IMF, Ukraine and Ireland

Originally posted by normbenign
The real beauty is a place where one can make the choice.

The real beauty is a place where one can make the choice.

viz a choice between education or the ostentatious display of wealth

There are few places in the world where one cannot make this choice, but only in the event of having money.

The real beauty is a place where one's opportunities are not dictated by one's inherited, unearned and undeserved wealth or poverty.

Originally posted by Wajoma
"Compare Japan with the USA"

Didn't mention the US, my point was just that the Japanese economic model is nothing to emulate, follow the money indeed and you'll find that Japans debt far exceeds the wealth of it's rich so even if you were to claim that all wealthy people come by their wealth through state debt the numbers don't stack up. So yes it is or ...[text shortened]... xt generation.

It's not a nice fact for you to face Finnegan, so you will resist the truth.

The Japanese economy has not returned to growth in perhaps twenty years. The declining population is also a problem . I was not advocating their economy as a model for getting wealthy but as a model for sustaining all the same a decent society in which it is possible to live with dignity to a degree that escapes, for example, the US and (increasingly under its neo liberal leadership) the UK.

So yes it is ordinary Joe thinking they're due this that and the other, and so yes it is this generation living at the expense of the next.

Ordinary people have not enjoyed the benefits of economic growth in the form of improved income since the Seventies. Instead, they have seen their share of the economy's income and wealth shift upwards to the wealthy. Where work is available, it is increasingly in an insecure world of short contracts or in low waged sectors. Instead, since the Eighties, access to credit has been loosened and people have been encouraged to believe that they can meet their needs through loans. Contrary to the stories you have swallowed, in a large proportion of cases, people have been driven to borrow to meet necessities, including education, housing, health, childcare, not for frivolous spending, and that because of a systematic attack on their wages and conditions of employment. Now, with the system (inevitably) falling around their ears, people like you crow your moralistic slogans in order to blame the victims. But the point you ignore is that the very rich have continued to absorb a growing proportion of wealth and income to a staggering extent. It is they who are destroying the prospects of the next generation.

Originally posted by finnegan
The Japanese economy has not returned to growth in perhaps twenty years. The declining population is also a problem . I was not advocating their economy as a model for getting wealthy but as a model for sustaining all the same a decent society in which it is possible to live with dignity to a degree that escapes, for example, the US and (increasingly under ...[text shortened]... come to a staggering extent. It is they who are destroying the prospects of the next generation.

Don't you see that this is the outcome of Marxism, which never promised to eliminate the rich, but the middle class, by forcing it into poverty.

Originally posted by normbenign
Don't you see that this is the outcome of Marxism, which never promised to eliminate the rich, but the middle class, by forcing it into poverty.

No I don't. It is a spurious claim with no validity.

What the statistics on distribution of wealth and income shows is that wealth and income are being re-distributed away from the middle class by all means, but also away from the lower classes, while it is being diverted into the pockets of the already very wealthy. I am not aware that Marx advocated this but he did predict it. So too does the current work of Thomas Piketty.