What we currently call the poverty line is so high that only the top 6 percent or 7 percent of the people who were alive in 1900 would be above it.
Robert Fogel (Via Arnold Kling). RTWT.
Economics & Finance
Democrats, Republicans and the Stock Market
WRT this:
The stock market didn’t take off until 1997, after the Republicans won a House majority and passed a capital-gains tax-rate cut that Clinton, to his credit, signed. But like welfare reform, another popular initiative that Clinton had no choice but to go along with, it was an essentially Republican idea that Congressional Democrats blocked as long as they could. And now that we are again enjoying a strong economy and stock market, in part because of Bush’s 2003 capital-gains tax-rate reduction, Democrats who want to raise taxes by canceling that tax reduction want us to believe that Clinton was solely responsible for the late-’90s boom. Is the Democrats’ current behavior an example of irony or merely chutzpah?
!@#$% the AARP!
The AARP’s new TV ad campaign in which innocent little children earnestly lecture the audience about how “important it is to keep promises” fills me with a blind rage every time I see it.
The Adventures of Leisure Time Larry
From Slate comes an article pondering the strange mystery that lower-income people now seems to have significantly more leisure time than do upper-income people.
Will the harsh inequities of free-market capitalism never end!