Or simply put the bonuses in escrow, and pay them out over several years. Maybe even have a balloon payment at the end, if the short-term gains didn't clearly lead to long-term failure.

I'd say that this is a property of a certain subset of capitalism where influence of the political system is treated as any other good. That is to say, buy what you can afford, at whatever price it's worth to you.

The libertarian approach is to weaken government to the point where it can no longer aid corporations in their corruption. The liberal approach is to not treat it as a free market good. I can't for the life of me figure out what the conservative approach is. Seems to be, "What's the problem again?"

See? Third world country.

They really should have named it glubziclou. No hits for that one.

Live off $250K for the rest of my life? Depending on my investment strategy and my forecasted lifespan, I could probably do it. I live cheap, I have almost no debt, and I don't have a family to support.

But that's beside the point. The definition of "winning" that you're using is "never having to work again." If you make $250K for even one year, you can live quite comfortably while stashing away most of it. Do it for a few years in a row, and you can retire. Given the current state of the country, that sounds an awful lot like winning to me.

And it's not as though we're asking a whole lot from the $250K crowd by taking away the Bush tax cuts. If you make $250K on the nose, your taxes aren't increased. If you make $250,001, your taxes go up by a few cents. If you make $260K, your taxes go up by $500. Not enough to substantially change your buying habits or cause any sane, reasonable person to "go Galt."

The Making Work Pay tax break was a new tax break, and therefore increased taxes on nobody.

Yes, people do pay other taxes besides federal income taxes. State taxes, local taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, use fees, payroll taxes, the works. Which is why the whiners who whine that "half of Americans don't pay any taxes" are just being whining whiners who whine whinily.

Please explain to me why it's fair for us to tax capital gains at a lower rate than income.

Like my dad always said, "I'd love to be earning enough to pay that much in taxes." Yes, close to half of Americans aren't paying federal income tax. But they may be paying state income taxes. They're probably paying property taxes, use fees, sales taxes, and payroll taxes. If you put them together, my understanding is that the tax structure is regressive overall.

My dad also says "statistics prove that you can prove anything with statistics." When you say,

Additionally, a larger share of Federal tax revenues are paid by the top 1% of income earners today than was paid by them before the Bush tax cuts were passed.

what you leave out is that during the Bush administration, the average person's income actually went down (even excluding the economic collapse), while the top 1% (and especially the top 0.01%) were lavished with more money than they knew what to do with.* When you point out that the top 10% pay 50% of the income tax without at the same time pointing out that they have 70% of the wealth, you're using statistics to conceal the truth, not reveal it.

* What they did with the money was send it to Wall Street. Wall Street, completely failing in its societal function of putting money into investments that would yield long-term value, used it to inflate commodities bubbles, bet on derivatives and credit default swaps, and sell investors on investments that they themselves were betting against. Well done, free enterprise.

No, the morons who whine "half of Americans don't pay taxes!" are the ones who are trying to tax those attempting to become rich. By the time you're up to the sort of income where liberals like me want to raise your taxes, you've already made it into the winner's circle.

True. But how does that make us special? Right now, nearly everyone except for upper management and investors are being underpaid for the intrinsic value that they create. The sweatshop worker who adds a few stitches of value to each of a hundred pairs of shoes in a day, and gets paid $3 for her work? Undervalued. The dude making $8/hr assembling thirty McMeals an hour, which will easily retail for over 20x that? Undervalued. Front line Wal-Mart employees? Screwed over, with the savings divided between customers and the Waltons.

But the guy whose only "contribution" was buying a crapload of stock from the guy who bought the stock from the guy who bought the stock from the guy who got in on the IPO before immediately turning around and selling it? He gets to decide how the company operates, and gets paid handsomely for the privilege, regardless of whether he has any skill or interest (or even knows where his money is invested).

Take Carly Fiorina, the former HP CEO who made hundreds of millions of dollars off a simple theory: When you ram two companies together, the stock price goes up for a while, even if the result looks less like a merger and more like a train wreck. The day Carly resigned, HP's stock price jumped dramatically. Then, with her newfound fortune and "high-level business experience," she tried to buy one of California's senate seats. Hundreds of millions of dollars that could have gone to the people actually making the company valuable were instead squandered on incompetence and poor decision making, with a healthy dose of corruption thrown in for good measure.

This is a big part of the reason that you're undervalued.

Your claim that unemployment mostly resides in the housing sector is wrong. As Paul Krugman wrote last year:

[T]here should be significant labor shortages somewhere in America — major industries that are trying to expand but are having trouble hiring, major classes of workers who find their skills in great demand, major parts of the country with low unemployment even as the rest of the nation suffers.

None of these things exist. Job openings have plunged in every major sector, while the number of workers forced into part-time employment in almost all industries has soared. Unemployment has surged in every major occupational category. Only three states, with a combined population not much larger than that of Brooklyn, have unemployment rates below 5 percent.

Oh, and where are these firms that “can’t find appropriate workers”? The National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for many years, asking them to name their most important problem; the percentage citing problems with labor quality is now at an all-time low, reflecting the reality that these days even highly skilled workers are desperate for employment.

So all the evidence contradicts the claim that we’re mainly suffering from structural unemployment.

"Good. Because a union would mean that not only would the company not be able to lay off the incompetent developers, but they'd be forced to pay them the same as me."

Ever noticed how 90% of developers think they're above average?

"many unions seem to still have a greedy, self-destructive attitude that continues to drive entire industries out of business"

You mean like, "We don't want to work for third world wages?" </snark>

s/years/decades/ Oops.

Over the last couple of years, median income has actually fallen.

Please explain to me what the truck drivers and ditch diggers of the world will be doing in two decades, after those jobs have disappeared. Explain to me what they will be doing to exchange their labor for a share of the economy that's greater than what a Pakistani bricklayer earns.

Looking at total compensation only makes the picture worse, as more and more jobs are dropping or cutting back on health insurance. Virtually all of the increase in median household income over the last couple of years comes from increased working hours (more women entering the workforce, longer hours for workers). In order to say that we're better compensated for our labor than we were thirty years ago, you have to assume weird things from the get-go. Like "economists have no idea how to calculate inflation, but I do." Or, "since you couldn't buy an iPad in 1980, they're worth eleventy-bajillion dollars."

Meanwhile, the compensation given to the top 0.1% has increased by orders of magnitude.

Yes, people have always found other jobs. But you're ignoring everything that makes the modern era unlike those that preceded it. We've never had seven billion people on the planet. We've never had intense, direct competition between laborers around the globe. Last but not least, we've never had automating technology that allows machines to do damned near anything a human can do, but cheaper and better.

If we don't tear up the social contract that says "you don't work, you don't eat," then the choice we're left with is between revolution and feudalism.

>> "What you and everyone else is missing is that as productivity increases most people have to work less."

No, over the last thirty years, as productivity increased, most people have worked more, but been paid less. The bounty that comes from increased productivity have mostly come from the top.

>> "How many hours a year at minimum wage do you have to work to live as good as someone in the middle class from 60 years ago?"

There are so many things wrong with this approach, it beggars belief.

First, people don't generally evaluate their happiness by comparing their status to that of their ancestors from three or thirty generations back. You could just as plausibly argue that we're all living like the kings of 2000 years ago. Does that mean the poor should just shut the hell up and relish their wealth?

No. People compare their standing to that of the people they come in contact with. And they generally spend more of their time comparing themselves to those above them. If everyone around you has a nicer car, a bigger house with more amenities, take more extravagant vacations, and have better health care, it is simply unreasonable to expect them to be happy with their lot in life.

Internet, cable, and cell phones are close to necessities in modern life. Back in 1950, they didn't even have answering machines. Today, people expect to be able to reach just about anybody at any time, or at least leave a message and have it returned promptly.

You can't buy some of the things on your list today. You can't buy 1950's era health care at any price. A good doctor today would feel it irresponsible to try. The unsafe, polluting, gas-guzzling autos of the 1950s can still be bought, but only as expensive hobbyist toys.

You can get a small, cheap house. But you pretty much have to build it yourself and fight city planners tooth and nail for the privilege.

It's more expensive to live a respectable life these days. Case closed.

>> "There is so much food available so cheaply that the poor are fat form the same reason they are poor. They lack self control and the ability to delay gratification."

Have you ever noticed that your self-control is lowest when you're under stress, or when you feel ill. Being poor means being constantly stressed and sick. When every dollar is precious and every month is a race between your bills and your bank account, life suddenly gets really, really hard. Try it.

Moreover, when you're impoverished, when you've been down your entire life, when you've never seen any of your friends make it out of poverty, hopelessness is a defense mechanism. You try to get a better job, only to lose it when your kid gets sick or your car breaks down. You try to get an education, only to end up deeply indebted to one of the shady for-profit colleges built to fleece the government of student loan money. You try to build up a nest egg, only to have a friend fall on hard times or rip you off. So you say, "screw it." You're done following the rules. Society keeps telling you to work hard and dream big, then shoving you back every time you try. So put off your landlord, buy some pizza and beer, and hang out with your broke-ass friends. At least you're happy for a moment.

In short, you're being heartless, sanctimonious, and ignorant. Knock it off.

Um, wages in the US have been stagnant for nearly thirty years now for most of the population. And we've never been at a point technologically where computers could take over complex tasks like driving or trivia games. Do you really think that if we automate away all the fast food jobs (currently employing 7.7M Americans) that we're going to make up for it by having 7.7M more plumbers and hairdressers? If the tens of thousands of taxis in New York are automated, will those who have been displaced become WoW gold farmers?

Hell, for most of the 2000's, the biggest-growing sector of the economy was finance. That turned out to be mostly imaginary.

The argument has been perfectly correct for decades, and will be going into overdrive in the next two decades.