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I recommend people visit http://www.lcurve.org/ to see "how rich rich people are"!

> Quick! Name a single billionaire who isn't also involved in job creation!

They all are, but not for the reason you think. Because they buy things. But the rich are too few, and can't spend enough to make up for the spending power the middle class used to have.

Trickle-down is really trickle-up, based on all the productivity gains of the last 40 years going to the top of the heap.

Investment doesn't create jobs; demand does. Only people having money to spend can create markets for goods and services that allow businesses to thrive. Income inequality is bad for business because most people are forced to economize. So it's in the interest of the rich to pay workers more (call it "demand-side economics"). Earning power translates into spending power.

“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.”
  – Chris Rock

> Do you really understand how much money Gates and those like him have?

A lot

People are closer to state governments and are better able to change it so any tyranny will be short lived as the people vote it out.

That was the theory. In reality, since the late 1800s it became easier for trusts, megacorps, and billionaires to buy overwhelming influence in state governments. So in the Progressive era, people started looking to the feds to protect them from that corruption.

But as the rich got richer, they just bought out the federal government too.

In a society suffering from an L curve as severe as ours, the balance of state and federal power doesn't matter. It's all the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules.

You should listen more closely, because there are a number of reasons why vast wealth is bad for everyone but the wealthy person.

Indeed, most people who defend the ultra-rich really have NO idea exactly how big the income distribution disparity is.

It's BIG: http://www.lcurve.org/

Income inequality in the US is much worse than you think.

If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.

http://www.lcurve.org/

Exactly. Like it's some kind of shocker that the people who have most of the money pay most of the taxes.

If you want a real eye-opener, take a look at the L-curve.

These amounts are very difficult to imagine. Even if he received no more income for the rest of his life (say 20 years) he could for example buy a new car every 2 minutes (but have no time to drive them).

This is a bit dated, but it gives a good visual impression. Gates's wealth equals a stack of $100 bills literally into the stratosphere:

http://www.lcurve.org/

> My argument is at the 175K mark.

$175k isn't a "fuck ton of money." It's a good living, or a very good living if you don't have kids. It doesn't put you in the 1%. Even Obama doesn't have the stomach to call it "rich."

Speaking of perspective, have a look at the real income disparity in America.

the choice with education isn't about school or no school, it's about which school. if government got out of the way and all schools were privatized, schools would compete with each other for tuition fees which would keep prices down, and it becomes "user pays" rather than everyone being forced to bear the burden of the cost of education.

The choice used to be "school or no school," until we collectively decided that everyone who wants to go to college should be able to. Tuitions would have stayed high anyway if demand outstripped supply, but the availability of financial aid to everyone has allowed tuitions to skyrocket relative to inflation.

Once the "easy" college money dries up, enrollments will drop and tuitions might also.

the problem with taxing "rich" people is that the rich people being targeted ($250k+) aren't really "rich"... they are merely households with more than one decent income. ... also, how do you define "rich"?

I don't know of an objective measurement of "rich," but the disparity of wealth distribution in the USA skews the line higher if you go by percentage of total income earned. Only 2% of the population have a household income over $250,000. If you divide income levels of the remaining 98% into thirds - "poor", "middle-class" and "rich," the dividing lines fall on $83,000 and $166,000. I don't know anybody who considers $83,000 to be "poor."

Take a look at http://lcurve.org/ to see why the rich pay most of the taxes.

the biggest problem with taxing the rich more is that less people will want to be rich

There is absolutely no evidence for this. Look at the historical record - higher taxes have never kept people from seeking higher income.

Being in the top 1/3 does not make you "rich" dumbass.

I dunno, it seems reasonable to me to say the bottom third is "poor," the top third is "rich," and the middle third is, uh, "middle." That's assuming you define it by income and not by wealth/assets.

Then again, dividing into equal thirds may not be fair, since the income distribution is not linear - not by a long shot.

I see how you get that. You misunderstood the numbers or what I'm saying...

While paying a tax rate of 18% for the wealthiest americans
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2011/07/25/the-400-richest-americans-pay-an-18-tax-rate/

and a tax rate of 24% for the top 1% of americans
http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2011/10/25/beyond-the-1-percent/

The share of federal taxes they pay is 36%.

They reason they pay a lower rate but a higher share of taxes is that they take much more than their share of the countries income.

The top 1% has 40% of the nation's wealth and takes home 24% of the entire countries income. They took just 9% in the 1970's.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five-wealthiest-one-percent/?mobile=nc

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Let me put it this way.. if these trends continue, by 2040 they will have 75% of the nations income. At that point- since they took most of the income, they would pay even more of the income tax even if their income tax rate fell even further.

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And let me put it another way....
If you take home a FOURTH of the nation's income, and everyone doesn't really pay taxes on the first 6k of their income, then you will pay a THIRD of the total taxes.

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Had an error in my post above. The gas tax on the poor is 1.6%, not 5%. And it's still .000185% on the top 1%.

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And FYI, the top 1% is really just a cover for the top .5%. The bottom half of the top 1% are basically poor compared to the top .5%.

$380k per year income. (bottom of the top .5%)
Millions to Multi millions per year in income (top of the top .5%)
http://www.lcurve.org/

Bill Gates had a rich family, but like many others that became mega rich he worked his arse off, whether you like him or hate him he certainly worked for it

He worked hard, no doubt, but no harder than any number of engineers/managers who never earned more than $100,000 a year.

No, Gates got rich by leveraging markets. There really wasn't that much work involved, just a keen insight and sheer will to dominate.

Take a look at this site and tell me with a straight face that Bill Gates (or anyone in the world) did or possibly could do anything to deserve a seat on top of a 50km-high pile of $100 bills.

Okay, so the millions don't have much to worry about. It was the billionaires that I was really concerned about.

Through what other means (the artificial scarcity of energy has worked really well for a long time) can the planet's billionaires maintain the L-curve distribution of income in the economy? This is the only question which must be answered before revolutionary energy technology can be allowed into the market.

As I've said before, remember that JP Morgan only financed Nikola Tesla's research until he realized that Tesla wanted to give electricity away to everyone for free.

So, just suck it up and take it?

No...

or (as an industry, collectively) grow a pair and do something about it.

What I have observed in the last 40 years has been a bunch of ineffective whining with regards to "fairness" in the distribution of wealth. We need to either do something effective about the problem, or just enjoy life for what it is and stop whining. There is no reason that this should ever happen in a Democracy.

In the case of the U.S. that means voting for people who want to cut the budget because the less money the government has, they less power they wield.

Yeah. Less power to maintain the roads, fight fires, teach kids, rebuild flooded cities, feed the hungry, find and lock up murderers, care for the sick and injured...and, most importantly to the investment-class parasites who most strongly promote this "cut the budget!" meme, less power to put any regulation on big business.

Actual totalitarianism can be run on the cheap, clubs and jackboots are not very expensive. The size of the budget has little to do with how much freedom people have -- low government spending doesn't correlate with increased freedom. (Read the whole linked page, not just the table, especially the note about the U.S.'s rank -- the U.S. already spends less (by GDP) on government than any other large, prosperous country.)

Now, as a Zenarchist, I'd love -- and look forward to -- a society where we don't need government to maintain the roads, fight fires, teach kids, etcetera. But before we get government out of those things, we need to get it out of creating and enforcing the capitalist "property rights" that create economic injustice, that have us living in the L-curve. First tear up all those government-issued land deeds held by landlords, the government-issued corporate charters that make stock in companies meaningful, all those government-issued copyrights and patents. Then we can talk.

"If you make less than a million a year, you are what a rich person would call a peasant."

True.

CC.

Only poor people pay taxes.

In contrast, the top 10% of taxpayers paid 55% of total federal taxes in 2007. The lower 90% of taxpayers paid the other 45%.

That sounds awful, but that is because the top 10% own all the money. Really, a proportional tax would have them pay even more of the tax burden because they control that much of all the money in the US. Let me introduce you to the L-curve: http://www.lcurve.org/

I don't believe your 73rd percentile stat at all given that the mean and median (so 50th percentile) are roughly $45k.

You can get those stats from irs.gov. Back in 2003 I checked it out: I was making $75K and that was the 80th percentile; at the time $35K was the median. At the top 5% range it gets absolutely ridiculous - see the L Curve (biased but still accurate numbers).

That's the major cause of the current recession - the fact that people didn't save and used credit cards to spend way more than they earned (at least you're not doing that).

The problem wasn't people spending - spending is great for the economy. The problem is that the economy simultaneously requires a large middle class to keep spending and a smaller workforce to keep producing. Since the workforce and consumer class are the same people, eventually layoffs must have an effect. For the last 30 years we've been aggressively pursuing greater efficiency (woo!) but have not been able to keep up with demand for new jobs.

Ultimately the problem is structural: we are moving towards an asymptote of one self-healing machine, owned by one person, that creates all of the goods of the world. Think of a single Star Trek replicator operated by one Ferrengi. The IRS has only one W-2 to audit, and the Ferrengi insists that the income tax is drastically unfair as he is the only one paying any of it.

truth

I LOL'd

90% of income taxes are paid by the 1% richest earners. 99% are paid by the 10% richest. Yes I know - an inconvenient fact but also happens to be true (came direct from the IRS).

The simple truth is that they should pay much more. If you want to hold all the wealth, why shouldn't you pay all the taxes? The idea that a few can make almost all the money and yet accept less than their share of the stewardship (through various tax dodges including ye olde capital gains) is ridiculous no matter how you examine it. The top 10 taxpayers in the year 2000 paid taxes on only 50% of their income, another fact straight from the IRS. Typical wageearners who work for some corporation have to pay taxes on nearly 100% of their income. Now what's fair?

So government pre-dates concentrated wealth in the history of mankind?

Absolutely. Concentrated wealth only became possible with civilization and agriculture; when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, no one owned land, and personal possessions were limited to what you could carry. Back then, "wealth" was that you had a nicer spear and shiner trinkets than the next guy. It was only after it became possible for you to have more land (or better land), or more cattle, than me, that we could have a real difference in wealth.

Industrial civilization has only amplified this trend, giving us the L curve of wealth, where the top 1% make in one year what it takes a mere millionaire a lifetime to accumulate.

Goverment predates all of this. The most primitive form of government -- the alpha of the pack -- predates humanity. Even if we limit discussion to Homo sapiens, nomadic groups had tribal chiefs or councils. And kings and princes pretty much came with cities. (As did priests, but that's another rant.)

As Tom Paine, that radical socialist, noted,

Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state.

...

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.

(Technically, it could be argued that "the history of mankind" only picks up with writing, thus after civilization, but I'm presuming the broader meaning of "humanity's existence including prehistory" here.)

wealth will concentrate in the hands of those with the greatest willingness and ability to use force. The fact that this is currently the government does not escape me.

The group that has the greatest potential to use force, is by that fact the government -- de facto, if occasionally not de jure. If we shrank and shrank our democratically elected government until it could be "drowned in a bathtub", government by plutocrats or by strongmen would fill the power vacuum.

And indeed, this often seems to be the goal of some leaders of the conservative movement; going back to this nation's founding there have always been those who are suspicious of too much democracy, and want to tilt the scales to aristocracy and plutocracy. They appeal to the universal American desire to "get government off our backs!" -- but don't mention that it's because they want to put the leeches of landlords, bankers, and absentee investors on our necks.

Everybody with a bank account is an "owner of capital."

Only in the same sense that anyone who walks in an "athlete".

We live in a society where a small class of aristocrats -- the top of the L-curve -- control the economic resources.

One anecdote about a person on welfare (possibly burned out or damaged from the current economic system or schooling) does not a case make.

You said previously that another person's vast wealth does not bother you unless it affected your ability to make a living. I then gave a list of things from campaign donations through advertising and getting multiple chances that suggests a vast wealth disparity would impact your ability to make money. And that's even without considering how many workers can be replaced by increasing automation (including robots and AI) and better design. Then you changed the subject. :-)

In an age of robots, an "L-Curve" society can't function if the only reason people have a right to consume is having a job.
    http://www.lcurve.org/

The global economy has just crashed (or rather, is *starting* to crash in a big way). You are suggesting the same mainstream economists who defended it's current structure know how to fix it? Give examples of these people who are so effective at governing countries? The USA is second from last in child wellbeing of industrialized countries, and that is only because the UK is last as (it's said) a poor version of the USA. So, how about, say, Iceland as a model, a big neo-conservative poster child for a time as a well run economy? Markets have a lot of good points, but they often fail at dealing with positive and negative externalities, managing systemic risk of market failure, and equitable distribution of market production if the economic wealth distribution is very unequal. I stuck in "humane" is "markets need a wide spread of wealth to function humanely", but the fact is more like, they need a broad distribution of wealth to function at all (as we are seeing now). Why did the USA have so much economic growth when top tax rates were around 94%? Because it spread the wealth around. There is a law of diminishing return on great wealth, where it just becomes easier to park your wealth in Treasury bills and finance wars than actually run businesses.

From Marshall Brain's "Manna":
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV -- the world's best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived -- he had had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it."

It's the measure of money moved around, using goods and services as a way of measuring it.

No. The GDP is the measure of goods and services produced, using money moved around as a way of measuring it.

Summing the market value of all production will only tell you how much was produced. I can give you a bottle of milk. After you drink it, what's left of its value?

The value of a consumable good, just like that of a service, lies in the satisfaction of human needs and wants. The value of that milk after I drink it goes into the satisfaction of my thirst and the improved nutritional state of my body. (Pretending that I consumed dairy products, that is.) It's the same value I create when I give someone a shiatsu session: I have improved the state of their body in a manner which they value.

Other people are investing their past efforts (but it's only money now) on the company, you're not the only one creating value there.

The workers are the only ones creating value. The owners of capital aren't creating anything, any more than I'm creating something when I lend out my hammer. Sure, the owners are a necessary catalyst under the current system; but their necessity is an artifact of an insane system.

If you're the one with a good package for hammer renting (price + convenience + etc), there is nothing wrong with it. Your hammer is not a godsend, it has its own value. He can buy his own if he wants to.

It's hard for him to save enough to buy his own hammer while I'm sucking away most of the value he produces. (Obviously, not literally true in the case of hammers.) The fact that under our current system it's hard for our "carpenter" to "buy his own hammer" - for the people who do the work to control the capital with which they do it - is the problem.

This system whereby control of capital is concentrated into the hands of a few is not a "godsend" either. It is the result of deliberate actions by the state, which creates and enforces various "property rights" and which enacts policies that favor the interests of capital over those of labor.

That does not changes who the money owner is. It is still the average worker. Your disagreement with the rules or management of these funds is a whole different issue.

There is no "money owner", as there is no money. There is stock that may be eventually sold for money.

Ownership is defined by control. If you don't control the stock, if you can't vote it in favor of your interests rather than those of the fund, you don't own it. Making up an idea of "money owners" is a sad way to try to deny this fact.

In the end, all of your points were extremely weak and mostly based on right-wing capitalist ideology. The worst part of your message was all that nonsense and ranting about how drinking milk destroys its value - followed quickly by that "money owner" nonsense. I give it a 4 out of ten: unoriginal and lacking rhythm, you can't even dance to it. But at least the instruments were played competently.

You appear to be the sort of nutjob^H^H^H^H^H^Hfellow that confuses private personal property with private control of capital; such people often become confused when it is pointed out that modern corporate capitalism is not necessary the final apex of human society, that something other than the L-curve is possible.

HTH. TTFN.

I guess if you artificially define "hard work" to be "using your muscles" this is true enough.

No. That was one of Marx's greatest bloopers, to disregard intellectual labor.

Define "one's own" and define "hard work". And define them meaningfully.

"One's own hard work" in this context means physical or intellectual labor performed by one in support of the production of goods or services. Even the IRS recognizes the distinction between "material involvement" in a business and "passive activity".

If your only involvement with a business is to put money in and get a dividend statement every so often, you're not engaged in "hard work", you're an absentee owner. If your only involvement with a business is to buy and sell its stock, you're not engaged in hard work, you're engaged in speculation, in gambling. If your only involvement with a business is that you have a piece of paper from the state, a land deed, that forces that business to pay you for occupying that piece of the Earth's surface, you're not engaged in hard work. In each case, you're skimming off the value created by labor of others.

What is your alternative?

My alternative is policies that favor earned income over passive investments, rents, and inheritances, resulting in a flatter distribution of wealth.

Do you think there exists a system where the top 10% of the population only owns 10% of the wealth?

Neither necessary nor desirable. We don't need a completely flat distribution to have something much, much better than the L curve we have now.

The fact is that poor people breed like vermin, then they don't take care of their kids, then those kids go on to do the same.

Ah, I see. Poor people are "vermin".

Your own words indite you more than anything I could say.

The simple fact of the matter is that things like income are statistically distributed.

Only if the income distribution you are using is an incredibly steep exponential function.

If you are talking about a Gaussian normal distribution -- which is a typical one for truly random variables -- then the US income distribution looks nothing like it.

You are not reading what he said. He made two statements, both of which can be true.
(1) There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.
(2) There is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
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Seems statement "1" is true...hundreds of thousands of P. & S.E. have been idled due to work being shipped overseas.

Statement (2) is also true -- in the U.S. (which is where we are talking about there being a "shortage", and where MS claims to have difficulty hiring).

So it isn't the case that "there is a shortage of programmers" (i.e. statement 1 is true). What is true, is that MS is finding a shortage of entry level people that can be paid some fraction of what "market conditions" demand of salary.

Obviously, P & S.E. are "trained" -- not just anyone one off the street can do the job. If anyone could, there would be plenty of low-paid applicants to do the job.

In the US, 4 years a respectable college can easily top 120, probably 200K. However, MS can hire foreign workers where a 4 year degree is significantly cheaper and in some countries, paid for by the government. By hiring foreign workers, MS can get around all the worker protections and rights that have been enacted for American workers over the past century. American workers "cost" too much because socially, they have too many protections and have obtained too many benefits. So -- move a factory to China where you can hire child or slave labor (oops, that's been closed down until after the 2008 Olympics)...guess you'll have to pay them $20 a week with no benefits. Darn!

It's a slap in the face of "labor" -- labor being anyone who is, and has to work for a living. Those who are rich enough and have investments that will appreciate with inflation or at least have enough that they won't be bothered by the dollar's shrinking value.

The US economic inequality index (Gini Coefficient) has increased almost 10 percentage points in the past decade (was 37% for period 1990-2000, is 46.6% now). Why? Because the middle class is losing their jobs while the upper class is increasingly being served by non-residents (outsourced work). The US has one of the worse figures of any Western nation**. Another graph, The L-Curve (pdf) shows it using stacks of 100-dollar bills spread out over the length of a football field. The length represents the population of the US -- how many people have nothing would be the "0" yard line. The 50-yard line is the middle of the US population. The stack of bills there is 1.6 inches high (~$40,000). At the 100-yard line are the top earners, with the highest having a stack of $100 bills 30 miles high. That represents the ratio of how much the richest people have vs. the entire US population. Note, the 90 and 95 yard line families have stacks 4 inches and 12 inches, respectively. Compare that to the top families' 30 mile high stacks.

One can claim it is MS's duty to their stockholders -- but it is going for short-term profits at the long term health of the economy and *customers* who have been able to pay for their success. If MS wants to sell in India -- one Indian engineer stated that MS would have to reduce their MS Windows price to fit the "Indian" prices. So instead of selling their top OS at 250-300, it was suggested they reduce their price down to around $20 (otherwise they'll get "zero" as their products are pirated). To make the same profits, they'll have to reduce their costs by 10-15X, so...when engineers in India or China start costing more than 1/10th to 1/15th the cost of a US engineer, MS will be selling the high price copies to a market that will shrink, incredibly (who's driven the adoption of the PC if it hasn't been software engineers, progr

You are not reading what he said. He made two statements, both of which can be true.
(1) There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.
(2) There is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
---
Seems statement "1" is true...hundreds of thousands of P. & S.E. have been idled due to work being shipped overseas.

Statement (2) is also true -- in the U.S. (which is where we are talking about there being a "shortage", and where MS claims to have difficulty hiring).

So it isn't the case that "there is a shortage of programmers" (i.e. statement 1 is true). What is true, is that MS is finding a shortage of entry level people that can be paid some fraction of what "market conditions" demand of salary.

Obviously, P & S.E. are "trained" -- not just anyone one off the street can do the job. If anyone could, there would be plenty of low-paid applicants to do the job.

In the US, 4 years a respectable college can easily top 120, probably 200K. However, MS can hire foreign workers where a 4 year degree is significantly cheaper and in some countries, paid for by the government. By hiring foreign workers, MS can get around all the worker protections and rights that have been enacted for American workers over the past century. American workers "cost" too much because socially, they have too many protections and have obtained too many benefits. So -- move a factory to China where you can hire child or slave labor (oops, that's been closed down until after the 2008 Olympics)...guess you'll have to pay them $20 a week with no benefits. Darn!

It's a slap in the face of "labor" -- labor being anyone who is, and has to work for a living. Those who are rich enough and have investments that will appreciate with inflation or at least have enough that they won't be bothered by the dollar's shrinking value.

The US economic inequality index (Gini Coefficient) has increased almost 10 percentage points in the past decade (was 37% for period 1990-2000, is 46.6% now). Why? Because the middle class is losing their jobs while the upper class is increasingly being served by non-residents (outsourced work). The US has one of the worse figures of any Western nation**. Another graph, The L-Curve (pdf) shows it using stacks of 100-dollar bills spread out over the length of a football field. The length represents the population of the US -- how many people have nothing would be the "0" yard line. The 50-yard line is the middle of the US population. The stack of bills there is 1.6 inches high (~$40,000). At the 100-yard line are the top earners, with the highest having a stack of $100 bills 30 miles high. That represents the ratio of how much the richest people have vs. the entire US population. Note, the 90 and 95 yard line families have stacks 4 inches and 12 inches, respectively. Compare that to the top families' 30 mile high stacks.

One can claim it is MS's duty to their stockholders -- but it is going for short-term profits at the long term health of the economy and *customers* who have been able to pay for their success. If MS wants to sell in India -- one Indian engineer stated that MS would have to reduce their MS Windows price to fit the "Indian" prices. So instead of selling their top OS at 250-300, it was suggested they reduce their price down to around $20 (otherwise they'll get "zero" as their products are pirated). To make the same profits, they'll have to reduce their costs by 10-15X, so...when engineers in India or China start costing more than 1/10th to 1/15th the cost of a US engineer, MS will be selling the high price copies to a market that will shrink, incredibly (who's driven the adoption of the PC if it hasn't been software engineers, progr

I think you might find this interesting:

http://www.lcurve.org/

If only it was a good as 80-20

See http://www.lcurve.org/WealthDistribution-1998.htm for some statistics on US wealth distribution.

you should see these links: http://www.academycomputerservice.com/economics/ch arts.htm http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pics/kuznet3.jpg (trend graph %$ going to those with most $$$$) http://www.lcurve.org/images/LCurveFlier2003.pdf

Picking on one point (prosperity) out of one articles, and ignoring several others is a little disingenuous. From the one you used, there are a number of other cases that you would have a harder time dismissing, such as:

• (Ending) the unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas.
• going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
• the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
• a 250 percent boost in military spending
• Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?
• John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state.
• We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two
• We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.
• The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do.

The last point, of course, is the obvious rebuttal to your claims of prosperity. While Bill Gates and Exxon are doing great under this administration, the rest of us haven't been so lucky. Average prosperity doesn't matter nearly as much as inflation adjusted median income. --MarkusQ

How about from the unearned income of the top 0.5% of Americans?

http://www.lcurve.org/

If you don't understand this, you don't understand free-as-in-commercial speech.

The 30% of people who control 50% of the wealth or whatever are the people who, after 40 years of working, have paid off their homes, their cars, have a nice little IRA, etc.

Um, no. Those people would be what is known as the middle class. The middle class does not control 50% of the wealth. Check out the nice L graph to see how wealth and income are really distributed.

Next time you want to rail against "the rich," just take a drive through the nice part of town. Those are the people who used our capitalist economy to achieve upward mobility. Want to know what evil thing they did to achieve it? Take a ride down main street. They're the people who took out a loan to open up shop, provide jobs to the people in your community, and provide you with goods and services.

Okay, now drive in the rich part of town. The vast majority of these people never had to work for their money, they inherited it from their parents. Go look at the graph.

I think a lot of programs need to be cut, and the budget needs to be balanced and the debt needs to be payed off. But we do that by reducing government, not spending more.

Reducing government is a great idea. Let's start by reducing government's power to concentrate wealth into the hand of a few, by revoking or greatly limiting the issuance of corporate charters, land deeds, inheritance rights, resource rights, copyrights, and patents. (Actually before that should be ending government's power to criminalize consensual behavior like drug use and prostitution, but let's stick with economic issues for the moment.)

The "social spending" that the right would like to slash is just an (inadequate) governor on the engine of state capitalism. Breaking the government power that enables the L-curve is a necessary prerequiste for eliminating these governors.

When the rich get richer, the poor do NOT get poorer. There is no finite pie in economics.

Which is the problem with economics - it does not correspond to reality.

All natural resources, and all human resources, are finite. Land or gold or the services of a skilled physician that I own, reduces the amount available to the rest of you.

Until economic theories that accept that we live in a finite world come to greater prominence, we're screwed.

I think you need to do more research on the distribution of wealth, because you contradict yourself. You say that it's "insane" for 10% of people to own 90% of listed companies shares. This implies that you believe that, in a larger sense, it would be wrong for a small minority of citizens to control the vast majority of wealth. On that much, we agree. But while more ordinary people own shares than before, this is not the same as having wealth. In the old days, owning shares literally meant a share of the profits, in the form of dividends. Nowadays, most companies do not pay dividends, or if they do, they pay out only a tiny fraction of the profits. That means that stock ownership isn't really ownership, in the truest sense of the word. If I owned Acme Widget company in it's entirety, you can bet that I would get 100% of the profit. If own one millionth of Microsoft, do I get one millionth of the profit? I certainly do not. What I get instead is a piece of the speculative market for MS shares. And as the lancing of the dotcom bubble proved, the stock market is not a perpetual wealth generating machine - not for anyone who is not at the top rung of the corporate ladder.

By focusing on ownership of corporate shares, you have failed to consider the larger question of distribution of wealth in general. I recommend this site:

http://www.lcurve.org/

It graphs the distribution of income in this country by representing the population of the US as living on a football field, with their annual income represented by a stack of 100 dollar bills. The median family dwells exactly on the 50 yard line, and makes about 40 thousand dollars a year. That stack of Benjamins is just 1.5 inches high. The family on the 95 yard line earns about $100,000 per year, a stack of $100 bills about 4 inches high. At the 99 yard line the income is about $300,000, a stack of $100 bills about a foot high.

And then a really odd thing happens. The stacks of bills don't keep getting a little bit higher. They start to shoot straight up into the sky(the L shaped "curve" that the site's title refers to). So how high does that stack get at the 100th yard, in Bill Gates territory? It's a stack of 100 dollar bills 30 miles high.

Does that seem sane or insane to you, Robert?

Trust me, it is as bad as you'd feared.

Chart of incomes from lowest to highest in the US

Also has a section lower down that says the top 1% own more than the bottom 95% combined.

lcurve.com does financial planning. lcurve.org looks like what you meant.

The top 1% of the US earners pay about 21% of the total US income tax.

Is it fair to force them to pay more?

Try this.
It gives a very good visualization of the inequality inherent in the current system. I would also note that if you need a semi-log graph to make sense of income distribution, something is grossly wrong.

The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.

The top 10% pay 90% of the taxes.

Them what has the wealth, pays the taxes.

Of course, most of that money then goes to government contracts, creating profits for wealthy shareholders. Pity the Boeing or Haliburton stockholder who has to pay taxes (less taxes than you or I pay on our salaries, of course) on the profits their corporations make from taxpayer-funded contracts...

The obscene amount of wealth controlled by the richest Americans (we're talking about people whose yearly income is in the millions - the L-curve) is a flaw in the system, a run-away feedback loop in our economic structure. Progressive taxation is an (inadequate attempt at) a governing mechanism.

How much more can we hike them before they take their business elsewhere?

Take it where? American tax policy is so favorable to the rich that wealthy foreigners come here to take advantage of it. It's only corporations that are moving their shell overseas; most rich people don't want to live in a third-world country.

What a flake you are.

Take a good look at the income distribution of the United States. The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%. Wealth is a form of political power, and an imbalance this large is unhealthy for democracy itself. Can you at least admit that incredibly obvious truth, or are you too emotionally drugged by fantasies of orgiastic wealth?