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Bellingham Bill
2014 May 10, 7:55am
Piketty misses the boat wrt capital concentration.
Piketty's thesis is reducible to my argument that "interest never sleeps", and it's clear that this is what's going on and has been since the system changed the tax regime in the 1980s and again in the early 2000s.
So as we enter into a more corporatocratic state, we find labor suffering under the whip-hand of too many job-seekers and not enough jobs on one hand, and increased corporate control of media and messaging, but along with this has been the beneficial (to most) non-inflation of imported daily goods (clothing, electronics, transportation) and muted inflation in food for the most part. (Gas has skyrocketed but that's largely due to the induction of hundreds of millions of new consumers in Asia since 1990, buying oil with our money)
Baker does a good job taking Piketty to task for (apparently, I have not read the latter's tome) not focusing on the nuts and bolts of how exactly the system we have is fucked.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/economic-policy-in-a-post_b_5187840.html
As a quasi-Georgist I'd rather see us hit the rent-seeking directly, in real estate etc.
Just taxing the 1% and redistributing the money to the poors will drive up real estate more.
This is a blind spot for just about everyone, from Piketty to Rogoff to Mankiw.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/kenneth-rogoff-says-that-thomas-piketty-is-right-about-rich-countries--but-wrong-about-the-world
"Though Piketty is right that returns to capital have increased in the last few decades, he is too dismissive of the wide-ranging debate among economists concerning the causes. For example, if the main driver is the massive influx of Asian labor into globalized trade markets, the growth model put forth by the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow suggests that eventually capital stocks will adjust and the wage rate will rise. Retirements from an aging labor force will eventually drive up wages as well. If, on the other hand, labor’s share of income is falling because of the inexorable rise of automation, downward pressures on that share will continue, as I discussed in the context of artificial intelligence a few years ago."
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Here we get an other perspective on inequalities: when considered across countries, the difference between countries is going down.
And second, the difference within countries will eventually reverse as countries get more equal - and as retired people spend their savings.
If this is true, the trends we have seen for 35 yrs will reverse - Including housing prices.
There's the big elite's plan, from the horse mouth.
#housing