I have a good friend that went to highschool with him. I saw him in concert in the 1970's, probably before the seven words you can't say on television. He was more than an entertainer . . .
Republicans want to "reform" social security, because that is where the money is. Republican plans to help out social security prior to and through Bush, were to open the trust and invest it getting a better rate of return, like everybody was getting in the market. Can you imagine what would have happened with that?
I really can't get past the Republican plan to pay down the debt with a tax cut, (5b). I can't be cynical enough to believe that the powers to be think that the entire American populace is that stupid; nor can I quite get to the fact that the powers that be want Barak Obama elected that badly!
I think that people that worked hard through high school, and college, and grad school, in industry, medicine, banking, or whatever, people that were all about acquiring money, all these years saw successful entertainers and athletes, and what they were making, and decided that if people that didn't do anything important made that, they surely should. So they went out and got theirs. This happened durring the height of the trickle-down economics era, while unions were being busted and pension funds were raided.
The Olympic joke was not a joke. It happend. Romeny went to England, pulled out his Olympic expertise and made a series of comments only a douche bag would think, (let alone say out loud, to your host, when you were running for the highest elected office.) I was just talking to a friend who always voted person not party, and doesn't watch the big speeches. He used the Olympic brouhaha as proof Romney was truly stupid.
There are a couple good books out on inflation and how it is the Zyclon gas of personal wealth in this country. The jist of them all is this. We are taught that inflation is a specific thing. And we are led to belive we can think of it as a tangible. And that leads us to believe that it's definition is consistent. It is not. Every Presidential administration can change the definition of what inflation is. Do you include food? Do you include energy? Do you include housing prices? Or do you pick the combination that best reflects your puropse? Check it out. It is kind of funny, because I have seen heated arguments over apples to oranges, when either party had no idea what fruit they had.
Then add the myth of home ownership. Home ownership happend before the Second World War, and people had real wealth stolen from them. People paid for years, paid off their morgages, and had parties when they did and burned the papers. So what happened when the average home fell to two-fifths of it's pre depression value in the late '30's? After the war the new housing industry was not based upon ownership, it was based upon pre-paid subsidised rental. This financial transaction was pinned to an asset, it is true? But what happened in 2008 when this asset fell by as much as 40% in value? This was as big of a theft as raiding the pension funds, and filling them with worthless stock.
The concept of wealth is as nebulous as the concept of printed money (see Germany during and after WWII. See Eastern bloc and USSR during the Cold War). Exchanging tangible things like physical products or labor and services for intangible paper with printed #s on it is problematic at its core, particularly when it is not backed up by any physical thing with real worth.
"The concept of wealth is of significance in all areas of economics, and clearly so for growth economics and development economics. Yet the meaning of wealth is context-dependent and there is no universally agreed upon definition. At the most general level, economists may define wealth as "anything of value" which captures both the subjective nature of the idea and the idea that it is not a fixed or static concept. Various definitions and concepts of wealth have been asserted by various individuals and in different contexts. Defining wealth can be a normative process with various ethical implications, since often wealth maximization is seen as a goal or is thought to be a normative principle of its own." - wiki
"Wealth is not a zero sum game because people create wealth.
What is wealth? Wealth is physical stuff that makes life easier. Note, it's not money. Money is a form of wealth which is only of value in a fairly advanced society. Wealth is more fundamental than that.
Consider how useless a $100 bill would be if you lived alone, on a desert island. But consider how much more valuable a net for catching fish would be. Making a net from sticks and other available materials would be smart thing to do, because it would enable you to spend less time catching all the fish you need to live.
Making a net requires time and thought and effort. But the return is more free time. Ending each day with with enough fish to eat becomes easier.
Wealth, as such, makes life more secure (e.g. antibiotics in case you get an infection, rather than near-certain death), more comfortable (a warm bed in a house rather than a mat of sticks in a damp cave), easier (an electronic calculator rather than a pencil), and even more fun (a tennis court and a pair of rackets, rather than a thicket). People create wealth because they want life to be secure, comfortable, easy, and fun.
Perhaps, then, what is hard to grasp is that trade is not a zero-sum game.
Imagine there are two men on a desert island, one who makes water-shoes, and one who makes nets, and they trade, one net for one pair of water-shoes. One can get confused about this by thinking "The net's worth $30, and the shoes are worth $25, so the shoemaker is gaining $5 worth, and the net-maker is losing $5 worth."
The problem here is in thinking that a net, or a pair of water-shoes, has an inherent worth independent of who is evaluating it. Bringing in supposed dollar prices to measure the worth of nets and water-shoes hides a crucial pair of facts: that the net-maker's first pair of water shoes is worth more to him than his second net, and the shoemaker's first net is worth more to him than his second pair of water shoes.
Assuming, due to acquired skill, the net-maker can make good nets faster than the shoe-maker can, and assuming the shoe-maker can make good shoes faster than the net-maker can, trade lets each man have both a net, and a pair of shoes, at a time-cost that is lower than it would be had he attempted to make both a net and a pair of shoes himself.
That's why both men want to trade. It allows each of them to achieve the desired end result in less time.
Due to specialization, trade enables each man to help the other man while benefiting himself.
Imagine what would happen if trade were somehow forbidden: Each man would make both nets and water-shoes. No man would be motivated to make more nets (or shoes) than he needed. Neither man would become as expert at a craft as he would have become had trade been possible.
Free trade, then, motivates specialization, and specialization (the development of skill at doing one thing), increases wealth creation, because skill makes creating wealth easier.
The larger a society grows, given free trade, the fewer skills any particular individual must master in order to live, and therefore the more skilled he can become in his specialty. Each person gets really good at producing a particular kind of wealth, and trades it for the other kinds of wealth he needs.
This yields immense prosperity, and nobody loses unless he wastes his time producing lots of things which nobody wants. To prosper, one must not produce blindly.
Peter Schiff's book "How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes" inspired my examples. I recommend this book, at least its beginning chapters."
Why is wealth not a zero-sum game? - Objectivist Answers
