91% marginal tax rate sounds almost unreasonably high. I can see why the rich would complain about that. When recently studying Supply-Side economics, it helped me come to the realisation that if there is no limit to government taxation, then there is no real incentive to be productive. I do not know all things economic, but it sounds like tax rates that high would hurt the middle class more than help, because people and companies with large amount of revenues would simply leave rather than work in the United States and continue to give 91% of their taxable income to the government. I do believe that we should enact policies that would keep us at a sustainable and steady rate of growth, but neither of the extremes that were talked about sounded like they would work. Yes i believe that there should be higher income taxes for those making more money because most likely they are putting to use the infrastructure in the country more than the people who do not. This especially means CEO’s who ultimately get people into a company to run it. For example, huge food chains often have many, many trucks on our highways around the clock. This can only happen because our tax money has paid a great deal to maintain the roads, which in turn get used and ruined by these absurdly large vehicles. If companies have the extra cash to pay CEO’s millions, then we shouldn’t have to watch buildings deteriorate or watch potholes form and stay there because there isn’t enough money to pay for them. They should have to have a high enough tax to recover without a doubt all of the damage that occurs through depreciation to public infrastructure.

The end note of the article says that it’s class warfare, but it doesn’t feel much like a war. Policy makers are in the pockets of big companies, and even when we vote for our presidents, the super delegates don’t necessarily vote for the majority they are supposed to represent. It’s hard to convince people to go out to the polls, and even harder to find people who are educated enough to know what their politicians actually represent. I believe there is a general consensus not just in the U.S. but around the world that our politics today are the biggest joke going around. We aren’t just voting for people who are backed by big companies any more, we are literally letting them run for office. This isn’t a war, it’s a massacre.

I’m glad I watched this video. Aside from it being required for class, it actually opened my eyes to the implications of measuring a nation’s well being through its’ GDP. I believe Mr. Stiglitz mentioned that GNP was a better measurement, but we have moved from that, so I went online and looked around for some suggestions of what could be better indicators of a country’s economic “health”, which brought me to this article: http://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/CASSE_Brief_GDP.pdf
One of the proposed measurement is called the “Human Development Index,” which takes into account life expectancy, academic success, and also uses GDP per capita to measure the position of a country, as opposed to just its gross domestic product. I figured I would post something since Mr. Stiglitz didn’t mention much on alternatives.

I remember studying marginal utility in microeconomics. The idea was that there were diminishing returns on happiness, based on the amount of a good or service consumed. I suppose that applying this to money itself could also makes a lot of sense. However, at some point, our focus on happiness became the societal focal point for motivation to do things in life. when there was a period of time when just being able to survive brought us happiness. From what Ferrer-i-Carbonell was saying, it sounds like there is a marginal utility for happiness itself, which is an interesting concept. Perhaps this has always been a motivator for continuing forward? Almost as if once we peaked in happiness with a certain activity, boredom itself would drive us to find other sources of happiness.