I've figured it out.

This is how you get 80% + in any election anywhere in America.

The trick is to combine positive signifiers from both liberal and conservative segments.

Liberals love charts and wonkish statistics.

Conservatives love fat white dudes in expensive suits.

The trick: be a fat, white dude in a $4K suit with lots of pie charts.

Mrbogey: So by "us" she means people in the top quintile of income.

Because I've been to a lot of places where everyone was dirt poor... not a lot of roads or police.


Right. Because Appalachia represents the bottom four quintiles of the country.

GAT_00: Humorous? Well, yes, the graph was funny. And I think I chuckled once or twice during the Word after it. But that's a lot less funny than Colbert used to be.

I see the Hipsters have arrived.

Apparently the man who made his millions selling $5 footlongs does not feed the same to his family...

http://johnfleming.congresspedia.us/ (new window)

The_Gallant_Gallstone: The trick: be a fat, white dude in a $4K suit with lots of pie charts.

Didnt work for Ross Perot. I guess he wasn't fat enough?

Jackson Herring: Been reading it 3 mornings a week for years for some unfathomable reason, just hoping that maybe TODAY will be the day that it's not painfully awkward and unfunny.


It never is that day

Maybe you just miss the jokes that reference things... like classic literature... Dickens, for example.

"If you tax something more, Trish, you get less of it." - Paul Ryan

I guess that's why they want to raise taxes on lower-income people. It will make less poors!

SouthernManDunWrong: Doesn't this scare anybody that our economy is so suxars that the population is this poor? Will the democrats do anything about it other than blame Republicans and Bush?

Hey, SMDW is endorsing government management of the economy! And he wants DEMOCRATS to do it!

Trying to figure out how "the democrats" could do anything when REPUBLICANS control one house of Congress and have effectively vetoed anything that the Dems propose...but let's not trouble Boehner with actually doing anything useful after 8 months of sitting there with his tanned thumb up his ass.

what_now: Jackson Herring: what_now: Keep giving me a list of names to knit into my scarf.

Do what now?

Link (new window)

I hate that you had to explain it.

Dusk-You-n-Me: Philip Francis Queeg: What class warfare really looks like:

Piggyback:

In other words, the richest 5 percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation's gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983, meaning they did not participate at all in the growth of wealth over this period.

[www.epi.org image 580x500] (new window)

It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years.

Dusk-You-n-Me: Philip Francis Queeg: What class warfare really looks like:

Piggyback:

In other words, the richest 5 percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation's gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983, meaning they did not participate at all in the growth of wealth over this period.

[www.epi.org image 580x500] (new window)




Reposting your chart since int won't show up in a regular quote.

Anyway... All this chart tells me is that the blues (democrats) are making more money than ever, while the reds (republicans) are losing money.

Thanks for giving all that money to your base, Obama. Real America is dying!

Cataholic: It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years.

Citation?

And why does this change anything?

Rwa2play: SkinnyHead: Of course, Obama's new "class warfare" offensive is just empty rhetoric to fire up his far-left base


So lemme get this straight genius: Obama taxing millionaires is "class warfare;" but Scott Walker taking benefits away from working Wisconsians is not?

/will see SkinnyHead either a) move the goalposts; b) walk way from this argument to his next talking point or c) pull a strawman or d) log in as elchip?.

The_Gallant_Gallstone: I've figured it out.

This is how you get 80% + in any election anywhere in America.

The trick is to combine positive signifiers from both liberal and conservative segments.

Liberals love charts and wonkish statistics.

Conservatives love fat white dudes in expensive suits.

The trick: be a fat, white dude in a $4K suit with lots of pie charts.

Yeah! You can look to Ross Perot for how well that worked.

Well, to be fair, he wasn't fat.

Cataholic: It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years

Hey everybody, point and laugh at the guy who doesn't understand what a quintile is!

Jesus the 33rd: Reposting your chart since int won't show up in a regular quote.

Anyway... All this chart tells me is that the blues (democrats) are making more money than ever, while the reds (republicans) are losing money.

Thanks for giving all that money to your base, Obama. Real America is dying!

I appreciate a person who will go through that much effort to make a minor joke about the colors used on a chart. That shows real gumption. You are gonna go places, kid!

Dusk-You-n-Me: I cannot wait to vote for her.

...for president.

/seriously, waddaya think? 2016 is kinda early though, it it may be awhile.

Lumpmoose: .....holy fark. How long have we waited for another Democrat to run on "government is good"?

I think you missed the point.

Skleenar: Cataholic: It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years.

Citation?

And why does this change anything?

Two obvious reasons.

1. The more mobility there is in the system, the less valid a lot of these arguments are. (Meritocracy vs. entrenched power of the wealthy are not the same problem)
2. Data skewing. Any poor person who hits it big is not reflected in the lower quintiles, because the wealth he accumulated causes him to move quintiles, and someone who "loses it all" ends up in a lower quintile. Depending on the methodology employed, the data may be a self-fulfilling prophesy that ends up skewed that way even if random data is entered.

Cataholic: It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years.

I'm pretty sure they haven't been THAT many Powerball winners in 20 years.

Cataholic: It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years.

He's got a sourced chart illustrating actual data. You've got a bunch of words you strung together that suggest you may not know what the chart shows, or possibly that you have generally poor math skills.

Gonna go ahead here and say you probably ought to try backing your position up a little better than that.

Dusk-You-n-Me: Absolutely a possibility. But let's not all go blowing each other just yet. Let's get her in the Senate first.

I understand that, I just can't do anything about it here in my state. Imagine a Warren/Kucinich ticket...

/I know that's very unlikely to ever happen, but just let me have my dreams, okay?

SkinnyHead: Of course, Obama's new "class warfare" offensive is just empty rhetoric to fire up his far-left base.

Pretty cool! You managed in one sentence to combine several lies and GOP spins.

"Class warfare" is, of course, the GOP's characterization of anything that would increase taxes on the wealthiest. "Far-left base" is the right's mantra to attempt to characterize anyone to the left of Rush Limbaugh. And "empty rhetoric" is how they describe a detailed analysis of an economic argument (which was, after all, the topic if this thread before you tried to divert it.)

Well done.

Now back to the Colbert piece. Quite funny and very pungent. The problem is, the people who would understand what he did there don't really need to be convinced. The people who think in simplistic tropes like "millionaires = job creators", "democrats = communists", "the poor = lazy parasites on society" won't even consider his arguments.

But there's a real danger to stirring up anger and discontent in the lower classes like that. If social unrest and riots come to America, we'll have Obama's "class warfare" offensive to thank for it.

No problem. Just call out the National Guard and massacre the protesting lower classes in the streets. Worked in China -- for a while.

drkdstryer:
Man, I used to love xkcd, but wow has it gone downhill. That recent Amelia Earhart strip is a good example - it wasn't funny, it wasn't insightful, it wasn't clever. It just... I don't even know what it was. There was no joke. As far as I could tell the strip was "Hey, everyone, look! It's Amelia Earhart! Ha ha!"

I'm willing to cut the man some slack. His finance/wife has terminal cancer so I can't blame him if he a little preoccupied.

justGreg: Skleenar: Cataholic: It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years.

Citation?

And why does this change anything?

Two obvious reasons.

1. The more mobility there is in the system, the less valid a lot of these arguments are. (Meritocracy vs. entrenched power of the wealthy are not the same problem)

I'm not sure I totally agree, but in any case mobility has not been established, just asserted. And, additionally, how much mobility does there need to be for your asserted reduction in validity of the argument to be so? Because "any" mobility shouldn't reduce the validity. There would have to be, in my estimation "a buttload".

2. Data skewing. Any poor person who hits it big is not reflected in the lower quintiles, because the wealth he accumulated causes him to move quintiles, and someone who "loses it all" ends up in a lower quintile. Depending on the methodology employed, the data may be a self-fulfilling prophesy that ends up skewed that way even if random data is entered.

Explain. Especially since the lowest quintile is bounded, I am not sure how the data gets skewed to make it look like the situation is worse for the lower quintile than otherwise.

Cataholic: Dusk-You-n-Me: Philip Francis Queeg: What class warfare really looks like:

Piggyback:

In other words, the richest 5 percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation's gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983, meaning they did not participate at all in the growth of wealth over this period.

[www.epi.org image 580x500] (new window)

It's a nice chart and all, but in addition to ending in a year with a major housing bubble crash, it fails to account for the fact that many people move from the bottom quintiles to the top ones over the course of 20 years.

If only that were true.



And there's plenty of downward mobility going on too.