Originally Posted by filtherton

So your saying that all this is the result of SSE? You expect me to just believe you? Why is SSE even relevant? Didn't that sweet little economic boom of the 90's follow a tax increase?

I would argue that all the stats you opened the thread merely support the idea that those who already have bunches of money, rich folk and businesses, are making more money. That's great for them. That's what SSE is all about; giving people with a lot of money even more money because they might at some point have an interest in letting the little guy have some, maybe. How does the saying go? "If you feed the horse enough oats, eventually the crows will be able to pick some oats out of its shit"? It was probably more eloquent in its original form. This is actually a very apt analogy. The horse extracts every last little bit of nutrition from the oats. Digests them. The horse benefits as much as it possibly can. The crows are left to pick whatever nuggets of nourishment they can find off of the horse's waste. Sounds great if you're a horse, or if you fancy yourself a horse in the future. I bet you fancy yourself a horse, ace. It's hard to embrace a philosophy that has you picking through someone else's shit to get by. It does lend itself well to delusions of capitalist grandeur a la ayn rand, though.

According to your stats, the well off are getting weller offer. Very good. SSE must be working. But wait, how do tax cuts for the wealthy translate to more money for the wealthy? That's one place you lost me.

Even if you were to ignore the costs associated with implementing SSE policies, you know, like cutting funding for services like the police, the fire department, your local department of transportation, etc, i still don't think that you really have any kind of justification for SSE based on notions of what's good for the little guy.

I think claiming that those stats are due to SSE is wrong. Your attribution of the abovementioned statistics to SSE assume that SSE is actually a relevant economic force. How could it be? How could giving more money to people who already have an overabundance of money somehow result in a brighter economy?

If you really wanted to use tax cuts to help the economy, you'd drasticly cut the taxes of people(small businesses too) who would then use that extra money to directly contribute to the health of the economy through consumer spending, not the people who already have the money to get whatever the hell they want.

What really happens with SSE is that the people who already have a lot of money pay less taxes. However they spend that money might at some point have some sort of positive effect on something relevant to the economy, but perhaps not.

It seems more likely to me that the capitalist class are getting richer because of increased consumer spending? Isn't most of our economic vitality due to consumer spending? Couldn't your stats be due to increased consumer spending? You said it yourself. More and more people are able to get financing for a house and a car and some furniture and a nice vacation and a pool and a higher education etc. People are spending more. This doesn't actually meant that they're making more. It just means that they're getting more into debt. It also means that bankruptcy is now perpetually on the rise. Woohooo.