Reply #33: Not to minimize what is important to you, but I'm not looking for who is #1 [View All]

[jtuck004]

or what the "common wisdom" is about who is making things well or not. I drive a 15 year old GM car that works just fine, so perhaps you are thinking of someone elses' meme.

Sure wealth is being created, but it may not be enough. According to the BLS stats (which may be conservative) we have 27 million people either unemployed or underemployed and every indication that we will have double digit unemployment for at least the next couple of years. We may see unemployment of 9 or 10% as far out as 2020. The manufacturing sector lost _at least_ 1 of every 6 jobs from 2000 to 2007, and then we REALLY lost jobs. All the time that "little" financial sector grew. What crap.

Output may have increased, but at the cost of a lot of lives that no longer have an income. And a lot of the "wealth" is being shipped overseas in bullets and trucks and paychecks, both to our troops and other governments.

All the wealth that wall street has is not even close to that which evaporated from the housing markets (and from retiree's 401k's and people's pension funds). I seriously suspect that even if you took all the paychecks from all the CEO's and investment bankers and distributed it among the working folk it wouldn't touch what they used to spend when they were employed.

'Course, the finance folks have kind of screwed themselves, cause you can't siphon off 90% of the income from labor that is not, well, laboring.

So while we are creating wealth, we are not providing soul-sustaining work that helps people maintain their self respect.

And upping the taxes to 60, 80, 90% on financial gains that result from a lot of misery, while it might help a bit, isn't going to fix that. (As much as I would applaud ;))