I like that analysis. It's a pretty good example of how you can make statistics say anything you want. I haven't been a fan of the Reagan administration since I divorced myself from the Republican party some years ago, but even I know that some of the conclusions demonstrated there are false. The problem stems from putting unrelated data together or assuming that two things are related when there may be other factors involved.
For instance, I find it hard to believe that the decrease in US personal savings of 6.2% can be attributed solely to a 5.5% increase of concentration of wealth at the top betwen 1982 and 1992 when US median income
rose by only .94% while inflation devalued money at an average rate of 5% per year in the same time period. Seems to me like maybe the fact that rich people can edure inflation more handily than average households, but again we are missing too much data. We'd need to know a lot of other things, including how much the GDP varied (it was positive) and what percentage of that was due to government spending and a million other things before we could find the real correalations, and even people who spend their lives doing that still disagree.
I try to put my faith in simpler equations, without politics, where less can go wrong, such as in the corelation between inflation, government spending, and economic growth. That decision is what made me leave the Reps. They're just as bad as the Dems when it comes to that kind of stuff, and worse during recent wars.
Economics and blame games aside, this was my favorite part of the submission, though the "needed changes" part gives me the willies. You'll tell me what
I need? I think not.
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But entrenched interests use their wealth and power to keep us from making needed changes
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Sure they do, but who gave them that power? I didn't give it to them when I chose not to buy Shell gasoline because the Exxon across the street was cheaper. Exxon didn't entrench itself or abuse its wealth all on its own. Big companies have the power to entrench themselves because the state gave it to them through its own misguided intentions. I'll spare everyone the details of how that works, since I never shutup about the subject.
Speaking of subjects, as in same, what entity is more entrenched, powerful, and wealthy than the state? People have been complaining about government doing everything wrong on both sides of the aisle since time immemorial, and yet we are farther from changing it now than we have ever been. Too bad we can't make a quantified overlay graph about that. We might quit alternating blame between the horse's mouth and the horse's butt.