So you're also saying that Obama's budgets were crazy, because they established a norm?

Yeah, it's normal. But it's not like anyone should be surprised. I mean, everyone knows our economy is capitalist and that money controls our government, writes the rules, and decides who gets to play.

The U.S. is really an oligarchy. An oligarchy of the obscenely wealthy and powerful, the corporate boards of too-big-to-fail corporations. They'll keep feeding themselves, so it's only going to get worse and worse. The only way to stop them is to take away their political power, but to do that, you have to have political power, and they have it all. We're pretty fucked.

The number of people living in poverty worldwide has been cut in half since 1980. Things need fixing in the west but the neo liberal experiment has brought with it a massive increase in well being for the world's poor.

Actually @1) yes. Obama's budgets were crazy.

Christopher J / @3: Source(s), please.

As explained here...

https://youtu.be/287Cu5me0Og

Keynesianism has been thrown under the bus because #Neoliberals who control both parties demand that private debt replace public debt to the maximum extent possible.

Well, another reason why this process was interrupted was because of the fear of worldwide socialist revolution. The Cold War was as much a factor in the creation of the welfare state and redistribution policies in the West as the Great Depression or the hot wars. If you ever want to see a return to Keynesian economics and the welfare state, your best bet is a resurgent and scary hard left on a global scale. Any twentieth-century historical economic narrative that ignores the elephant in the room of "real working socialism" (the nightmare of Leninism) is incomplete.

@4 Charles Mudede (and also re @1 Phoebe in Wallingford's question): B-b-but. However crazy the Obama Administration's budget, we still had the ACA that provided healthcare to 24 million U.S. citizens who would otherwise be left to die in the ER. the shameless atrocity of Trumpzillacare only serves the corporate 1%ers, and that for the sake of humanity and the fuuture of life on this planet, cannot become the norm!

@9) not saying crazy is wrong. normal is wrong.

@5 https://www.vox.com/2015/7/13/8908397/11…

Alao google ted hans rosling. The late Hans Rosling was a professor of global public health.

@Christopher J.
Mr. Mudede's explanation also applies to your statistic. After China's loss of 50,000,000 people through starvation during the Great Leap Forward, the powerful there were threatened. They reluctantly acceded to giving power to their own 90% in lieu of a revolution. The rise of China accounts for the vast majority of that cut in poverty you cite, and interestingly enough, within the last few years, as China has accumulated its own billionaires, the rise of its middle class is starting to stall as well.
Within the U.S., the greatest drops in numbers of impoverished occurred under Franklin Roosevelt. Lyndon Johnson provided the greatest cut in the percent of U.S. impoverished, a cut in half in just 5 years.
The rise from poverty to working class in China and India.AND the rise of the 0.1% in the West came at the expense of lowering the relative power of the middle class of North America and Western Europe to that of the working class. What Mr. Mudede is calling for is the same sacrifice by the 0.1% that they have caused to the Western middle class.

1. Extreme poverty has been cut in 1/2 over the last 30 years. Note extreme poverty is living on about $1.90 per day. That said it is a significant accomplishment.

2. No way anything close to the Presidents Budget passes.

@13: You fail to mention that many social programs have been severely cut over the last 30 years. Any minor gains made to the 'welfare state' (which is pure horseshit and absolutely not true in the U.S., btw), were already lost in the decades before the Obama years. There was no net gain, except possibly in healthcare coverage. Poor and working poor have been earning less and less and less while the government has cut more and more and more. This isn't just a government issue. It is also the greed of corporations and banks and the people that take massive salaries and bonuses while the people on the bottom lose salary and benefits and jobs.

@13 - Do you consider the free university education currently available in Mexico to be a "handout"?

Why doesn't the "richest nation on earth" have free university education for it's students?

Explain me that, mr. smarty pants who ignores vast details to support their pro-1% point.
Why are you arguing for the 1%? Class traitor.

Escape from the 19th Century. "Did the Nineteenth Century ever come to an end? Was the "Twentieth" Century just a rerun? And what about the Twenty-First Century, the New Millennium? Another lackluster confirmation of the Eternal Return? Another garden of secondhand time? If to know "History" as tragedy is to escape its repetition as farce, then perhaps we need to look more deeply at this Past that won't stop haunting us."

@11 - While I fully agree that millions have been "lifted" from extreme poverty in recent decades... let's not forget that it was capitalism and colonialism that put people in "extreme poverty" in the first place.

"Here, we'll replace your community economy of food, labor and gifting, with a money economy that forces you to earn 'tokens' in order to get food and shelter, oh, and if you don't make a 'profit' somehow, you'll suffer. And no, you can't just build your own shelter because that's the governor's land and his thugs will burn it."
-- The story over and over.

Before 'money' came along, large & small societies were actually interested in supporting their people.
Today, clearly the ruling class has no interest in supporting people any more, and only care for themselves, the rest of us can just do heroin and die, apparently. Trapped in debt, one of the biggest scams ever developed.

In that Vox article the author says: "For most of human existence, our species was dirt poor." -- A statement that makes me cringe. Is an elephant "dirt poor"? Are dolphins "dirt poor"? The concept makes no sense.

Money has only existed for 5000 years. Before that we lived in communities that supported one another through mutual effort and voluntary cooperation, a web of social interdependencies. So no "money" per se, but a great wealth of human relationships.

I firmly believe one part of the solution to all this is to get away from exclusive reliance on "positive-interest" currency. The ethics & social mechanics of our national currencies strongly reinforce the current societal power dynamics.