dave the plumber, er marine...
you didn't hit a nerve, you have alot of nerve!
Again I urge you, go get the real bad guys, go on! Don't pick on the people on the corner...go right into the offices and halls of the real bad guys, you know where they are, and go ahead, make fun and sport of them and call them out, you big strong guy! We are waiting....

Again, you sidestep the question: Why aren't you spitballing the people who defraud us and then hypocritically call for an end to entitlements when we are supporting their low wage slaves?
You and your big plan right out of a bankers play book...more of the same "solutions" brought to you by commercial interests.

so these "hippies" ---veterans, librarians, students, grandmothers, teachers, businessmen, er, people can all go home now that you have decided what works for rest of us...a great citizen of democracy you are! You have nothing to say about those who have decimated our economy yet pitifully save your scorn for those who haven't swindled you...
You do not make sense! you love your abusers and hate those who would free you?
Again, a big, brave hero, doesn't bully the wrong target with name calling...no one decent or with any claim to honor uses these tactics, as they teach in military school. Apparently you still don't understand why you shouldn't call people names, or treat them disrespectfully...You cannot have a civil society when the inhabitants cannot have rational, respectful discourse.
It cannot be an accident that, cowardly, you never target the real defrauders, bankers, businesses and go after the businessman whose workers are subsidized by public resouces, the bankers who fraudulently manipulated numbers and markets, the chamber of commerce whose members benefit from subsidys and public monies and are awfully quiet about it.
It cannot be an accident that are a friend to those who defraud, and an enemy to those who want to end "business as usual"
Tell us why you only scorn those who are easy targets, not the rich, connected or powerful?
You stand by them, or is it---you stand behind them, more like...

Dave,

I enjoyed reading the post but some of it troubled me a little bit. It's impossible to separate government from business when government is law and regulation. Government regulation is only going to get more intrusive the larger businesses get... and they're all consolidating and growing internationally. In essence we have governments within governments if you care to look at it that way - I definitely do.

Your philosophy that companies can't take one dime from you unless you buy their product is misleading. If someone else limits your ability to procure a job, decreases the number of jobs available, suppresses the salary for existing jobs, limits the products available for purchase, make it nearly impossible to enter a market in order to compete with them, and is able to work on such an economy of scale that their position is impregnable..... you have tyranny, a loss of freedom, and the destruction of the ideals which the spirit of capitalism and the 'free market' are based on and which are believed by many Americans to foster in a healthy and equitable economy.

Wal-Mart is a great example. This behemoth eats small businesses up and makes competition with it nearly impossible. It suppresses wages, forces companies to take smaller profits from their goods in order to sell their product in Wal-Mart, and is only getting larger.

I'm not saying Wal-Mart isn't a success story but allowing a company like this to engulf smaller businesses means that people will now be forced to seek employment elsewhere. There will be a decrease in the amount of small business owners out there, wealth will be unevenly distributed, and our countrymen will lose a confidence, demeanor, intelligence, and skill that comes with running your own business.

I truly feel that large companies that have such a hierarchy and ability to place control/power/wealth into the hands of a few isn't healthy for a nation which still has hope for democracy.

Allowing insurmountable barriers to entering the majority of markets to occur is bad business for the nation. The free market thrives on competition. If a handful of companies write the rules, buy the legislators, and control the market.... why defend them? Your first instinct should be to protect yourself and those immediately below you because any day you could become that person.

I don't understand why people are so eager to protect the rich. I think it comes from an inherent American trait of property protection - the sanctity of personal property. This is something that we all need to recognize. We all know we value personal property but we need to look at the problem in the form of Democratic values and limiting the possibility of tyranny - we are constantly overlooking this threat today.

Look at the new National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. It stomps on freedom. If you're a terrorist suspect you can be held indefinitely without trial. Who may be considered a suspect? Anyone that has more than 7 days of food may be considered a suspect. I don't know about you but I definitely have more than 7 days worth of food in my house. This piece of legislation passed nearly unanimously 97-3... even though the issue about Constitutional freedoms were expressed in the debate!!!!

Democracy doesn't work if you give one group of citizens guns and the other group plows. IT WILL NOT WORK.

hey dave,
where are you?
I thought I would see you on the 6 pm news as staunchly calling out your hypocritical local business leaders?
What happened big guy, stop on the way to call out some grandmothers? Where is your target and why no news of your righteous stand against real corrupters?
Remember, the question is why you spare all of your criticism of the fat cats, businessmen who are really on the government dole and while hypocritically calling for reform...

I'm still waiting for the attack on special interests, corrupt businessmen, corrupt business practioners, wall street, etc?
Or are they really your sacred cows?
go on, I'm still waiting for your big stand to show you realize who the real defrauders are and see how a big, brave guy like yourself handles worthy opposition...you have yet to come through...

I'm the last one that should be saying this but... when emotions get involved an argument can devolve into eristics. An argument should be attacked, not a person.

Sorry I didn't respond immediately icindy but I have a job with which I pay for the things I have, unlike you who obviously are sitting in your moms basement on her dime attacking me not for what I said but because of my screen name. You are one of them hippy wannabes who wish they had been around back in the 60s to spit on me... go ahead big girl go out in public and do it now... show them balls you have.

On a more serious note and responding to someone who wants to have a conversation and not trade insults President Camacho I am not opposed to having a discussion on how big we should allow companies/corporations to be, but lets have an honest open conversation about it and the reasons. Lets discuss the trade offs of making them smaller (ie. somewhat higher consumer prices). I don't 100% disagree with you about corporations getting some of our money without our consent but in order to do this they have to go to the government and get their permission to rip us off (which is why Jeffery Emelt is so far up Obama's backside). Warren Buffet is another rent seeker, thats why he is saying what he is about raising taxes, he plans on skimming off some of the take. Government does in my mind have a regulatory responsibility particularly in the area of force and fraud. When one company is forcing others out with what in my mind amounts to unfair business practices then we need regulations to address that, does it take the 80,000 pages the government issued last year, I don't think so. Everyone should know the rules ahead of time and they should be clear and precise, lets lose some of the legal jargon thats used so the regulations are clearly understood.

As far as should wealth be spread out, yes as far as possible, but the government should not be in the business of wealth redistribution for one very simple reason it gives them too much power. So in my opinion they way to achieve that is to set the rules so that it wealth is naturally spread out. That said I still have no idea how best to do that within the rule book we already have, although I am certain it probably can be done within the rules. Having said all this I still have questions that I can answer for example How big is too big? How will it effect the poor among us (higher consumer prices have a greater effect on the poor)? What about the rights of the person who created the product? How can we achieve the best result for everyone without punishing others?

Then their are the questions that some people don't bother asking when they speak that I would like answered before we move on for instance What is rich? How much is too much? Who will decide? How with this effect others? more particularly how will this effect me/us?

They all talk of a bogey man "the rich", "the big corporation", "the elite"..... give me a name, give me an example or in other words give me a specific to work with and lets address the specific problems and stop talking in generalities. What amount of money does the top 1% represent? oddly it is much lower then most people think. For example when someone says rich to a person who makes 20K a year 75k sounds rich, if you make 150k then 500k sounds rich, rich seems to be based more on your prospective then on how much is rich.

I have probably ran on too much but Ill leave you with one last thing, a reporter from (I could be wrong about the site)the hill blog went to the capital when some "rich" were there saying they should be taxed more and she interviewed them. She also had open on her Ipad the IRS site were they could donate money to pay down the debt, curiously all of them refused. That leads me to believe its not the rich they want to raise taxes on so much as all of us. What I would like to see is what I said a flat % with few deductions and graduated fairly (saying this knowing a graduated tax is communistic) and with the top rate at a level that is no more then 38 - 40%. Lower if possible. Also, we should not tax money made by corporations overseas when they return the money here for use, which I believe would allow them to hire more workers here, I believe he current tax law encourages them to keep the money overseas along with the jobs they could fund.

One last note for icindy, if you want to have a conversation. Have a conversation I haven't defended "the rich" or anyone else. No one has defrauded me, I entered into all the contracts that I have made in my life with my eyes wide open. I understand when the bank loans me money to buy my house that they are going to make a profit on the deal, I however gain a house so long as I pay my mortgage I can stay here and at the end of the specified period that we (me and the bank) agreed too the house will be mine, then so long as I continue to pay the government the property taxes (till I die) the property and house will remain mine. Then when I die the government will tax it again and my heirs will get whatever is left, which brings me to screaming at the big guys you so much want me do, I want the politicians like that big eared dumbass in the whitehouse now to get the hell off our backs and let the (i hate to use this communistic/socialistic/facist term) middle class pass on their wealth to our children like the Kennedys, Rockifellers, Roosevelts, Buffets, and others get to pass on their wealth to theirs.

dave, dave, dave,

oh, so you're going to insult me instead of the bankers who swindled you, the fat cat wall streeters who lied and manipulated our financial markets, the businessmen who use our tax dollars as their own piggy bank.
You have been asked again, and again to display your courageous outrage against the real bad guys, and could only bring yourself to attack me?
so pitiful!!!!!!!!
as usual, you bypass the real substance of debate and just seethe with
uninformed blather and insults. One cannot have a substansive discussion with someone who is not a decent
being....first, their scorn appears, their mockery of others,
their selfishiness and lack of compassion, soon their horny, bumped skin appears, then the bristles
until finally, just the ether of evil, mis-information, dis-information, and from the monstrous, purple shapes-
the rank, fetid order of the
the dark lies sprouting from beds of death.

Above all, strive to be a decent, just, honest, humane person with good character so that you would always act
with personal integrity and wisdom. When you can do that, without qualification, you will be a man.
A true gentleman does not use (by choice) mockery, scorn, insolence, insult and other "dirty" tricks. Educated people know these foolish
tools are only used by the desperately uninformed, those who have no knowledge or training in ethics.
If you don't know this (and all evidence shows you haven't the least idea of the what personal attributes and character are needed to facilitate a "good" society) you should ask someone who you know is universally respected for guidance.

Having a set of rules that naturally spreads wealth out - I can agree with this. Barring monopolies and breaking trusts is one way we've set precedents for this. I agree that redistributing wealth in the form of subsidies and obtuse tax laws is wrong but that redistributing wealth to those who can't work because of a major disability is just fine to me.

How big is too big. It's nice to see people asking this question. There is such a thing as too big (to fail?) and there is such a thing as too rich. One man having 60 billion dollars when the average American household takes in something around 60,000 is bonkers and dangerous. When wealth is power, that man is godlike. It doesn't matter if he's a good king - he's still a king. Even if he doesn't choose to exercise any power, he still has the ability to do so. This type of accumulation of wealth creates aristocracies and dynasties and nobility and well defined classes and all real nasty sh*t.

I'm for the protection of property. I'm also against aristocracies and the rest of the nation should be too but they aren't. A great example of this are the Kennedys, Clintons, and Bushs. People need to wise up. Even though they have the possibility, or will be through some magical guarantee, of being the best leaders EVER, they shouldn't be voted for on principle. Why people vote for leaders that have nothing at all in common with them is beyond me. I think this betrays a tell-tale sign that people have turned their back on democracy, have forgotten the dangers of inequality, hero worship, and ultimately may be strongly inclined to servitude rather than seeking the burden and responsibility of sharing the load of ruling themselves.

'Rich' is a perspective but it can be statistically quantified in a reasonable manner and agreed upon. The argument opponents of a more equitable distribution of wealth initiate, I feel, are made to illicit the highly emotional mental images of greed, ignorance, and jealousy. A level headed person can see that the income distributed based on data that has been collected for YEARS shows a gradual increase in inequality. This data has been collected from the 50's. Charted out it looks like Gore's damn Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide chart... up, up, up.

This all boils down to what kind of society we want to live in. Is democracy possible with two separate classes of people? How long does wealth stay inside a family in the United States? Are rich families getting richer? These are the questions we need to ask. And no, I've come to the conclusion that there doesn't need to be a ceiling.

Businesses that can't fail are a huge warning sign that the country has already made a booboo by allowing companies to get so big that they actually can send the entire population economically down the crapper - or that the politicians are completely corrupt. It's a bit of both probably. Either way it's a head-slapping wake up call to an issue that the country has overlooked for a long time.

They start small with subsidies for big business to secure campaign funds and then subsidies for the poor to secure votes and then here is your yoke, sucker - go to work.

Any jerky out in OWS that's asking for communism or any other nutty proposal should get the attention they deserve from people who want to solve this problem: none. Overlook them. They don't represent the majority - they're only out there because this movement has given them an opportunity to receive attention. I respect their right to have a voice even though I won't bother considering them seriously. It makes me EXTREMELY upset when these nutballs are displayed as representatives of an issue that IS serious, thereby painting the problem in clown make-up. It's treasonous.


With regards to 'how rich is too rich' or 'what should be considered rich'... This seeks a ceiling. A ceiling, in my opinion, shouldn't be the goal. This puts a limit on how much wealth a person can generate. Equitable distribution should be the goal. A progressive tax rate set on the average American yearly income is a decent place to start. This can't be achieved unless people work, though.

Your progressive or "graduated" tax rate is NOT communistic - an emotionally charged buzz word that needs to go bye-bye if an intelligent conversation of these issues is to take place. This country has been on a progressive tax system since 1862!!!!!

Your last paragraph echoes some of what I've been saying. Ive tried to read each point and respond paragraph per paragraph. The only thing I have to say is that if the banks are so large that they can shut an economy down and put you out of a job - do they have the right to take away your property after they get bailed out by YOUR tax dollars????

"and from the monstrous, purple shapes-
the rank, fetid order of the
the dark lies sprouting from beds of death. "

What the fuck?

just riffing on how from small lies and deceptions monstrous evil can grow....we know from the scholarship of gordon allport that violent speech can grow into violent actions. llikewise, using personal slurs and mockery, can grow ugliness and incite hatred between groups as well as individuals once the bonds of civility are broken.

President, I don't think there will ever be nor would I necessarily want equality of income, one reason because there is not equality of output. Human nature being what it is some people work harder then others, therefore they produce more then others, and for this reason are entitled to reap the rewards of their effort. Consequently, those who produce less, are entitled to less. The decision to produce less maybe simply be, I am making enough to provide for myself and see no reason to do more and feel they are better spending their time in some other pursuit. The one thing that some never take into consideration is that we have a finite time to live, and with this a finite time to earn money and provide for ourselves and the taking of someones effort to give to someone else should only be done for those who are unable to takecare of themselves (I don't want to see people starving on the street). However, there are some who expect others to take care of them, again I don't want to see people starve but if you are capable and you want to live off others then you should be forced to provide some service to society to compensate for what is being provided. Where possible I would like to see private charities take care of this and not the government, however, we may decide that is unworkable and the government will have to get involved.

Here is a moral question I have grappled with, permit me to tell a story to illustrate, that was told by Walter Williams.... Suppose I am walking down the street and I see an old women, homeless, hungry, and in need of medicine. I don't have any money, but I know that you run the gas station on the corner so I go to your gas station pull out a gun and demand you give me 200 dollars. I then return to the woman, get her some medicine, rent her a room and get her some food. We would all agree that what I did wasn't moral and certainly wasn't legal. So how is it the government can essentially do the same thing that I did to you and people think it is moral although it is certainly legal. Is it not still theft? Does a majority vote in congrees chage what is moral and immoral? I think not. Further how can we delegate to the government a power we don't posess namely the power to take someone elses property by force or fraud? One could say it is legal, but many things are legal but immoral, slavery was legal but it wasn't moral, Hitler marching the Jews into the oven under his law was legal but it wasn't moral. We are thinking reasonable people we owe more then doing just what is legal in my opinion.

At anyrate, we all learn as we go, I am still a work in progress.

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell