...notion that a poor person must be a bad person because if they were good, they'd be rich. God would have rewarded them. And, vice versa, a rich person is a good person, because if they weren't good, God wouldn't have rewarded them with riches. QED.

Australia -

185% for the Danes

!45% for the French

German worker in between those two nations.

"Oz Landers" are at 65% wage hike experiencers.

And we Americans have received a scant one half of one percent, which I bet a lot of us did not even notice.

As far as the 15 dollar an hour, Super Duper Worker Salvation Concession that most Dems seem to support, watch Mc Donald's and other fast food franchises go to robotic order takers.

Some 250 million delivery jobholders will be re-placed by smart cars in the next eight years. (Uber executives are fast tracking the smart cars for their firm.)

Meanwhile the real jobs for Americans will stay overseas, and only by immigrating will any Americans find any type of job enhancement.

He spends a few pages describing Boston's many universities including Harvard and MIT, the Route 128 corridor, its reputation as a hotbed for innovation and business startups, everything that the Clinton and Obama Democrats champion as the new economic order. But then he looks at it from a different angle:

<To think about it slightly more critically, Boston is the headquarters for two industries that are steadily bankrupting middle America: big learning and big medicine, both of them imposing costs that everyone is basically required to pay and yet which increase at a cost far more rapid than wages or inflation. A thousand dollars a pill, thirty grand a semester: the debts that are gradually choking the life out of people where you live are what has made this city so rich.

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that another category in which Massachusetts leads the nation is inequality. Once the visitor leaves the brainy bustle of Boston, he discovers that this state is filled with wreckage - with former manufacturing towns, with workers watching their way of life drain away, with cities that are little more than warehouses for people on Medicare. According to one survey, Massachusetts has the eighth-worse rate of income inequality among the states; by another metric it ranks fourth. However you choose to measure the diverging fortunes of the Ten Percent and the rest, Massachusetts always seem to finish among the nation's most unequal places.>

analysis of Massachusetts something I hope to respond to tomorrow (Later today, already?)

Well thought out. Sad to think that back in the 1950 and '60;s, people would argue about
which area of the country was the most prosperous, and now it is more likely that we are squabbling over which region is the most depressed!

I'll take "Lip Service" for $200, Alex.

They're for it, at least the Party leaders are.