3 Terms?  I'd say it took.... well shit.   I can't even say.  There hasn't been a fiscal policy that's made sense... since i'm not sure.  I'd say from Carter to Obama it's been nothing but crap.   I say this because I know nothing about Ford's policies.

Nixon's weren't that great, as he proved... every poltician is a Kensyian.  Sadly it makes more sense politically to douse gas on a fire then it does  do nothing.

Oh, I'm not saying at all that the deficit should be fixed just like that.  As the comment below mine says, I am trying to get at how it has actually simply gotten worse since the democrats have held congress, not better.  They have done absolutely nothing to fix the situation, and now they somehow have some magical solution they say will work...I feel like I'm told this crap all the time by politicians, but it has yet to actually happen.

Already did, check the links I gave earlier, heck check the gini coefficient stuff that Kaz gave, check the first few links I gave in my first post in this thread on the great divergence

The number of rich growing and the overall wealth of the rich doesn't prove me wrong, it in fact proves me right and you wrong, as I said the wealthy have come out of the recession even better than before, while the middle and the poor face stagnant wages and high unemployment, so my earlier point that the rich emerged from this recession in a better psotion than anyone is proven correct.  Your argument that the recession hurt them the worst was proven wrong

First off you seem to be thinking I was arguing something completely different, I wasn't arguing income disparity with my comment earlier, I was arguing thast the wealthy came out better than anyone else, which is proven by the fact that their wealth and ranks grew  and that wages and employment were pretty much stagnant for pretty much everyone else.  There is no way you ca get around the fact that th rich emerged fro m the recession in a better position than anyone else. Accusing me of not knowing things, might hold more substance if you actually proved you understood the issue being discussed in the first place.

Your argument was that the rich were hurt worst by the recession, this was proven wrong, as they were not hurt by the recession, they emerged even with more wealth and larger ranks.

The issue of income disparity is a different issue, as it is about the difference in wealth between groups, something which was not part of my original argument, my argument was that the rich emerged in a better position, not that income disparity grew during the recession, in addition I pointed out they are doing far better than the middle and poor classes, which is again true, here the gini coefficient backs up my point, as 46.8 is still an extremely high level of income disparity, indicating that the gulf between the rich and the middle and poor classes is large.

You might want to try and read before jumping to respond in the future

It showed the opposite, axt. Thats my problem. You didn't do your homework.

Yes, the income distribution is rising in favor of the rich. The question I asked was: Was it outstripping taxes? The answer is no, its not. The actual data shows that as the rich become richer, they are shouldering an even larger burden of taxes.

Lets correlate the data:

Income taxes paid by top 1%:

Income from top 1%:

Merging the two charts together, you find that in 1980, the rich earned about 10% of the income, and paid 17% of income taxes. In 27 years, we've seen the rich increase their income share by approximately 135%, and tax burden by 156%. Or in other words, they pay more taxes as a percentage of income today than they did in 1980.

The numbers don't lie, axt. Your analysis is wrong, because you never actually pulled up income/tax data.

Sorry, but there are quite a few flaws in your argument Stick, first you're comparing two seperate measures, one is percentage of pretax income  and the other is percentage of income tax revenue, the problem with that is you don't give any values for what the pretax revenus is compared to what the tax revenue is.

In addition, you only took into account pre-tax income, as I noted in my comment earlier, I referred to wealth which is more than just income, as many of the rich are quick to point out, they have low incomes but high wealth, due to the fact that their money comes from other sources than just income like capital gains, so by just pointing to pre-tax income ignores much of their wealth, Buffett for example is quick to point out that his taxes are extrmely low due to most of his money coming from investments.

Can you please give a link showing where Buffett says that...because there are taxes on investment gains just like everything else, so I really don't think that has truth to it.

Taxes on capital gains and dividends are not income taxes, and often have lower rates

Here is the stuff on Buffett

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ece

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1126/042b.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html

From NYT:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Yes, they are paying lower tax rates, but it isn't just as simple as lower tax rates.  When you have huge businesses like these people (heck, even I am self employed and write stuff off), you are generally writing off shit loads of stuff, so a lot of your income won't even be considered taxable.

That may play a role, but from what Buffett himself says, its probably not anywhere big enough to create the result he's referring to, in addition, the writeoffs of Berkshire hathaway would probably apply to its own corporate taxes and not his taxes, since a corporation is a seperate legal entity, he seems to indicate tat his  taxes seem to be affected by the difference in tax rates of different sources of his wealth, and it proably applies to a lotof other wealthy people as well.