Raptors says a trip to the white house is a "hard no"

[QUOTE=Hawker]Everyone benefits from the resources of the land. Consumers and owners. Owners of the private property benefit by offering something to consumers. This is basic capitalism.

Income has increased for all workers adjusted for inflation since the 80s. That is just wrong.

As far as your three points, the rich want more regulations so they can keep the wealth and put up barriers in place for competition. You can see the same thing with Amazon, google, facebook right now - they are all asking for regulations so they can own the competition. Pressure was put on Amazon to go to $15/hr min wage, and now they are lobbying the government to do the same. Not because they really believe it but to stifle competition.

BTW - we aint short on producing basketballs dude. There is always a market for little stuff like that.

And as a % of GDP, federal tax receipts has been flat since the 50s.

[IMG]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg[/IMG]

While those tax rates were extremely high, there were tons of tax cuts built into them (by the rich in cooperation with big government) and they were cut significantly by Reagan who at the same time got rid of those breaks.[/QUOTE]


That's not flat. Some of those fluxuations represent hundreds of billions of dollars. Since Trump took office annual tax receipts are down $230 billion according to that FED data.

Real wages really haven't increased significantly in decades.

[IMG]https://www.pewresearch.org/?attachment_id=304888[/IMG]

Just accounting for inflation doesn't tell you much about wages. You need to account for purchasing power, which takes into account increases in the cost of living.

Basketballs were just an example of a good that can be enjoyed by a wide range of income levels.

I'm not offended by the idea that Americans no longer assume they are the leader of the world. As for the administration, logic implies they could have sent a representative to the championship game and recruitment notes would have been noted.

[QUOTE=ralph_i_el]No, you are exactly right. Marx is not the be-all-end-all. He inspired a lot of very insightful people though with his materialist framework.

My wife is an archaeologist![/QUOTE]

Cool, man. F the Eagles, man! heheh