Crushing the middle class

[425Cat]

"The way to crush the middle class is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. Who said that???

[bruce MN]

Lenin. Sorta. Part of it anyway. But He didn't say "middle class" however. He said "bourguiise". Later day, dumbed down usage sort of equates those terms but not in his culture in his time. There essentially was no middle class. There was the proletariate and then there wasa collusion of the aristocracy and those who were their agents and various other shoulder rubbers that were for all practical purpose the bourgeoise Whoever put you up to this is playing fast and loose with history and context. Imagine that. You reading something of that sort and biting on it.

[bruce MN]

Taxes are historically low and we are balancing on the precipice of deflation all over the world. The bourgeoise by his definition is thriving.

[425Cat]

Not really biting on anything just putting it out there. Income taxes might be low here in the US however add up the other taxes we pay and its a bunch. The decreasing spending power of the dollar is indirectly causing inflation. Doubt the middle class here is thriving. Not with 4dollar gas and high priced burger.

[Samnospam]

http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Keynes/kynsCP6.html

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

V

.14 Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

[r3020]

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@bruce MN wrote:
Taxes are historically low and we are balancing on the precipice of deflation all over the world. The bourgeoise by his definition is thriving.

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Don't forget the tax hidden inside of your electric bill. A hidden pass through tax heaped on the backs of the poor paid to the rich who own the green energy companies and the political scientist who write the hoax papers that convince you of the need.

[Red Steele]

Thanks for the link, Sam.

Its hard to place contemporary America in the context of a country, or continent that has just fought and lost a major war, but perhaps that is the proper placement.

Osana Bin Ladin really did a number on the USA with the 9-11 attacks and his correct prediction of our improper response. Now we have currency debasement and virtually everything else that Keynes referenced in his writings, and I can see myself reacting in the same way that those farmers he talked about in his writings, resorting to barter as they no longer trusted the paper currency.

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[bruce MN]

The evolution of this thread is rather astonishing. Sam channeling Keynes who he has become a legs do deriding and Red acting like a guy who just encountered another guy on a street corner sporting a "the End is Near" sandwich board and asking how to get to the lumber yard. Keynes was posing his dire predictions of the ultimate effects of the Treaty of Versailles. A prediction that proved to be true, the Treaty having been based on the very same extreme policy of austerity that the political philosophies and movements and parties that you fellows support espouse. Go figure c

[hardnox]

Bruce, I'd say you're holding your own here. Nothing but moral support required.

[Red Steele]

I wasn't going to respond to your posts below cause I was in the mindset, at least for this morning, that if you can't say something nice about someone and their thoughts, perhaps you just don't know them well enough to say anything and for all I know, your background has convinced you that you are right, even if it flies in the face of reason.

Perhaps you see the dismantling of the German industrial complex as akin to trying to balance the American budget. I guess I fail to see the similarity.

Spend, Baby, Spend.