Is "the rich getting richer" a problem?

[Kasz216]

mrstickball said:

Kasz216 said:
As for your second point.

That's totally possible... and piggybanks on to my point earlier about why it was easy to grow during those earlier times with earlier tax rates.

It was an easier time to grow. Growing was easy.

It certainty is harder to grow now... and it's going to keep getting harder to grow.

Which is also why you need more incentives.

It's why Warren Buffet had to phrase the statement he did the way he did to get across the political point he wanted when he essentially said nobody was going to turn down a sure thing if the tax rate on capital gains was higher.

Nobody was going to turn down a sure thing... but so little in investments are a sure thing.

I would point to the fact that the overall regulatory structure of our government and economy was vastly different, and far more favorable back then, than it is today.

People always make the mistake of pointing to "Oh! But the tax rate was real high in the 50s and 60s, but the middle class was growing and everything was great! Lets raise taxes and promote unions!" without looking at the totality of the economic climate in years' past.

For example, there was no Clean Air or Clean Water act. The tax code had thousands less pages than it does today, and the labor force was significantly different than today. Those things correlated to the expansion of the economy. Indeed, the countries that are growing by leaps and bounds today are doing it through very weak regulations and arguably small government, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and so on.

That's a good point.  Only real outlier being China on the small government front.

Not the regulations front though!

I read an interseting article the other day that claims the reason global climate change has been completely undetectable for the last 15-20 years or so is because of the Chinese and there excessive use of coal leading to massive soot cloud cooling effects.

That's right up there with the fact that it's thought by climate historians that depopulation of the Native Americans led to Global cooling.  As there was a plague that killed off something as high as like 95% of the population sometime before the Pilgrims landed in North America... and despite there "Green" image... Native Americans deforested areas like crazy.