La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for December 16, 2010

I understand the reason for his sarcasm, but put blame where blame is due. The economy got squeezed between decades of federal housing and monetary policies, setting up a perfect storm that swept away hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and savings.

The fault is not with the free market we don’t have but with government manipulation of the mixed economy we’ve had for over a century.

Ten years? C’mon. Trickle-down economics has been failing for thirty years now. But hey, let’s keep trying it, it’ll work someday…

I just love the temper tantrums that liberals always throw when the lose.

I just love the complete fantasies that conservatives have about the wonders of free markets, in the face of overwhelming evidence that lack of regulation is exactly what caused our current economy.

Lack of, or wrong regulation, or blatant violations of law, the middle class keeps sinking and the very few super rich keep getting a bigger share.

this time for sure

trust us!

pschearer: please do your brain a favor and read “The Big Short”, which explains that the source of the problem was indeed with the “free market” and not with the “federal housing” strawman you libertarian clowns love to prop up. The monetary policies didn’t help, but they weren’t the primary source.

It was regulation (specifically the Community Redevelopment Act) that go us into this mess. It went largely unenforced until Andrew Cuomo, under the Clinton administration started bullying banks into subprime lending. That created an unmeetable demand in housing driving up home values to unsustainable levels. This created hundreds of billions in debt with zero equity to back it up. When Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank were repeatedly called on the fiscal viability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 2003-2006, they kept testifying that ‘everything was fine’. Yeah, there were a few jerks on Wall Street who are guilty of bundling these subprimes into securities, but that represents relatively little of the resulting economic fallout.

But I don’t expect a bunch of economically illiterate liberals to grasp any of this. They never have in the past.

@Night-Gaunt49 - The wealthy didn’t get wealthy through some form of unequitable wealth distribution - THEY (I) EARNED IT!

Wealth is not a fixed sum game - there is not a pie from which we all take a slice. Wealth is created through productivity, through the creation of goods and services for which there is a market.

There is not a single poor person in this country from whom something was taken away from them. Their poverty is the result of a series of volitional acts or lack thereof. From education to behavioral choices.

BTW, when these current tax rates were first enacted early in the decade, they resulted in the creation of 8 MILLION jobs and a historically low unemployment rate of 4% (which is technically nil - that 4% represents elective unemployment or people between jobs and on the unemployment roles for an average of 3 weeks - essentially a paid vacation with the margarita bill being footed by the taxpayer). Check the website for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and look it up yourself.

Again, everything was fine until the subprime mortgage crisis blew up in our faces, and the fallout from that has yet to be fully realized.

…and just what will THAT accomplish for the economy?? Hmmmmm??

Addressing the true elephant in the room: Conservatives never complained as loudly as they do about government “redistribution” and the poor until the late 1960’s (Civil Rights Act). That’s when “those people” (They’ll always say poor but they mean minorities) got access to the same benefits poor whites had. Now that minorities could get welfare, food stamps, etc. without discrimination, government help became bad. “Those lazy people are taking my hard earned money” became the mantra, “Welfare queens” became the buzz word in the 80’s so on.

So when you hear “we have to reduce government spending” from conservatives notice how it’s always related to welfare, social security, education, but never military spending, “corporate welfare” or tax breaks on the rich.

The people who react negatively to strips like this will always deny that they’re not bigots or racist but trying to uphold “the American way” but the loudest screams always come from white males. ALWAYS. It’s about power and many white males can’t stand that they’ve been slowly losing it over the decades so they yell and scream and try to deflect, blaming the poor and “those people”. Note: The first comment, and a negative one about this strip, a conservative white male.

And for those screaming all wealth is “EARNED” go as Paris Hilton for a second opinion. Please explain to me, in detail, what she did to “earn” her wealth beside being born into it. Or the Kardashians beside inherit it from their father the lawyer, marry it with Bruce Jenner and dating celebrities.

@Aldeberon - How does a flat tax or lower tax rate in the top bracket constitute a spending cut?? You must be assuming it’s the government’s money. It’s not - government doesn;t produce ANYTHING except waste and it can;t do that without a productive populace.

And now we’re racists? Wow, didn’t see that coming. I’m wondering if a liberal is capable of making an argument without resorting to demagoguery. The only racism I see here is that against white males. Did it ever occur to you we want to see the same opportunity for EVERYBODY in this country and when they succeed, not have them punished for it?

Paris Hilton is a bit of a straw man (or straw bimbo) dontcha think? A supermajority of those in the top tax bracket are self-made in the past 30 years.

Here’s a challenge to you leftwing hoopleheads:

1) Show me exactly what the rich took away from you to arrive where they are at.

2) Demonstrate the economic benefit to taxing the rich.

Drive around your neighborhood. Go through a industrial park. Look at the hundreds of small businesses operating out of leased warehouses. Look at all the fast food franchises and small cafes and boutiques and other retailers. Most of the owner’s of those businesses fall into the top tax bracket that you all want so dearly to raise. Most have worked a lifetime of 12 hour days to get where they are. They have families and employees who depend on them. You raise their taxes and they’re going to have to cut back their most capital-intensive expense: Employees. You think they want to do that? No, they want to grow and hire more people - it is the nature of the entrepreneur.

Swing and a Miss, shytimes2! Read my second post above.

It’s our money, but it’s our debt, too. The Republicans could have staked their claim to fiscal conservatism by using Clinton’s surplus to pay down the debt, but they’d rather give tax cuts to rich people. Who cares about the debt if the end is near.

Home value is the same as it ever was, a safe place to live and/or raise a family. “Flipping houses” drove up market prices, because they weren’t buying a place to live, they just wanted profits. They didn’t care that it made some people only able to afford subprime mortgages on subprime real estate. Profit is okay until it grows to usery. Low interest rates are also part of the problem. Money shouldn’t come cheap, you should have to work for it.

Lowering taxes at the top bracket actually tends to increase revenues to the treasury so your argument falls apart right there. Clinton never actually had a surplus - it was a projected surplus over the next 10 years. I agree, the republican congresses under the Bush administration failed the fiscal conservative test, but the increased debt and deficits were just that - overspending. The revenues were still pouring in. Tax cuts to rich people would have surely stymied the flow of those revenues.

Real Estate flipping was also only a marginal contributor to the subprime crisis - the crisis just invited the opportunist. If there wasn’t the sudden influx of unqualified buyers, the prices would have never been driven up disproportionately in the first place.

The rich invest anyways - it’s unnatural to sit on cash. We’re in a rare perfect storm right now where the uncertainty about the future does have a lot of capital on the sidelines. I guarantee that when the tax deal is settled with the extension of the existing rates, you’ll see growth. When those rates are made PERMANENT, you’ll see even more.

You want economic stimulation, kill the capital gains tax. I’m being killed right now because I’m being taxed on recovery of everything I lost in ‘08. I pull more money from my investments to pay that tax and I’m taxed on THAT. It’s a destructive reduction cycle that only ends when I’M BROKE.

Any tax or regulatory policy that favors one American over another because of income, education, skin color, religion, WHATEVER, is fundamentally immoral. Treat us all the same. Tax us all the same regardless of our chosen endeavor. Equal Opportunity is the only thing that can be manipulated. You will NEVER achieve equal outcome. People are people and they will do what they will do. Punishing success is immoral.

My theory - the reason they don’t want to raise taxes for the rich is that they will find more Bernie Madoffs (ie - no real cash). Make believe assets via Leveraged Derivative Investments have drained this country of real assets!

Full agreement on your latter point - now as for WHY they don’t want to raise taxes, you’ll get different answers from each side of the aisle. Frankly, I doubt either side cares what they find though… Madoff was definitely the king of the baddies, that’s for sure.

Gee I wonder if conservatives are able to create an argument without resorting to demagoguery either. Government may not produce anything but it is the price you pay for a polite society. And the way you pay for government is with taxes. They are then redistributed for things like roads, courthouses, police, education, fire departments, and everything in our federal, state, and local governments. Seriously, are conservatives looking for Anarchy or something? It’s like you want to pay no taxes, still have government services, and the complain about the government.

I do recall the Republicans arguing OFTEN in the past about how to “pay” for middle class tax cuts and now how to pay for unemployment benefits but there is absolutely now talk of how to “pay” for tax cuts for the rich. I guess they just pay for themselves.

And to be perfectly honest, NO you DON”T want the same opportunity everyone else has when they succeed. You want the privilege that being a white male has brought you since the birth of this country. Yeah, I said it. Everyone wants opportunity, some just have more by virtue of who they are. That’s a FACT and it’s not disputable, though it amazes me how many times white males try to do so.

What did the rich take away, Checked gas prices lately? That came first from the the fed putting money out so banks and institutions could lend and help the economy but did they? NO! These fat cats, instead of trickling it down, used the money to speculate on commodity futures, thus raising gas prices and taking money I could be using for something else out of my pocket while they pocketed the spike in oil prices. Which is now being exacerbate by the weak dollar. There a nice clear easy example but you won’t get it, so I’m not worried.

Paris may be a straw but doesn’t alter the facts that 1)she’s rich and 2) she didn’t earn it. So, sorry, as long as people are going to insist the rich “earn” it, which many do, you have to deal with the ones who don’t. And while many did earn it, even those like Bill Gates and Ted Turner, and the children of Henry Ford benefited from hand-me-down wealth. Hell, I’m working on being there someday so I can have such problems as worrying about a 2% tax change on my millions instead of my thousands.

And yes, bigotry/racism does exist when it comes to this stuff. I know you can’t or won’t see it but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s there. I could lay out 1000 examples but you’d never see them. Tim Wise points them out all the time and still people fail to understand his message.

In the end, none of this writing matters, I’ll no more change your mind than you will change mine. Or as someone famously put it “To the true believe no proof is necessary, to the skeptic no proof is enough.” We are all skeptics.

Have a nice day.