Thank you mate. It is beyond me how anyone still believes supply-side works, it was a fraud when Reagan started it, and it is a fraud now. Our conservative government here in Australia is trying to sell this idea right now by proposing to cut our company tax rate by $50 billion. Evidence has shown clearly that the effect on jobs would be minimal at best and most of the cuts will go to offshore investors and not "trickle-down" at all. Through my interest in politics I've been inspired to stand up and get involved somehow, because I'll be damned if I am to sit idly by and watch Australia go down the same path of neoliberalism America has for decades.

Well, it works for those in the top 20%. It [b]really[/b] works for those in the top 5%. For everyone else, we got to watch [i]Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous[/i], which has now been revived as a Presidential campaign. I recognize that the school of economic thought is called "neoliberalism", but damned if I know why. There's not much that's liberal about it. At least the first Clinton administration purged the Reagan ideology out of it and re-regulated a great deal of the market (which Bush then deregulated, with epically disastrous results). Those who want to return to pure laissez-faire economics are anything but liberals.

Weird thing about Clinton is that he also deregulated Wall Street and the financial sector by repealing Glass-Steagal, allowing banks to gamble with depositors money and enabling them to become "too big to fail". He also deregulated the FCC with the Telecommunications Act of 96 allowing big media companies to monopolize and a year later, Fox News was born.

[quote]Adjusted for inflation, the "rich" people you talk about in 1980 would be making over $600,000 a year now.[/quote] Except those stats are taken from the years 1988 and 1980. The current year isn't brought up. [quote]Second, the real GDP increased by approximately 33% in that decade, coming out of the recession of the late '70s. Incomes for the wealthy shot up, so they naturally paid more taxes, even at a lower rate. [/quote] An increase that accounts for a 600% increase in paid taxes despite the tax rate being 28% instead of 70% ? No. [quote]Imagine what the collection would have been had they been paying the tax rates we had under, for instance, Eisenhower, when the top marginal rate was 91% (and the economy was booming, by the way).[/quote] Look at the ledger. That rate applied to people who made 200k per year. Adjusted for inflation, that's $1.7 million. The table I provided cuts off at $1 million. If we applied the 1954 rate to people making the equivalent of $413k (the cutoff for the last bracket), people would be in a 72% tax bracket, which is close to the 70% bracket of 1980. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/15/bernie-s/income-tax-rates-were-90-percent-under-eisenhower-/) [quote]What's undeniable is that the top 5% has seen nearly a 900% increase in its real income since the 1960s, while the bottom 20% still makes less than $20,000 a year. That is a fairness issue.[/quote] In what world can we expect a poor person's income to increase at a similar rate to that of a wealthy person's income? This kind of inequality is only a problem if you believe in finite wealth. It isn't a pie. The size of the wealthy's slice isn't going to reduce the size of everybody else's slice.

[quote] In what world can we expect a poor person's income to increase at a similar rate to that of a wealthy person's income? This kind of inequality is only a problem if you believe in finite wealth. It isn't a pie. The size of the wealthy's slice isn't going to reduce the size of everybody else's slice.[/quote] THIS world. The top 5% certainly act as if increasing anyone else's slice reduces theirs. The Walton family fight like hell against any initiative to raise the minimum wage, since "it would cut into their profits"... even though the more income the working class has, the more they spend, and thus the more will trickle back up. The rich will NEVER become poor; but there's less chance than ever for the poor to get rich. Or even break even. I respect some of your libertarian principles, but I'm a left libertarian and I believe that a society needs to cooperate for the good of all. I get that you are a right libertarian who believes that we're all on our own, and that's the way it's supposed to be. We're doomed to disagree about this issue.