The homeless crisis in Seattle parallels the progressive rise to prominence in the city politics. All the city positions are occupied by progressives. Nobody else even bothers to run.

LA has had every flavor of mayor over the last century, and Skid row has been Skid row ever since it was first named such in the early 1900s.

Skid Row's origin is from Seattle, where the logs were slid down "skid road" to the boats.

Skid is another word for shipping pallet and it’s called skid row because it’s next to the freight train lines into downtown. Pallets would get stacked high along the streets, hence skid row. There are plenty of cities across America with their own area called skid row. The name has nothing to do with the current homeless population.

It is common for poor industrial areas to end up with large transient populations, but that’s a case of convergent evolution.

It's not named after homeless people, I'm saying the character of the place has been the same since like the 1890s. That part of town has always been full of transient and destitute people no matter the flavor of local government, is the point I was trying to make. The OP comment was implying some false correlation between homelessness and progressive government. Lest we forget it was progressive government initiatives that ended the great depression and both peace and wartime public works projects, not private corporations, that finally got people back to work decades ago.

That is indeed the progressive interpretation of those events. The other interpretation is FDR's progressive policies extended the Depression into by far the longest in US history.

The banking runs were caused by the fixed exchange rate between gold and fiat money - in 1929 one could double one's wealth by buying gold from banks at the official exchange rate. This naturally caused endless runs until the banks either collapsed or FDR (correctly) suspended such sales. The banks remained crippled for lack of money because the Federal Reserve Bank (not a free market bank) failed to understand what the problem was.

The country came out of the Depression late in the 30's because of vast quantities of money flowing into the country from foreign countries buying arms.

If you're going to correct someone, isn't it worth spending just a few minutes doing due diligence? Skid row comes from logging roads where the logs were skidded down the road.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_row

And the larger the safety net holes get, the more progressives will be elected, hopefully.

That’s a pretty dubious implication of causation.

Capitalism extracts work from wealth gradients the same way a Stirling engine extracts it from temperature ones. The higher the gradient, the more efficient it becomes.

Haha, I wish this wasn't such a STEM-y analogy so I could mention it to my friends, it's great and describes so much in so little.

Is it a pro and anti capitalism point, i cant tell.

By that logic it was most efficient with slavery? And the next best thing with serfs?

It’s not pro or against. It’s an observation. Slavery and serfdom is not as efficient because the motivation to work is extrinsic and needs work to maintain.

It's worse than that. Slaves will actively sabotage the work, even at the risk of execution when caught.

I went for the most morally neutral analogy I could find. Systems and models are not inherently good or bad - what gives that quality is how we use them.

There's nothing morally neutral in exploitation.

So visit a different part of it. As someone whose parents grew up without electricity in their home that's nonsense and tone deaf. We don't need an "America bad" melodrama on every thread, especially one about European culture. Turn off the news and talk to real people. You have no idea how positively we brown 1st and 2nd gen immigrants view America, and the pages I could write on how far ahead of the "developing" latin and South/Southeast Asian world it still is. And yes Ive been to 20+ countries I'm not missing "perspective". Europeans have certain benefits explicitly defined by law and we don't because the US is rooted in a libertarian understanding of what a "right" is but we get them anyway and to keep it brief I will say that the recent hyper-focus on the US' flaws and fixation on what other countries "promise" their citizens make people myopic to how it actually plays out in the real world. I've met many entrepreneurial Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, French, and Australian friends abroad on the nomad circuits who start their own cafes and training centers and studios in other countries and tell me about what they lack back home and went in search of outside of the EU. I'm much more appreciative of the opportunities the US still offers after having traveled.

The US is definitely doing better than most developing worlds. Except of course for minor things like lifespan, health, crime etc. However doing better than developing worlds is quite a low bar.

“ what they lack back home and went in search of outside of the EU. ” that’s a very heavy selection bias. The Americans I’ve talked to in Europe doesn’t represent those that I’ve talked to in America. There’s a reason people both leave and stay.

>So visit a different part of it.

With this mindset soon there wont be any left.

>As someone whose parents grew up without electricity in their home that's nonsense and tone deaf. (...) You have no idea how positively we brown 1st and 2nd gen immigrants view America

It's easy to view the current status positively if you start from a low bar.

But sure, the US has electricy AND running water. I'll give you that. Well, mostly ( https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/26/how-texas-tough-winter-expos... ).

Second-generation Americans almost universally didn't start from a low bar themselves. Many first-generation Americans didn't start from a low bar, either, but that's maybe a different point.

Wealth is not "trickling down" mainly because of high taxes in Europe. Corporations have incentive to transfer profits outside and spend it only when absolutely necessary, otherwise any bigger project wouldn't be economical. So not only those corporations act like a hoover of funds, the void that is created has to be filled with something - and here comes progressive tax, that ensures middle class cover what otherwise those big corporations would have to pay and also ensures that if someone comes from a poor background they almost never go up in the class ladder. This will eventually create a society where everyone cannot afford anything to buy, but they will be able to scrap money together to pay for subscriptions and big corporations will become de facto governments and all parliaments will focus on protecting that status quo rather than serving the public.

> Wealth is not "trickling down" mainly because of high taxes in Europe

it's not trickling down anywhere.

While it might be in most corporations best interest to have consumers that can afford to buy all the thing they are selling, it's also in their own immediate interest to squeeze as much money as they can, and keep it for them self.

And each year laws get passed (or reverted) that help corporations , and they get better and better at squeezing.

Look at the trends, middle class is disappearing, and more and more wealth is captured and kept at the top. (corporations are getting bigger and bigger, and rich people are getting richer)

and it's happening in USA even faster than in most of Europe. Pretty much the only place where middle class is growing is China (and other developing countries), but that is because they are still catching up.

So it can't be just the EU taxes.

Trickle down is nice theory, too bad it doesn't work in practice.

And no I don't even pretend to know what the solution is.

I just think that lowering taxes for corporations, will just make even more money for corporations, make them more powerful and not really help anyone else.

While there are obviously major problems, if you rank countries by the social mobility indexes, or by GINI (income inequality) indexes, the top ten or so are all high-tax European countries.

Mind you, there's more to it than that; just setting the high-income-band taxes high won't do it. Efficacy of taxation and control of corruption is also important. Ireland's an interesting case; in the 80s its income tax was quite high (and it was a substantial net beneficiary of EU funding) but its GINI index was the worst in the EU (it was actually worse than the US for part of the decade). Today, income tax is still quite high (though not as high), and it's a donor of EU funding, but the GINI index is middle of the road European, far better than it used to be. The main thing that changed, beyond overall economic development, is reduction of corruption; there's no point in having big high-income-band taxes if no-one pays them.

"Corporations have incentive to transfer profits"

They will always have incentive to movw money into a tax heaven, their rate is zero

Only if the money can be freely moved.

“Trickling down” economics has been completely disregarded by serious Economists for years now. If it actually worked, the US would be in a much better position today than it actually is.

Large corporations like Google, Amazon etc. pays zero tax. I hope you enjoy your percentage of those non-existing “trickling down” $.

A great thing about America is you can buy stock in corporations and get your share of their profits. It also gets you the right to attend shareholder meetings and vote on corporate business issues.

> And the US, sadly, becomes more like the developing world, every time I visit...

But Biden has the "once in a generation infrastructure plan"!