The pope understands economics better than most economists

Not so fast. He said the rich should take care of the poor. He did NOT say the government should do this. The government should step out of the way and let the churches and other groups do their things, supported by the public.

The government does not stand in the way of private charity. You must be smokin' that whacky tabacky.

Advocate, i suspect that there is no one whom the Pope hates. At any event, he'd never say so.

We have waited for 12 years for the rich to help the poor. So far all that has happened is for the most part the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer.

The rich, churches, and charities would not reliably provide help for the poor. That is why we have social security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Were you in charge, would you dissolve those programs?

BTW, I meant to provide a link, in my first post, to a good article on the pope's speech. However, I forgot to do it and can no longer find the article.

Perhaps what he meant was that the US govt should not have moved the tax burden from corporations to the citizenship?

In case that's vague, in 1930 companies and employees roughly contributed 50/50 to tax revenue. Now, companies contribute 6 times less than employees....so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - by design. That is the govt's fault.

If you want to know where that came from, search 'whitehouse historical federal tax revenue' (if I remember the parameters right). It comes from whitehouse records.

I'm no economic guru, having avoided the subject most of my life even though that is one of the key ways the world works.

I've found religious organizations definitely trying to help the poor, both when I was involved in them, and noticing from afar the many decades when I haven't been. Methods vary (I am so glad I didn't get the postulant shoes for the missionary order, something over fifty years ago) and some are straight out scams, but a lot of religious do mean to try to help. And so do many unreligious, as I can attest anecdotally.

Some people's motives for helping are complex, including getting a cleansing personal jolt from the doing of it.

I started out both somewhat liking and somewhat distrusting of Francis for some matters back in Argentina, but now I plain like him: he's a whack upside the head for vatican whirligig. You can tell I like him since I don't just use his old last name to speak of him.

The pope hates celine dion.

I know that for a fact.

Yeah, but everyone with a pulse and a functioning brain hates Celine Dion . . . that don't count.

as are many other structural problems that lead to the same result. D's and R's are both equally responsible, that the D's have largely been successful at laying the blame for poverty and suffering at the feet of R's speaks volumes about the ignorance of the American people.

I have only one name to throw at you Hawk. Bush.

this is the problem we were talking about, the reason given by both R's and D's is that we must keep corporate tax rates low so that our companies can compete globally. I am not sold, but both parties are trying to sell me.



so the right has some decent arguments that the rich pay their share. I dont think so, as the rich have gotten much more rich over this time, and the poor more poor, so the rich should be paying even more. call it a cost of doing business.

one of my main issues is that the low taxes on capital gains tends to drive the wealth of the rich, and the reason we did it was that it is supposes to juice economic growth that all can benefit from, but I dont see the payoff



The problem for D supporters though is that once they had to power to raise capital gain tax rates they did not do it, so even though Bush and the R's passed the cuts by not raising the rates when they could have D's are complicit. even worse then not raising the rates is the D's not trying to do it, not telling the american people that this is bad policy.