well together.

Marginal utility. Someone near the poverty line gets more out of 1% of their income than (say) Bill Gates does --- in BG's case taking away an extra 1% won't determine how well he can eat or whether he can make the rent this month. 1% of one's income is, by this standard, worth more to the person with a small income. But it is worth less to the government, because of being a smaller amount of actual dollars.

Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, by Douglas Schoen (Wall Street Journal Opinion)

...Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American peopleand particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.

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The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

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Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda. ...

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Doug Schoen out and out lied in his commentary in the WSJ. This is a clear case where the source material does not support what is said by the pollster. [quote]At Capital New York, Azi Paybarah has obtained the full poll results, and Schoen appears to have grossly misrepresented the results of his poll. He writes that a large majority are bound together by support for a radical redistribution of wealth. But when he asked the protesters what they’d like the Occupy Wall Street movement to achieve, just 4 percent said radical redistribution of wealth, which tied for last on the list of answers given. There is no mention of radical redistribution of wealth anywhere else in the poll.Meanwhile, 35 percent said they would like to influence the Democratic Party, Here are the full results of that question: Similarly, while Schoen writes that a large majority express opposition to free-market capitalism, when asked what frustrates them most about the U.S. political process, only 3 percent named our democratic/capitalist system. Out of 198 respondents, that amounts to five or six people, which is quite the opposite of a large majority. Here are the full results for that question: Schoen also writes that [s]ixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirementno matter the cost. But the actual question makes no mention of costs. [/quote]SourceWhat does this show? Schoen is a lying piece of shit.Edited by Theodoric, : sourceEdited by Theodoric, : No reason given.