LOL. No. The reality is that the Republicans are a uselessly centrist party who suck at politics, while the Democrats keep moving further and further to the left on almost every single issue and the majority of the media provides cover for them by pretending that only Republican positions are extreme. See: abortion. The mainstream position on abortion is that it should be legal up to a point, and that a viable fetus should not be terminated without reason. The Democratic Party has drifted so far left on the issue that the pro-life Democrat is basically extinct, but you won't hear a word about how this represents a radicalization of the party to the point that no Democrat can challenge this dogma without being called anti-woman. While the media ceaselessly tried to tie every single pro-life Republican to Todd Akin, they have never spent a single second scrutinizing Obama's equally extreme position of abortion any time, anywhere, for any reason, paid for by tax payers.

I don't exactly see how the idea that the United States is a republic and not a democracy has anything to do with your jumping at Ayn Rand-shaped shadows, but as far as I'm concerned the "Tea Party mentality" (also, the founding fathers' mentality) that there ought to be a hedge against a tyranny of the majority is charmingly quaint in this day and age of unbridled government and much preferable to the left's mentality that the Constitution is just so much toilet paper.

First Detroit now California.... LIBERALS ARE ON A ROLL LOL.

America is a democracy that elects representatives, outside of some local and state initivaties.  It elects representatives that are to respond to the will of the people and temper extremes.  You can also have non-democratic republics which are dictatorial, and one party rule.  America isn't that.  You has the U.S.S.R that was a socialostic republic.  For a democratic republic to work, you need to have a sufficiently independent and self-reliant public, and sufficiently educated, in order to have the will of the people properly represented.

This democratic republic mentality grew post the founding fathers and was subject to debate also.  You had eltists who wanted to end up being governed by an upper class, and you had the populist side.  Originally, Democrat and Republican represented the differences in these mindsets.  As of now, it is a big blur, with both the Republican and Democratic parties representing collections of interests groups and negotiated truces between them.  The GOP side happens to currently represent a collection of interests groups that isn't sufficient to get elected.

The heart of the issue here is whether or not the people should rule themselves, or if they need to be governed by elites.  Anything else is a matter of degree and implementation.

Actually, wealth disparity is also a symptom of that.  If you look at the data you'll see Individual Gini Coefficent has actually shrunk/stayed the same, while household and Family gini coefficent has increased.

The poor indvidual is actually making a lot more money on average then they have been decades ago.  This is espiecally true if you count non wage income.  (These are both accounting for inflation.)

The issues in the current rise in wealth dispairty are due to two things.

1) There are far more single parent /single person households on the bottom end of the spectrum...

2) The rich are more often marrying the rich.  Meaning it's much harder to "Marry up" out of poverty.  (Due to women in the workplace, the rise of suburbs, gated communities.)

Again, this is not to say there isn't a very small 1% or more like .1% that are getting more and more rich.  However, they aren't getting rich off the poor's backs, but at the expense of the lesser rich.

I believe what you saw was that households went from one income to two incomes, and then divorce rates went up, so there was one bread winner in the house.  The anything but the upper end flatlined actually, and other costs went up.  Now add globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs.  And the bottom part, has fallen behind, if you factor in inflation.  Globalization and competing with China plays a part.  Most new jobs created are low end retail and low paid jobs.  Stuff more immune to globalization is on low end, if can be done with a lot, or if benefitting from globalization (as in scarce globally) results in these people doing real well.  America has run out of places to get more money to keep up.  Credit cards are maxed out, and the borrow from equity is not there.

We pretty much have infrastructure with colleges at one level, and medical at one level, making costs to survive expensive, and the ability to pay not there.  Currently, I am working a low paying helpdesk at home, and cheating severely to make it by not paying rent while staying with family.  I am going to need to see what happens with my Medicaid.  If I didn't have Medicaid actually, I probably wouldn't of been fixed enough to do a desk job (bad disk = no sitting, thus no desk job).

Again... that's not actually true when you count individual earnings.  (The flatlining)

As for the creation of low end jobs.

For that to be true and individual gini coefficent to be down.  That would mean that "Real Median household income" would need to be down.

Which it isn't.   Well it has been from 2008 to 2011.... (and still plummeting) however that hasn't been a long term thing.

I used to be very fundamentalist about this liberal thinking too.  I thought over regulation was the main  problem, but it was the lack of regulation of the banking system which drove pretty much all western economy to an abysm.

thats not true. it is ineffective regulation that caused the banking problem. In CA over regulation and taxation are a problem, there is no way around it. We probably have more regulation than any other state and it makes it hard to do business here. Because of this many businesses are leaving the state, meaning less jobs and taxes to go around.

Well... I wouldn't say it was ineffective regulation.  I'd say it was ineffective regulators.

The second graph is the most misleading graph I have ever seen and should not be used as the basis of an argument.

For starters, your costs are a displacement figure, whereas your benefits are a derivative, purely used to show an extreme bias towards the cost. If you added cost as a derivative as well, you'd see it's just as flat as the benefits.

Secondly, the graph uses two completely separat measurements on the same graph, with the assumption that, for example, $80k is wirth the equivalent of a 30% IMPROVEMENT in Achievement EVERY YEAR.

It's nothing more to appeal to the brainless mass who see this and say "OMG Education spending out of control!!!"