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Richest 2% Own Half the World's Wealth
kop writes "The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth, according to a new study by a United Nations research institute. Most previous studies of economic disparity have looked at income, whereas this one looks at wealth — assets minus debts. The survey is based on data for the year 2000. Many figures, especially for developing countries, have had to be estimated. Nonetheless, the authors say it is the most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken." The study itself is available from the World Institute for Development Economics Research.
Look at the duck world. Scrooge McDuck had enough money that he could swim in it!
All fellow members of the Roman senate hear me. Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich? Or shall we aspire to a more noble purpose and build decent housing for the poor? How does the senate vote?
Senate: FUCK THE POOR!
My work here is dung.
It's because of "news" like this that the terrorists will win!!!
It's not an Onion story?
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
A thing to think about when bitching about some aspect of socioeconomic status or buying "luxury" items...
One that hath name thou can not otter
...just because an asset is owned by some over-rich guy, doesn't mean that it is unproductive. Tomorrow we could send Bill Gates the title deed to all farmland in the Midwest, and that land would still continue to grow wheat for everyone's Raisin Bran.
And even if we then sent Bill Gates the profits from all those boxes of Raisin Bran, Bill would only have a pile of cash. Cash is not an asset; it represents assets, which usually remain in production somewhere.
No matter how rich Bill Gates gets, he still consumes very little, perhaps a half-million dollars a year in food, real estate, clothing, maids, butlers, and the like. Everything else that he owns is (if he is an even half-wise investor) still producing something elsewhere.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
between the current state and the feudal times.
It is possibly very hard to create such comparison given that probably the definition of wealth changed, the definition of feudal times is loose, the overall human population was much less and the world used to be much more fragmented back then. I think that 500 years is a nice round number, so a comparison between 1500 and 2000 could be made with some difficulty. Hard, but I don't think it's impossible.
Currently my gut feeling tells me that the "wealth" used to be even more centralized in those times, but we probably made some progress in social equality since then. I'd be interested to see in the amount of progress though.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
While it is pretty awful that 2% own 50%. The study reveals that 1% of the population owns 40% of the weatlth. Also the poorest 50% own 1% of the wealth.
More tax cuts for the rich!!!
Maybe these people are just genetically superior. Models are wealthy due to their looks, athletes for their physical abilities, inventors for their ingenuity, politicians for their ability to manipulate and businessmen for their ability to facilitate trade. Course resources play a part on a macro sense.
... all of a sudden?
It's in situations like these that I support communism or even its loose form (socialism). In many cases these rich folks are able to remain rich because of influence peddling, crony-ism, threats and corruption. In these Unites States, the above unwelcome features have become so apparent that our congress has also become the "no action congress."
Can somebody tell me what significant thing congress did in this term? Nothing was done for the common man. In 365 days of the year, congress will sit for about 110 days, and pull US$165,000 in salaries alone for congressmen and women. Overall, the picture is not good at all.
then it must be fair. Well, either that, or bad laws can be passed.
Still, as long as the issue is `do I cough up for a PS3 or is the Wii good enough` and not `why do millions of people die from easily and cheaply preventable/treatable diseases/issues such as malnutrition, malaria and sleeping sickness` I don't see things changing.
You still think the `war on terror` is important? Perhaps if the number of deaths on 9/11 we repeated in every country, every day, otherwise no - statistically, not really. And yet, look at the ratio of money spent on that futile little endeavor to money spent on issues that affect millions daily.
The only thing that surprises me here is the "2%". I generally went by the 20/80 rule, but it seems there are only a few people who understand how to make money, and a majority of people who are either not interested in being superwealthy (forgiveable) or who never bother to dig their way out of their financial woes (unforgiveable).
The top 1% only required wealth of $500,000 which a USer making $40,000 annually should easily eclipse with a 5% 401(k) contribution (assuming you have an employer match) and an 8% return. I'd guess that almost all of the college graduates here are above the 10% level (don't forget the value of cars, computers, clothes, any retirement accounts and such).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Inequality and Risk
Mind the Gap
For the good of humanity we must take all that wealth and re-distribute it equitably! But before we do, we might want to check out some countries that have tried that. The results aren't pretty (for example Zimbabwe).
Seriously, the wealthy of the world can be divided into kleptocrats, heirs, and entrepreneurs. As far as I'm concerned, you can shoot the former. Certainly not the second, though you may debate the merits of inheritance tax (which I'm personally against). Mess with the third at the peril of your nations well being.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Cue Capitalist/Communist flamewars in 3...2...1...
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Hippy: "Like, you can't OWN property, man!"
Prof. Farnsworth: "I can. But that's because I'm not a penniless hippy!"
Power to the workers!
To the extent that this reflects corrupt dictators stealing from their people, it's bad news.
To the extent that it reflects entrepreneuers taking risks and creating useful products, and savers putting off that next SUV purchase so that they can loan money to those entrepreneuers, I don't see any problem at all with this.
If you want the other 98% to start getting richer, then here are some things you can encourage:
- free trade
- secure property rights for poor as well as rich
- tax-advantageous savings and investment by the poor (in the U.S., e.g., raise the 401k contribution limit)
and here are some things you can discourage:
- corrupt governments, such as those that plague most of the third world, that use the power of the state to take all the wealth
- measures that impede the poor's access to capital markets: lack of title to their real estate, ability to take out debt secured by their property
- rich people who say they are for "fair trade" but who in reality don't lift a finger to extend trade and prosperity to the world's poor
Somehow, however, this being socialismdot, I suspect that much of the discussion will be about those bastards at the top.
You pinko, commie bastards! It's all your fault!
Like my economics professor tells us, when you have economic growth, EVERYONE gets a bigger slice of the pie. The slice of the rich grows much more than the slice of the poor does, but the slice of the poor is still growing. Some people may go on about how its not fair, and we should live in a more socialized economy where everything balances out, but when you stifle economic growth it's not just the rich who will be getting a smaller slice, but everyone. People living in poverty in America today have it better off than my grandparents did about 60 years ago. I'm not too concerned with how much the rich have, because as a lower-middle-class American citizen, I have everything I need. I also suspect that in 50 years time, most of what we call poor today will also have most of the things that they need (we are already close to that point in many countries).
The richest 2% pay considerably more than 2% of taxes, however.
They are disproportionately heavily taxed.
I believe in the US, for example, the richest 1% bear 18% of the total tax burden.
The purpose of tax is not to reduce the wealth of those who have done well to the level of those who have not; unfortunately, class envy is a very significant factor in the perception of the masses of poor and averagely well off.
Call them the hyper-rich.
While most economists recognize that the richest are pulling away, they disagree on what this means. Those who contend that the extraordinary accumulation of wealth is a good thing say that while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are most people who work hard and save. They say that the tax cuts encourage the investment and the innovation that will make everyone better off.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
This state of things was probably the underlying condition which inspired the french revolution... those who have money control the government to get richer while the lower classes remain lower and lower. This is the state of the world pretty much... read Viva La Revolution (a funny insightful book about the revolt) and also Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Class disparity still exists, yet some on the right in western countries argue the gap has narrowed. They arent thinking globally. After all it is our global village. The peasants are rising up, just as the colonists of the US rose up against those with the money and power that controlled them in 1776. Just some random thoughts to consider and which have already been stated elsewhere.
As capitalism spreads across the world the rich will keep getting in richer and the poor will keep getting poorer. The effects are evident not only in the third world countries but also here in the United States (as seen after Katrina). The pay packages of CEOs of top companies have increased by 11% every year where on the other hand the salaries of working class people have remained stagnant or gone down. Across the Atlantic, in countries like Africa, large multinational corporations have robbed the poorest of poor from their own natural assets (look at Kenya & the Middle East).
Unless there is a change in the socio-economic tendencies across the board and corporations become responsible not only for their share holders but also for the people in the countries they are dealing in, the gap will only widen.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
As I once learned a bit about the development of Japanese culture, the fact that they live on an island with very few natural resources that world considers to be useful or otherwise valuable, much of their cultural values developed around an appreciation for other things which I find not only admirable, but inspiring as well.
In my own life, I have learned to divest myself of debt financing and to save and survive with more focus on needs and less on wants. I definitely pay a lot less attention to pop culture marketting. Having grown up very poor as a child does make the adjustment easier and somewhat more natural for me, but I am definitely not an unhappy person.
Among the things that no longer hold any direct personal value for me are things like diamonds, gold or other things that do not directly enrich my life in any meaningful way. In short, I value the practical and all but ignore the impractical, useless shiny things in life. I doubt I'll see the world's culture shift in this direction within my lifetime, but if we were to simply stop valuing many of the things we currently value, much of the world's wealth would simply lose value.
How is this "news for nerds?"
What?
Why are diamonds so expensive? Because they are rare? They sure are, why is that? Oh, cause there's people who control the supply. What caused that recent spike in oil prices? Same thing. Why is software so expensive? Same thing. If the price can float, then the people who control the production can jack up the price. The only thing that stops most producers is competition. This is easily overcome by collusion. Where there is bodies that prohibit that collusion, we see markets. Where those bodies have been corrupted, we see price gouging. When those bodies start to actively sanction or require collusion, we see monopolies. There is no greater requirement for collusion than copyright - a law that requires everyone to maintain artifical scarcity, because everyone is a potential producer of goods that can be copied. By 2040 we may have a machine that can copy physical objects. Will we continue to require active collusion by everyone in society to feed our primitive obsession with scarcity? Or will we throw off these shackles and create heaven on earth?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Go trolling elsewhere. Do you think all those starving kids in Africa are buying plasma TV's so they can play PS3 in high definition? What about all of those people who file for bankrupcy because of otustanding medical bills. They don't understand how money works and fritter it away on useless things like medical care. Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack doesn't have a decent health insurance plan because senior management at his company decided to go with the cheapest health plan possible for the grunts because it allows the investors to earn an extra $0.01 per quarter.
I wonder why those poor people plan month to month. Oh, I know, IT'S BECAUSE THEY ARE WORRYING IF THEY HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO MAKE ENDS MEET. It's kind of hard to start your own business, set up an IRA, and invest in google when you can abrely afford your heat, electricity, and food. And credit card debt? Oh, I wonder why, because they can't afford to pay their bills so they use credit cards instead. They can only afford minimum payments, so they have a high APR. Looks like a vicious circle to me. Check out Wikipedia for the percentage of people living below poverty level. I'd like to see you start your own business on that.
what i always wanted to do as an idea was to reset everybody's wealth after a few generations. this would mean that people would have to work harder instead of sitting back and waiting for their paps to die.
50th percentile: $2,200 of assets
10th percentile: $61,000 of assets
1st percentile: $500,000 of assets (37 million folks in this bucket)
(according to the data from the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider)).
... thought provoking...
at part of the picture.
The absolute wealth value isn't as relevant as the wealth value related to the cost of living.
Example: If you live in a place where food costs $1/day and housing is $100/month, you can live off of not much more than $40 a week.
Now, if you live in a place where food costs $5/day and housing is $500/month, that $40/week won't even cover your food expenses.
Now assuming that other necessities and luxuries are all proportional to the house/food values, then who would be richer? The person in the first place making $80/week or the person in the second making $400? Answer: neither, in terms of what they can obtain, they are the same.
However the prices rarely scale like that, in this case the "equivalent" amounts for the first and second location might be $150 to $400 in stead, but the basic idea that absolute wealth means only so much, still holds.
Note: I'm not saying it isn't a problem that most of the wealth is in a few hands, it should be distributed around more to boost the economy (spend, not give), but instead they hoard, I'm saying that just looking at the wealth, and not the wealt compared to the cost of living and luxuries, is the problem
34486853790
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This is to be expected. People work disproportionately as well. High intelligence is distributed in a very similar curve.
The real reason that it seems to be getting more and more exaggerated is because the overall wealth/economy of the nation has continued to grow. This means that more people are able to afford to survive, to get health care, to be in a place where they can fill out these census instead of working their arses off or just trying to stay warm. Think back to the 1900s, or even late 1800s. People that were just scraping by would often not even survive. But really that's all besides the point.
Who cares if we have ridiculously rich people? What does it matter? It doesn't stop you from achieving your goals, you have to work to get there and earn your way the same. Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself. in fact, it makes you all the more likely to be able to get rich. These people if they want to stay wealthy, or grow their funds, must use it in some way. Maybe just earning interest in a bank, maybe investing in startup companies. Either way that money becomes a tool banks/companies can use to generate more wealth, and you can get in on that.
Quit being so classist. Just because others have done well doesn't mean you can't, but you surely can't if all you do is gripe about how you deserve more money without doing anything to earn it.
...who bought all the PS3s!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I hope you all realize that most Slashdot readers (being tech geeks) will fall into this top 2% figure eventually? Most of the world is dirt poor. Is that my fault? Fuck no its not. These people have to raise themsleves out of poverty. If the government is holding them down, then they need to do something about that as well. A LOT of people died fighting for what we have. We do not need to feel guilty about it. The person who wrote this article is probably a commie asshat.
Just ask the good Jedi how they feel about "Balance" now...
How is this a geek issue?
Where's the nerdy slant?
It's not that it's not interesting - but should it be a Slashdot article?
Daily Kos, maybe, but not Slashdot.
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
9% of people in US are Millionares. 9% of 300 million is 27million. 27 goes into 3 billion as 1%. This makes sense because a lot of people in the world don't have money at all and are just dying of disease and lack of food. I was dumb. I went to school so I could cure diseases. I shoulda just donated my college tuition to the poor, it woulda done me more good. I programmed from when I was 6 until I'm 29, and I can't find a single job in what people call a booming tech industry, I still find it absurd.
God spoke to me.
Gapminder is a group of people working on interesting ways to visualise data from the UN, as well as databases from national, and non-governmental organisations. The results are pretty interesting to see, and actually quite hopeful in terms of the world outlook. There seem to be a lot of incorrect preconceptions most people have about global socioeconomics which come from the way things were 30 to 40 years ago.
Here are a couple of rather interesting talks about what they've been working on. There's quite a bit of overlap between the two, but the Google Techtalk is longer and more complete. In Hans' talk at TED, in order to back up the claim that there are incorrect preconceptions, he shows how some of the brightest Swedish students scored a statistically significant margin worse than random when asked to choose the country with the highest child mortality rate from pairs selected such that one of each pair had double the child mortality rate of the other.
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
I might be exposing my ignorance on the subject (I have had hardly any economics education), but it seems to me that there should be something we can do as a pre-emptive release valve for wealth maldistribution. We start out with a relative imbalance, but not too much, say 70/30. This imbalance is not due to unfair advantage. It's just because some people are a more [industrious|clever|capable] than others [1].
The "problem" starts when the accumulation of assets among the more-capable accelerates, a phenomenon that I believe is due to the selfish exploitation of systems. (This is quite probably an evolutionary strategy, so it may not go away soon.) This, of course, is precisely what Marx was on about, and his prediction is that the imbalance will grow to the point that the have-nots will rise up in arms and simply take back what was taken from them (i.e., the release valve is opened). I think history has shown this to be fairly accurate, the French, American, and Russian revolutions being three recent examples.
So accepting that this is the inevitable result of accelerating imbalance, an intelligent course of action would be the invention of an economic mechanism that effectively bleeds wealth back to the proletariat, thereby providing release and staving off revolution. This should make sense to the wealthy as well! A stable system in which they are assured their wealth ought to be better than a short-term system that will lead to their heads being cut off.
Even though there are some mechanisms like this already (e.g., progressive taxation), they are apparently not effective. What's the blockage here? Why can't this be figured out? I am enough of a cynic to think that the main blockage is the arrogant belief of the wealthy that they can suppress revolution indefinitely. However, has there been any good mechanism proposed to address this issue?
[1] cf. Beggars in Spain for a good treatment of the economic responsibility of the more-capable viz. the less-capable.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I wish I was rich, then I would be self loathing... but really it is just class envy, but I hate them all the same.
In traffic I don't let people in if their in a BMW or Benz, but that is also based on that so many people who drive those cars are cutting me off anyways.
This may not affect the results that much, but you should remember that 2000 was at the height of the dotcom bubble. It'd be interesting to compare the results with those of current data.
It's amazing the number of slashdot posters who are *sure* that they're going to be almost as rich as Bill Gates shortly, and so identify with the ultra-wealthy. Another case of the victim identifying with the victimizer.
But then, they're the ones who've voted Reptilian "pro-business" year after year, while the people they vote for change the tax structure to put less tax on the wealthy "in order to create jobs"... which they do... in Third World countries. Meanwhile, the US can't manufacter even all the parts for our space program, or national defense: we have to import things.
Meaanwhile, adjusted for inflation, if they're not just out of school, their own real wealth and purchasing power have *dropped* every year (except during Clinton's presidency) since the late seventies. (Go look at the IRS site.)
Y'know, it's considered a sign of neurosis, at least, if not psychosis, to do the same thing over and over, and expect a different result each time.
Thanks so much, guys, for keeping my income *flat*... no, lower, than it was ten years ago (adjusted for inflation).
What would I do? Start by going back to the tax structure in the US of 1972, and roll *ALL* "capital gains" back into straight income.
mark "ah, the screams of the middle-income who think they'll win
the lottery...."
...I mean, ...Brunei?
Darwinism, or survival of the "fitest", does not care how much money you earn.
The definition of "fitness" is your ability to reproduce. Welfare mothers, NBA stars with 14 kids, are more fit than CEOs worth millions/billions with one,two, or especially no children, regardless of income.
Earning a degree from college does not make you more "fit". Having children makes you more fit.
Having an IQ of 150+ does not make you more "fit". Being "smart" enough to take birthcontrol to prevent unwanted pregnancies probably makes you more "unfit".
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I heard a guest speaker on Minnesota Public Radio (NPR affiliate) say just a week or two ago that in America, even if you live at the poverty line of a household $9000 annualy, you are still in the top 12% of richest people in the world. I hope that puts some perspective here. That said, I bet at least a tenth of slashdot users qualify in the top 2%.
The story makes clear why a statistic such as average income or wealth is bogus. It means nothing for the vast majority of people. A far better measure would be median income or wealth.
But then, government statistics are there to mislead you instead of inform you. To see what else is bogus, look here: http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/.
It's a geek issue because, as skilled professionals, the Slashdot readership tends to fall into that upper-middle-class section of the curve that is most likely to get squeezed out when the gap between rich and poor widens. I'm talking about the 'rich enough to pay a lot of tax, not rich enough to avoid tax' band that basically funds everything.
So I'd say it's a trend that's perhaps more worrying to geeks than to members of the Dick Cheney class or to Indonesian sugar-cane cutters.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
If you live in a $100,000 mortgaged home, you only need $60,000 in equity to have $60,000 in assets (assuming all other finances net to $0). Why? Well, the home is worth $100,000. If the bank foreclosed tomorrow, they'd sell the home for its $100,000 value, take the $40,000 you still owe them, and be obligated to give you the rest... $60,000.
Where'd you go wrong? You forgot to consider that a home isn't like a car -- it holds its value. This means that every dollar you pay toward equity in your home is a dollar gained in the assets column.
Put another way. When you buy a home, you own the whole thing. Your name is on the deed. All $100,000 is assets, and it all belongs to you. You also carry a loan on the side. If you still owe $40,000 on your loan, you've got $100,000 - $40,000 = $60,000 in assets.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
"thank the enlightnment for making things change, a little."
Thank the firearm that allowed the common peasant to kill the highly trained solider/knight.
The world was not a better place before guns existed.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
They aren't without money, they have 20% of the wealth. If this 20% of wealth were enough to feed/cloth/shelter them then this would actually be a desirable situation because everyone would be living and working toward being productive for the economy. I guess I should state the disclaimer that I believe in capitalism fused with democracy.
No, I don't keep asking myself why Chavez keeps winning. It's painfully obvious to me. They think that the way our system works in the United States is bad for them and I agree with them. Chavez offers them an alternative and, at the end of the day, everyone is lying to the people of Venezuela a little bit one way or another. Socialism is right for some countries but wrong for others. The United States has seemingly unlimited resources which makes capitalism very very good. Venezuela has resource issues & corruption which are both very very bad for capitalism. If the people feel that socialism will help them in the short run to get up and running, I hope they experiment with it. But I am a firm believer that once there is money & resources present to make an economy take off, I certainly hope they switch back to capitalism because that's where you really start to see your people strive to achieve great things. The great thing about socialism is that everybody eats. The bad thing about it is that everybody eats the same food--so why should I work harder at my job? What's motivating me to work my ass off in the fields while some computer scientist programs in an air conditioned office, in the end we both get the same thing.
I'm not sure why you called me idiotic. Nowhere did I say that the current situation in the world is perfect or good--in fact I pretty much said it was a bad situation considering that you have to be wealthy to get more wealth. I'm not sure what I said to put a thorn in your side. If my comment sickens you, fine, tell me why but calling me an idiot doesn't really help me that much.
My work here is dung.
One million Libertarians suddenly converged on /. to paste in their comments from last month.
Fortunately we have this tagging system to save us!
I wonder who sits at the top of the 2% pyramid.
James, fetch me my sporting tinfoil hat please.
It's not a geek issue and it doesn't have a nerdy slant, but it feeds into the liberal guilt of the typical /. leftist so it's big news. The same part of the brain is also responsible for a general low-level loathing of western civilization and a tendency to overlook and in many cases defend the sources of real evil in the world. Kinda like the entire United Nations collapsed into a person's head, if you can imagine that.
Now, supposing on an extreme level PPP correction leaves no international variations, then I think logically things would be basically a weighted average of the figures for each country. The report talks a bit about specific countries, so while it appears that the statistics would be smaller (thanks to big population, relatively low inequality countries like China - where 10% of pop holds 41% of wealth), they'd still be significant.
Not many here could pull that obscure reference from way back in 1981. Truly a classic flick.
(for those who missed it: link)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Unlike resources (assets) like land, water, ore etc. total wealth is not limited. Just because 2% of people have 50% of wealth, does NOT mean that there's somehow less wealth to be had for the rest of us.
Wealth is created by creative people. Each time you write software that other people need, you create wealth. Wealth is what other people need really.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Wealth in the study is defined as assets less debts, but there is a need to normalize the value of assets and the buying power of a dollar in the respective countries. For example, Dell moved its support centers to India because a dollar buys more in India than it does in the US. Does that mean Indian assets are worth less than US assets or does it mean prices are more inflated in the US than in India.
...
It is the latter, of course. As US dollars are pumped into India, prices in India will inflate, wages will go up and US companies like Dell will start looking someplace else. The intrinsic value of the labor didn't change, only the price.
In theory, free trade causes inflation in some contries and deflation in others moving everyone towards an equalibrium among all counties. It is a negative feedback mechanism. Unforunately, prolonged deflation leads to depression, bread lines, 15 cent per hour wages,
So if this is the first one this comprehensive, we don't have anything much to compare it to yet.
I am not sure whether this marks greater or lesser equality; many societies in the past had huge populations with negative wealth (e.g., slaves).
Also, is equality significant in and of itself? If I can feed and care for my family, and we are happy, does it matter how much richer than me some other guy is?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
For the most part, the "rich" EARNED it! They went out, took a risk, and made the money. Yeah, there are a few "silver spoon babies" like the Kennedy's, but you look at the top 100 and I'll betcha that they started with nothing.
The smart/educated/connected get richer, while the dim/uneducated/unconnected get poorer.
If you took the wealth from the world's richest and gave it to the poorest, how much different would things be in 10 years time?
42 hidden comments
This measurement of 'wealth' doesn't mean a great deal. If you live in a shanty town and have no regular work, but you do own the shirt on your own back (which might be worth say fifty cents) and don't have any debts to pay off, then you are counted as more wealthy than someone who lives in a million dollar house but is still making repayments on the mortgage.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Maybe this is part of your list too:
wasting it on sports and luxury cars - very dumb use of money and it just proves that you have decent credit!
Lavish weddings
McMansions
Second homes that you hardly ever visit
Simple. Brilliant. Devastatingly inefficient.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
This is not news for nerds. My vote will not change this.
Maybe if the poor didn't piss away all their cash on Pixar DVDs at MaoMart maybe they wouldn't be so poor.
I know there is a statistic out there that says the poor are more likely to smoke and drink... maybe they need to learn the lesson that is being told here.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
The news is, the terrorists have already won.
how to get rich:
(also: waste taxpayers money, get employees killed, lose the war etc.)
See the documentary
Source: iraqforsale.org
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
That is the income tax burden, not the tax burden. Why aren't you factoring in payroll taxes? Are you intentionally being deceptive? Despite your selective numbers, the top 1% of Americans still only pay 30% of the incomes taxes, even though they own more than 30% of the nation's wealth. So they are paying a smaller percentage of their wealth than the bottom 99%.
"Welfare mothers, NBA stars with 14 kids, are more fit than CEOs worth millions/billions with one,two, or especially no children, regardless of income."
There is also a case for those children growing up healthy and so on. It's no good for the welfare mother if all her children die in gangwars before maturity, or in a war in a foreign country.
By your definition, some yeast bacteria (or whatever) would be the "fittest" life forms, because they replicate a million times every day? (Actually, they are probably not more or less fit than humans).
Besides, evolution also operates on other aspects, like lifestyle. If Paris Hilton would die today, parts of "her" would live on in the millions of women imitating her lifestyle and clothes.
The problem is that most people don't know what wealth is. Most people don't actually have any. Remember, the study take assets minus liabilities to compute your wealth. Looked at this way, most Americans don't have anything. People buy a big house and an expensive car, but they borrow money to get it so their net change in wealth is zero. Then people relocate on average every 3-5 years, so what equity they do have in their home goes to the salesperson, and their car depreciates so much that it's comparably worthless by the time the loan is paid off and then they buy another. These people all think they're doing well and that they actually have some wealth when in fact they have none. Nor do they understand the benefits of not living this way.
Dollar is just a piece of paper whose scarcity is guaranteed by US government :). A lot of things in economy are relative.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Not in China. Peasants were free, and owned their own land which they could buy and sell as they pleased. It was also common for farmers to run their own small business in addition to farmer, most commonly selling the cloth that the farmer's wife weaved.
Another thing in China helped redistribute wealth. While in most places the eldest son inherited everything, in China, the property was divided equally amongst all the sons. This meant that "rich" families often became "ordinary" over a few generations unless they can produce one or two men of great ability every generation or so. In fact, this custom was deliberated introduced by the Chinese emperors to reduce the chance of feudalism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmon ey/15every.html?ei=5088&en=15efa5e07a61f354&ex=131 8564800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
October 15, 2006
Everybody's Business
You Can Complain, or You Can Make Money
By BEN STEIN
THERE is extreme income inequality in this country. It is hard to say whether it's the fault of President Bush, since there was also extreme income inequality under former President Bill Clinton, and in fact there has always been extreme income inequality.
Just to give you an idea of current inequality, statistically speaking, the top 1 percent of all income earners in this great land earn roughly 20 percent of the total income. The top 1 percent of wealth holders have close to one-third of all wealth. The top 5 percent of wealth holders have very roughly 50 percent of all wealth in this country.
As you can see, that does not leave a lot for everyone else.
There are a number of ways to respond to this situation. You can become indignant and say that it's a violation of American democratic principles. This is a good way to put yourself into a sanctimonious mood, and it offers some psychic satisfaction.
I'm not sure that there is any historical basis, though, for believing that the founders of the nation wanted everyone to have equal wages. Certainly, many of them were wealthy men, and the Father of Our Country was said to be the wealthiest man in the colonies from his land and slave holdings. But, again, if you want to be exercised about inequality, you'll have plenty of company.
Another way, possibly more satisfying in the long run, would be to ask yourself how the top 1 percent of wealth holders and income earners got to be that way, and then to try to do it yourself. My own observation, having been both a critic and a moderately well-paid person, is that while it's nice to be a critic, it's also nice to have your own swimming pool. (The best is both, but that's another story.)
In other words, look at two recent business stories and decide which side of them you want to be on. Sumner M. Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, recently fired the company's chief executive, Tom Freston. Mr. Freston was a pioneer at MTV, immensely well liked -- people on the Paramount lot literally wept when he said good-bye -- but Mr. Redstone decided that he had to go because he had not done a good job for the stockholders and the stock had languished.
In the last paragraph of an article about his departure, The Wall Street Journal dryly noted that Mr. Freston's severance package would be about $60 million and his pay this year was about $20 million.
An even more recent story has been about Brian Hunter, a commodities trader for the large hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors. Mr. Hunter made big bets in natural gas trades and had been getting good returns for his investors. Then the market turned against him and he lost roughly $6 billion -- yes, billion -- for his investors within a few weeks. He's no longer at Amaranth, and the fund is being dissolved. However, it was noted that his pay for 2005 would have been between $75 million and $100 million. Yes, you read it right.
That is, Tom Freston, an undeniably great guy, gets $60 million for leading a company whose stock performance was deemed unacceptably poor (although it's been good lately). Brian Hunter is presumably still a wealthy man despite leading his investors to disaster.
You can be furious about that, and you should be. But you might also think how nice it would be to make that kind of money, or even a small fraction of that sort of wage.
For students slogging their way through school, here are the merest hints of how you can and cannot reach that top 1 percent, that place where you are paid well even if you make mistake
my guess is that a real business man doesn't
just make himself rich, but "everyone" else also.
pretty much useless to live in a golden mansion
surrounded by slums and disease.
of course there a good and bad people, smart and
stupid people, small people and tall people etc.
so of course there are also people who want to be rich
and stay rich (even if it means to actively keep
other people poor (exploit them)).
some people get a "kick" from being very rich,
e.g. golden mansion in slum - situation.
Stop picking on us rich folk - we've done nothing to deserve it *wipes ass with $100 bill while lighting another $100 bill instead of a match*
The same can be said of any feudal system.
Sure, the king lives in luxury while the serf toils all day in the fields and dies at a relatively young age
Here's an easy example that most people here can understand
So if a couple people have to be sued to ensure that the MPAA/RIAA has more money, that's
After all, the lawyers that are being employed to sue those people are being paid, right?
Here, I'll shorten it a bit. If the money is in the economy, it doesn't matter if 90% of it is held by 10% of the people or by 90% of the people. It will still be spent and people will still have jobs to earn it.
The difference will be what it is spent on. The rich can afford yachts and such. The rest spend it on food / shelter / clothing / education.
Which is why cutting taxes for the 98% of the people causes the money to circulate faster than cutting it for the top 2% who will "invest" it in off-shore tax dodges in order to accumulate more millions. And from most economic points of view, you want the money circulating in the economy.
Then you must not be including your home and car as assets. I seriously doubt the principal on your mortgage is more than the value of your home and I wouldn't think you could be too upside down on your car either. Cars depreciate rapidly, so I suppose you may owe slightly more on your car than it is worth, but I wouldn't think that would be very large. So if you have any money in the bank or equity in your house, chances are you do have some net worth.
A friend of mine who is a tax lawyer had a framed copy of the first modern US income tax form in his office (not the Civil War revenue act). I don't recall the rates. According to Wikipedia In 1913 the tax rate was 1% on taxable net income above $3,000 ($4,000 for married couples), less deductions and exemptions. It rose to a rate of 7% on incomes above $500,000.. What stuck out in my mind was the form: it was one page, and easy to understand. It's not so much the cost of paying these days, it's the cost of paying correctly, which is why my friend has a job!
All local businesses are owned by rich people? Wow, news break for me. I know several local business owners and none of them are rich, unless we are playing the game that all Americans are rich. If that is the case, I'm sure there are local business owners in poorer countries that you would not consider rich.
While I believe it's necessary for government to tax their population, the reason for the tax is protection, from enemies, sickness, famine and many other things. However it seems that in socialism and in this new age global economy, it is being used to unjustly level the playing field on income earners. The government's first duty is to protect its population, not to ensure that tax's are burdened evenly according to wealth. Those who disagree need to look up Karl Marx.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
It really doesn't (and can't) happen all that much. Except for the amazingly incomprehensible and plain idiotic Alternative Minimum Tax.
When I looked it up on the internet I found some information on GINI coefficient on individual country but not for the wolrd as a total, especially dynamics of it. Can anybody help with finding that info? Thanks.
Now for some musements on the subj. I think that if we would like to look at the impact of the wealth disparity to the world in politico-economical terms (vs, say, ethical terms) it is important that we look at the effect of the wealth disparity on the social stability. As far as wealth disparity is concerned, common sense and historical experience suggest that the following observations are true:
1. The larger the disparity the less stable is the society (country or the whole world)
2. The faster dynamics of disparity diminishes stability.
3. At the same level of disparity the richer country is more stable than the poorer.
4. Disparity grows faster in poorer countries. Bill Gates has nobody look up to, but Russian oligarchs have.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
You could say 2% make most of their financial gains from the work of half of the rest of us.
If you put it that way taxing them to a larger degree sounds almost fair, doesn't it?
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
This is a serious problem that cannot be ignored. People die from poverty. They lead miserable painful lives and then they die. This is about the poor countries of the world, not the rich nations who act as if the poor ones don't exist.
People who are saying "it's their own fault" or "it's not such a bad thing" or claim that really poor people have any part in their own destiny are completely deluded. Whatever intellectual arguments people want to get into here, the fact is that most of us are extremely fortunate to have been born in wealthy countries where we can choose to make what we want of our lives. Many people in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia never get that chance and certainly don't have money that they can invest in a bank or any other way. The best they can do is survive if they are lucky. They cannot help themselves any more than you or I would be able to if we were in their situation. To suggest that these people should invest money, help themselves and get out of debt is not just irrelevent but exposes a complete lack of comprehension concerning the reality of the situation. And to use this story to complain about high taxes is simply perverse.
And I wonder how many people excitedly clicked on this story hoping to find out if they themselves were in the richest 2%. Selfishness and greed are two of the biggest reasons why the world is in the sorry state it is, and it will never improve unless attitudes change. Not just the attitudes of politicians, not just the attitudes of the super rich, but yours and mine too.
Sure, everything single thing you do in life is a value decision of some sort. Do you value the money from overtime or the time with your family? Do you value your morals over stealing that TV? Money is just a measure of one facet of value. Do you value the 20 hours of work you had to labor to generate this amount of money or the value of that new big screen?
If we start putting family and happiness into the wealth equation, we'll start to see that all those heavily compensated CEOs everyone loves to hate have sacrificed their personal lives and their families to get to the positions they are in. Would I do the same? Absolutely not. They can have the money, I wouldn't want that job for anything.
When you die a significant amount of your estate goes to the government. I mean, who can handle money better than the government??? Oh... wait...
I'm not sure what the point is you're getting at. You don't pay tax on the unrealized capital gains, but you'd pay tax on them when you tried to convert them back to cash.
So let's say I buy 100 shares of a stock at $1 a share; during the year, it increases in value to $100 a share. So my $100 investment is now worth $100,000. Aside from the dividends, I don't owe any taxes on the stock -- however, if I 'cash out,' and sell any of the shares, I'm immediately liable for capital gains taxes. It's not a free ride.
The IRS doesn't try to tax investments as they go up and down, because to do so would be ridiculously complicated (and, as other people have pointed out, would probably lead to people claiming negative tax liability on losses). Instead they look only at the value when you bought in to the investment, and when you cash out, and then tax the difference between the two.
E.g., if my 100 shares ran up to $100 a share but then sunk back to $50 before I could sell them, the capital gain I get taxed on is $49 a share, not $99. Taxing me on $99 wouldn't make any sense, because I never really had that much money, except theoretically.
So while Bill Gates has a lot of money in MSFT, it's only wealth insofar as Microsoft's stock is considered rather stable. If Microsoft were to tank tomorrow, much of that apparent wealth would evaporate. Any time he actually sells stock in order to use any of that wealth, he gets hit with taxes. So really, he has a constant 'potential tax liability' on his 'potential wealth' of about 28% -- because if he wanted to cash out tomorrow, that's what the IRS would be coming after him for. (Well, probably slightly less than 28%, I think the first few thousand bucks get taxed at a lower rate and it goes up from there to 28% which is the cap.)
Actually taxing people on unrealized capital gains would be effectively a tax on savings. It would be a giant mess and have vast consequences -- basically it would mean that just having money sitting around in an investment would make it "shrink." It would lead to lack of savings and probably not hurt the very rich nearly as much as it would hurt the middle class. Not to mention that taxing unrealized capital gains would also involve taxing real property -- it would basically be a federal property tax. That's going to hurt homeowners everywhere; it's a total non-starter.
There are a lot of problems with the current tax code, but the fact that it doesn't go after unrealized capital gains is not one of them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"The rich get richer" is basically a result of something sometimes called the "risk free asset" by modern portfolio theory aka "risk free rate of return" -- generally the interest rate the government pays to borrow money. In classical economics its called "economic rent" or "Ricardian rent" (after the classical economist Ricardo). It results from systemic growth in the economy -- growth that increases the value of assets that do not increase with increasing demand, such as land. If you shove more people onto the Earth, you get higher land prices but you don't get more land. (BTW: This is the real reason guys like Gates, Bush and Kennedy are for immigration liberalization.) In a natural setting, this corrects itself through die-offs and/or fighting over the land -- or whatever the monopoly at issue happens to be (it could be a monopoly on, say, the right to make copies of an operating system that everyone happens to have standardized on, which is what made the present day's richest man). Governments protect wealth holders from this natural redistribution by taxing things to pay for police, courts, military, and other things that protect nonsubsistence property rights. When this service is paid for by taxing things other than those property rights, you have a subsidy of nonsubsistence property rights.
If you don't tax away all monopoly profits and redistribute it evenly to everyone, then you end up with a class of people who have an incentive to load up the economy with more people, whether through immigration or birth rates, in order to increase the demand for their property. This class can be the private owners of the monopolized rental properties or it can be public officials that reserve to themselves and their special interests the economic rent derived from taxation.
Think of it as signal processing where you don't subtract out the DC component of the signal before integrating. You end up overflowing your accumulators and losing the information you were trying to extract.
The only exception you might make is for intellectual property representing genuine invention of technological utility, and subsistence property rights since people will generally fight to the death to retain their subsistence.
That's why "the money quote" from my white paper says:
Seastead this.
Unless theres a hole in your boat -nt-
If you can read this, it's already too late.
When we were discussing illegal immigration, remember? When you said we need all the poor Mexicans here to do our shit work for us. We need more poor people, not fewer, that's what you said!
Rich people have money. Who would have thunk it!
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
...when it comes to heinous pain and misery when it comes to the wars started by and run for the profit of the top 1%. If you want to call that a tax that is, they are taxed the most in what really matters.
First reaction (in Al Gore voice): "The top 1 peeerrceent" Second reaction: I don't even make that much money as a recent college grad and I'm in the top 2%.
Ok ATM RFID... yeah I can see that being stupid (though it takes a bit of paranoia, not much though once I woke up and thought about it). However this is NOT NEWS. Ok it is news, but it's old news, it's news for liberals, it's not news for geeks. If anyone didn't know this then here's another statistic they trot out every so often. 10 percent of the world owns 90 percent of the wealth. (DEAR GOD!)
Can we get back to posting dupes and biased pieces about the industry? I long for those days. The reason I don't read CNN is because of stuff like this. What's next? An indepth analysis on the death count of the Iraq civilians, of course slanted to make us look like we killed them all instead of insurgents?
The problem is real in terms of percentile, and any other conclusion is either based on intentional deception or ignorance of the issue.
Here is a chart that says it all - the rich are getting richer as a percent of total wealth and that's bad for America.
Last time it was this bad we had a great depression.
If you don't like your 100k income in SF try making 15k there cleaning up after the 100k club. The so-called middle class has a very poor picture of how normal people actually live. You can live very very well on 100k in SF if you don't buy a lot of over priced crap.
Promote efficiency in the upper income brackets; tax 'em.
$44,050/yr is a 98th percentile wage according to the site you gave. However, the OP is about _WEALTH_ not _WAGE_. There is a subtle difference between the two. Find a site that maps ASSETS to percentile, not WAGE, and then you have my attention.
Yesterday (or Monday?), I participated in comments to an article about IRS taxing income from games, and I covered a lot of tax history, as well as made some comments that got me labeled a tax protestor andmy informative post full of cites was modded a as troll(0).
Today I am back to fill you in again on the history of the income tax. What I am about to tell you is established fact and not "tax protester" rhetoric. Its agreed upon history.
Up until 1930-45, the US was almost entirely financed by protective tariffs. There was a lot of debate of what to tax at what rate. There were some arguments that the protective tariffs allowed some insutries to profit to heavily. All the in-fighting in the government was about whether sugar or cotton or some other product should be taxed. There were other small sources of funding, but that was mainly it.
Then communism rose, and the idea of "each according to his ability" was used. This of course was income. Those who had large ones could more easily afford the import tariffs, so it was concluded that the poor were bearing the worst of the things. Congress wanted to tax these people less, and the only way to do so was to repeal the tariffs. The tariffs made up 20-40% of the shelf price of a product, depending on the product. (Yes, congress actually wanted to reduce tax burdens on the poor at one time, unlike today where every man, woman and child pays at least 15% of their income)
At the time, it was sold as a wealth redistribution scheme. The 2% of the population that held 80% of the money was seen as obscene and they should be able to tax the unearned income of these individuals. (Unearned income is money you don't trade labor for, i.e. dividends, capital gains, etc). The problem was that in 1895, the supreme court overturned a revenue act on the basis it was unconstitutional. Direct taxes have to be apportioned to the states (the states are responsible for collecting & paying the bill, where each state is billed according to population, it is up to each state how to collect it). The reading of the revenue act was not clearly worded and so it was overturned.
The 16th amendment was drafted to do away with future acts being overturned. Here is where you get multiple interpretations, some can be labeled as "tax protester". IRS contends that it allows for a new, un-apportioned direct tax. In reading supreme court decisions and the congressional record, I have to say that this is probably not the case, as one revision of the amendment had "as direct" in it, but was promptly voted down. What the courts said in response can be found in Brushaber vs Union Pacific and Stanton vs Baltic Mining (Both 1916). (I will not quote these here, as I was lamblasted for "using quotes out of context", so I encourage everyone to look them up and read them in their entirety.) Again, their wording is confusing, but it is settled that it didn't create a new un-apportioned tax, but one that is to be enforced as indirect (excise). The implications of that statement is what most people clamor over between those who think the status quo is correct where everything is taxable by the feds, or those who see the rulings as restricting what can be taxed. The latter contend it is only a bit of subterfuge that keeps most people in the dark. Its a long road to go down, but regardless, you'll learn a LOT about this country and its history.
So as someone who knows far more than most people (and both sides of the story) I have to say "Good job income tax! You're really delivering on your promises of wealth redistribution!" (sarcasm). Clearly the rich will always find ways to get richer. If it is talent or luck or whatever, there always seems to be a 2% that owns the bulk of the wealth.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I'm working my a$$ off to be one of those 2%. When I get there, I'll help the poor by helping them get jobs so that they can do the same thing.
Oh, that's right, I forgot.
Facts are liberally biased.
A poll tax or head tax is in some ways the most fair, in a perfect world, because it assumes that everyone has equal access to services and thus that everyone is "getting" the same thing from their government. Of course, in practice it doesn't work, and you can quite easily make the argument that wealthier people, by virtue of having more to lose, 'get' more from their government (in protection, economic/social stability, etc.) and thus should fairly owe more in taxes.
A percentage-based tax (which is often called a 'flat tax,' but I think that term confuses people with the idea of head taxes) solves this; everyone pays taxes at the same rate on their income, which naturally means that the more you're making, the more tax that you'll pay. This seems quite fair. At the extremes, someone not making any money would have no tax liability, someone making a lot of money would pay a rather large amount. This seems fundamentally most fair. Determining the rate is fairly simple; you take the proposed government budget, and divide it over the gross national earnings. If the rate's too high, you're probably spending too much.
So-called "progressive" schemes rely on taxing people making more not only more money in absolute-value terms, but also at a higher percentage of their income. This always has seemed to me rather nonsensical and punitive. Income is income; everyone should bear the cost of government equally across what they're making. Carving out special exceptions here and there, and taxing this person more than that one, and generally trying to do social engineering with the tax code as a bludgeon, is a terribly flawed idea.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
To have a full understanding of the repartition of the world wealth an its population, please see this site (all in flash animated sequences): http://www.gapminder.org/ Google have made its own version based on gapminder.org: http://tools.google.com/gapminder
If taxation is based on net wealth, then someone with a new wealth of zero should pay zero or they pay an infinite tax.
Beware the erroneous implication -- that because wealth is concentrated, the people at the bottom are in worse shape than they were when wealth is not so concentrated.
Consider the graduating class of a typical suburban high school as a closed system (ie ignore everybody not in that class). When they graduate, their individual wealths are usually pretty similar since they have very little in their own name. Now, fast forward 20 years -- some of those people will have been extremely successful, some moderately successful, and some will just be getting by. The relative wealth among the graduates has become skewed, yet each is generally better off than they were upon graduation.
If the pie keeps growing, we don't need to be as concerned with getting a smaller portion of it. In fact, there's a good argument that concentrations of wealth actually help the pie to grow -- when finding a cure for a disease may cost a billion dollars, you need people who have that sort of money and who are willing to put it at risk.
Did anyone else realize that about $850 in US Dollars a year puts you in the middle of the road between rich and poor? Also I think the average miminum wage for the US puts you in the top 15% or so. If you think about it, it should make you stop complaining.
No reasonable person would dispute that the US tax system is progressive. The problem, at least in developed countries, is increasing the relative net worth in the middle class. Home ownership in the US and the inducement of the federal mortgage interest is already widespread. There is not much more to be gotten out of it by the middle class. But a similar tax incentive for stock or bond purchases or dividend income for lower income brackets would be a good idea. The Bush tax cuts have reduced dividend tax rates but not in a way that prefers lower income investors. Still, the vision of an "ownership society" is a good one.
an ill wind that blows no good
I am starting to thing that there is a fundamental flaw with this kind of analysis. In particular the "relativism" that is used to make comparisons about the widening rich poor gap. I guess it is a nagging suspicion that there are at least two "pools" of wealth within each of the two groups. One of them is the capital that cannot readily be exported to the other community, say; infrastructure, this captial requires further investment, servicing etc and is probably closely linked with some other "closed loop" multipliers that increase the overall wealth of the "haves" without really being a lost opportunity to the "have nots".
A second factor is the relative change in amenity of the two communities. It seems that there is an argument to suggest that there is a greater increase in amenity within the "have nots" than amongst we "haves". Obviously it is easier since they have so little in the first place but the fundamental point, I think, turns on whether there is any "acceleration" in growth (positive or negative) that is correlated to the overall level of development. I think there is a strong case to argue that the less developed world has a more rapid rate of growth than the "haves" (in the west at least).
I haven't really developed this idea but I think that the growth in the wealth of the rich is growing in proportion to their starting position. More people are joining the haves than are leaving them. The overall amenity of (a significant number at least) the have nots is increasing. Which means that the only real issue in my view is to ask how many people in the workd are enduring falling amenity. I suspect the answer is very small.
IT is important to note that by amenity I mean a general sense of "weatlth" and not just a question of income or assets. In many cases a falling real incoming can still mean a growing amenity.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
No, that would be really dumb. It would further discourage people from saving money, and push everyone even further down the road towards paycheck-to-paycheck living. (Or worse, to debt-maintained living -- unless you want to tax debt?)
Now I agree that it's rather bizarre that we don't just tax capital gains as income; actually it's bizarre that we don't just tax all income as income, and do away with all the little niggling special categories -- if it was someone else's money and now it's yours, that's income, tax it at the same rate.
People shouldn't be taxed on money that's sitting around and not doing anything, or on the principal value of property. If an investment makes money, then they should get taxed on it -- immediately in the case of dividends, or when they cash-out in the case of capital gains. But taxing "wealth" in the form of unrealized capital gains would result in people's retirement/college/savings funds just magically shrinking, year after year. It would basically be telling people: "use it or lose it."
That's not a smart road to go down, because when you discourage people from saving, you're just going to end up having to bail them out later, when they're 65 and broke because they didn't bother to save money for retirement. (I suppose you could pull a Logan's Run and kill them, but I'm going to make some assumptions here.) Rather than letting individuals run their own lives, you're heading down the road to a centrally planned economy, where because nobody can afford it on their own anymore, they have no choice but to depend on the government for everything.
Furthermore, you'd also discourage property ownership (which is one of the keys to social stability), and instead favor people who maintain a low "wealth" by constantly matching their stream of income to their stream of expenses, even when it's obviously not sustainable. Anyone who wants to could probably zero out their 'wealth' by just spending more on services and other items with little residual value. As long as they stay employed, they can maintain a high quality of life -- but the second that they have a gap in their income stream, because they don't have any savings, they fall flat. And then it's back to the government for a bailout.
Wealth-based tax schemes lead directly to heavy government dependency by the entire populace, and encourage personal finance schemes that aren't sustainable or productive in the long term. You might think that it's eliminating one form of classism, but instead you'd just replace it with the classism of a Politburo: a small number of bureaucrats managing all of society's savings and wealth. No thanks.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think the best way to go is to only use sales taxes. That way, you tax the "idle rich", the wealthy that have lots of money but don't necessarily have an income to tax, because they still buy stuff. The more you make, the more cool stuff you can buy, but the more tax you pay. But if you are poor, and only buy the essentials, you basically pay no tax. Check out fairtax.org/.
The prices of land and labor vary wildly between markets. (You can't ship a parcel of African land to Manhattan, and even when laborers in low-wage markets can manage to cross borders they often prefer to remain at home.) Those are significant inputs to just about every business activity. The exceptions prove the rule: microprocessors, for example, cost the same everywhere.
If I have a Million-dollar house, and I have 20% of it paid off, then my net assests are ($1,000,000-$800,000)=$200,000. I could sell the house today for $1 million, pay off my debts, and have $200,000 in the bank. To put it another way- I own 20% of a million-dollar house, and the bank owns the rest. Therefore, I own $200,000 of a house- and that's worth a lot more than some dirty shirt.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
So when does the revolution begin?
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Most of Paris Hilton's money comes (I assume) from investments; probably in the real estate, stock, and bond markets. None of them are zero-sum games; all are net wealth creators.
Just because all that money in the market isn't directly employing people doesn't mean it's not doing anything.
You might want to take a refresher course on How Money Is Made In The Stock Market or Why Do Stocks Go Up? (On the latter, go about halfway down the page.)
The stock market is a huge wealth creator, and a whole lot of people benefit indirectly from it and all the companies that participate. The bond market is somewhat easier to understand because the money invested there is actually used by companies and governments to do stuff; it's fundamentally just a loan. Real estate is more complicated, and depending on how you look at it (limited total amount of real estate) may or may not be zero-sum, but certainly spurs development in other areas indirectly.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Right, because the conservatives complain about who holds the money... no wait that's just the liberals still.
Just because I use the word doesn't mean you have to spring into action and attack, maybe I'm right in that it's got a liberal slant. Or are we going to pretend that because the average news station is to the left of Fox news, then Fox is the only slanted news station... Yeah that's good story too, too bad I don't buy it either.
The figure is 1-2 billion people living on $1-2/day, adjusted for purchasing power.
I don't really care. As someone who drives a BMW, I'm hardly in a position to yell and scream about the proletariat.
However, it seems the real question that is on everybodies mind(at least in US politics) is:
If 2% of the population has 50% of the wealth, what is the appropriate level of taxation?
A> Since they are only 2% of the population, they should pay only 2% of total taxes.
B> Since they have 50% of the wealth, they should pay 50% of the total taxes.
Doesn't have anything to do with redistribution. Adam Smith argued in Wealth of Nations that people should pay taxes in proportion to how they benefited from Government.
What does benefit mean? It means having a stable business environment, stable laws, enforcement of contracts, peace, etc.
Oil Subsidies. Free Roads. Defense Contracts. Other Contracts. Gov't funded education for your workforce. Government Guaranteed loans. Bail outs. Cheap Trust lands and easy tax dodges. The rich are definitely getting their money's worth. Gore Vidal put it brilliantly: Capitalism for the poor, socialism for the Rich.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you can read this, you are in the richest 2%.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Goes to show you can get statistics to say anything you want. Why are poor people poor - well, they don't save enough or get enough of an eduction to live in the modern world. Why is that - not my fault.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
(you'll need to read the articles to follow this)
:p (Ok, do not take this too seriously)
Not that i nessesarally agree, but it gives me something to think about.(and i will) I think the writer has a very good point about seperation between power and wealth, which would be nessesary to make sure the wealthly are proportionally productive.
It does partially miss that not all wealth is gained fairly, some people are rich because their parents are rich, and some are get so by scamming people. Also if people really produce less, would it not be right for the rich to make sure they get enough to decently live from? (without having to work ridiculously hard) I think you can still take a lot of money from the rich without preventing them from being productive. You also simply need to have money to give people equal chances in life, for things like education.(and i mean education as far as a persons has capability of) Currently it seems clear to me that people dont get the same chances.
Also there are other incentives to get productive, people that like their work and have other people to motivate them will do those bits that they dont like about their work without extra financial incentive. Another thing is that is some professions like research where wealth can be produced, there is no way of getting richer of it, thats partly why we have universities, probably the writer thinks this aswel.
It may be out of the scope of the article, i should note that it does not say anything about how seperation of power and wealth must be implemented. Another thing i still need to think about is the individualisticness this way of thinking has.
PS Society for Christian Doctrine, Kevin? ewwwww two dirty words, (sorry about that, cant help it), and BTW their site says IE only sdcmusion even more ewwwww, and ye with no broadband shall go to hell
This is a great point, one that is essential for understanding the relative advantages of capitalism over communism or socialism. It's not so much that the richest 1% own the majority of capital, it is that they control it. It's not ownership the way we normally think of it with respect to personal property, because there are practical limitations on how they can use it. Bill Gates can't just liquidate his stock and take the cash; partway through the process the resulting market crash would wipe out his wealth. What he can do, though, is choose where it will work in the economy.
As the capital he controls is worked through the economy, it creates growth. His appreciation and return is a small tax on that growth, however like taxes it is quickly reinvested as new capital. The rich capitalists compete with the government in directing the economy. This creates the competitive tension between elitist business and populist government that drives the improvement of both.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I carry a high deductible plan. My deductible for the year is $2400, I don't have a prescription drug plan, etc., but my monthly premium is $119. My wife and child are on her insurance with reasonable copays, etc., and it's over $500/month for the two of them.
For me, I never go to the doctor because I'm healthy, I should start going for annual checkups, but never remember to. However, even with annual visits (which are free or cheap, I forget, because they want you to stay healthy), I don't pay much for it. Why do I carry insurance like this? I don't want a health maintenance plan, I want insurance. If something bad happens to me and I need to be hospitalized, my downside risk is covered. It's much cheaper because I am responsible for routine stuff... My car insurance doesn't cover oil changes, why should be health insurance cover routine medical care?
The nice thing with the high deductible plans is the HSA incentive. I can put up to my deductible into an interest bearing account (I put pre-tax dollars in) that can be used tax-free for health care costs. So I am insured for expensive stuff, and I have already saved up to cover the deductible if I need to use it. It's a win-win for me.
Insurance is expensive because people with insurance get a lot of medical care that they might skip, but once you are paying $800-$1000/mo for insurance, there is no way you aren't getting EVERYTHING looked at.
The question with the cheap coverage is what did it cover. You said it didn't cover what you needed it to, but now you're paying an extra $120/month. Do you really go to the doctor's enough to cover that extra $1400/year in premiums? Would you be better off with a cheaper plan and paying for "what you need"? Something like 80% of Americans use less than $1000 of medical care each year. Would that $79 plan cover you if something bad happened?
I think that people worry to much about the small parts of health care, and don't focus on what they are really insuring against. What's great for me is that this HSA that is building up can be used if I need something expensive down the road, and that to me makes it reasonable to pay $50-$100 if I need routine coverage.
Alex
People with high incomes pay most of the income taxes. After paying their taxes, they accumulate wealth. Most countries don't have a direct wealth tax (give us 10% of everything you own). So the fact that people with high incomes also have most of the wealth is not surprising, and it has nothing to do with whether the income tax is progressive.
The site that shows you how you stand in the world on income also states that Bill Gates by himself has as much wealth as the bottom 45% of all americans. Given that example, how would you be surprised that the richest (wealthiest) have most of the wealth in the world?
It would be interesting to plot percentile distributions of world income (per person, per year; PPP adjusted) for each year of the past fifty. I don't think we'd find much to complain about, except perhaps that the the bottom quintile had not advanced by enough. Whole countries have industrialized in that time, but no rich country of 1950 has returned to its old peasant villages (so as to offset the gains). The next fifty years promise equality as never before, as China and India (cross your fingers) grow.
It's a good thing us Slashdoter's are in that 2% then.
I entered my income in one of those world income calculators and it said I'm in the top .4% of the world. So how come I still can't afford to buy even an apartment in New York?!
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I put in 1 GBP, and it said "You are the richest person in the world". Yay.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Now, the cool thing about these so called "Universal laws" is that you can change your mind set to attract wealth and abundance by just thinking about it, these guys claim there is some science to it (Quantum Physics?).
<Plug>There is a movie about this if you want to know more</Plug>
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
From the study you linked, the top 20% pull in 54% of the total income (last chart). They pay 65% of the tax burden (4th-to-last chart). Tell me again why this is so far off from "fair"? This was projected for 1999, but I looked at these numbers for 2004 or 2005 from the IRS to answer a similar selective stat posting like yours some time ago and came up with the same kind of numbers.
And when you look at wealth, like this post started with, it really gets quite "fair". The bottom 50% have about zero of that going toward any sort of long-term investment. Most of them don't even own property. Every single penny they get, they spend on living now. So, every single tax penny you can afford to give them a break on goes toward living expenses now. From an individual economic standpoint, it makes a huge difference in standard of living and quality of life (and we're talking about food on the table here, not an extra Lexus). From a whole-soceity economic standpoint those pennies flow right back into the system rather than being locked away in investments.
I don't buy the "but we supply the jobs" argument. In my state, 2/3 of the companies didn't pay a single penny of income tax. So, while the top few percent are whining about paying their fair share in personal income tax (as we see above, not much different than the rest of us), the businesses they own or run aren't ponying up.
Get over it cry babies.
Obviously the site isn't using a very fine scale - just big range buckets to lump everyone in a category. It is kind of pointless to put an exact figure on it, like 107,565 - that is just to fool the uncritical into thinking it is accurate. If it came up with round numbers people would naturally recognize them for what they are, estimates, and it wouldn't personalize the site as much... thus lessoning the emotional appeal for donations.
It is a site asking for donations - of course they want to say you are "rich", so you give more.
For me, the site doesn't say how rich you are, so much as how "poor" everyone is. Around here, a kid flipping burgers makes $8.00 an hour. So he is in the top 12% of the worlds wealthiest? Give me a break.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I advocate any structure which punishes people for success. We need to enforce equality across the board.
My recommendation, however, goes far beyond taxes, as I don't feel they do enough.
When a person reaches certain percentiles on the income scale, they should be 'taxed' a proportionate amount of their body. For example (these are not real numbers, as I have not yet reached a completely fair formula) when a person crosses into the 90th percentile, they lose a pinky finger. At the 92nd percentile, it's a hand. 95th, an arm. I think you can see the pattern.
This allows us to enforce equality at a level that cannot be matched with mere confiscatory financial policy. The threat of limb removal will assure that no one will attempt to rise above the rest again.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I go to sleep, I keep grinning...
Flat income tax only works if you eliminate other taxes.
I don't favor things which can never be implemented in a proper and fair manner. That is, another proposal I see is to eliminate income taxes in favor of consumption taxes. Yet such a move would be difficult to enforce, creating a large black market economy and turning every citizen into a criminal. So I don't think it's a good idea.
There is an argument to be made that people who contribute something to the common good ought to receive a commensurate reward; eg, if Britney Spears contributes a concert valued at one millon dollars, it would be fair for her to receive back the same value of goods and services; and as both parties to any such trade are made better off than they were before, Britney is led, as if by an invisible hand, to make a net contribution to the welfare of society.
You and I agree that it would be virtuous and admirable if Britney were to increase her net contribution by giving away some of her profits, and surely people are well advised to debate such principles and (more importantly) apply them to their own lives. But, what right do we have to legislate charity? (That's not a rhetorical question.)
Whatever she may have, Ms. Hilton has contributed more to the common good (pace Smith's invisible hand) than you and I ever will.
No question, free flow of capital leads to creation of wealth. As the article pointed out, establishing banking in poor countries would help. How much of middle class wealth is tied to home ownership? A generation ago, you financed 80% of the house, 10 years ago, 90%, now, 97%-100%. The existence of a banking system that establishes credit gives people the ability to finance assets. If assets will generally grow faster than the interest on the credit, then the people gain wealth simply by having access to capital.
.25%), and the 10 year treasury note (4.5% +/- .5%) is only 2%... That's not a huge premium for random guy compared to the federal government.
The collective wealth (whether rich individuals investing through hedge funds, a pension fund, or individuals in their 401(k) mutual funds) gets invested. It's no direct (rich guy loaning me money), but out secondary markets reduce transaction costs and make these transactions occur. Take home loans? Banks used to loan money and hold the loans, which meant that a local economic downturn resulted in a housing correction, caused loans to become upside down, people to default, and the bank to collapse. Now, mortgages are "securitized" and sold off in bundles to investors. This diversification makes the overall risk lower, which has dramatically reduced interest rates... The difference between a 30 year prime mortgage (around 6.5% +/-
This access to capital creates the massive wealth in the US. For fun, Google's market cap is $150 BILLION dollars... that's a lot of wealth created "out of thin air." All the wealth creation that goes on in the US is truly staggering.
So yes, wealth is created, and those that have wealth benefit from it, so the wealthy benefit disproportionately from a stable society. The question however, is which of these taxes are going to "creating a stable society" and which are going to "buy votes from dependent people." One of the reasons that the GOP pushed so hard for welfare reform was that the effect of the old system was a permanent underclass. Since this underclass had a higher birthrate and shorter generational times (first child @ 16 compared to 26) was causing this rapidly expanding class that wasn't going to get out (if you are one of 5 kids born to a single mother on welfare, you have a bunch of strikes against you... while some will make it, the overwhelming majority will stay in that underclass)... However, it was creating a dedicated group of Democratic voters (at least that's the political theory, in reality they didn't vote in large numbers).
The concern is that a good chunk of our tax dollars go to buy votes or campaign dollars... Both sides do it, the corruption of the GOP was staggering, where $1 in campaign contributions had an expected return of $20.
Roads, law-and-order, sanitation, etc., these are all costs of a stable society, but these are costs generally provided by local governments off of property taxes. The collective security is a big chunk of the federal budget (as is interest payments), but large chunks go to strange items. Social security was designed to get old people out of the work force to lower unemployment (weird situation was economic activity decreases massively as unemployment goes up, where as you would assume it was a factor of employment and wages, not number of people in the work force). There is a lot that taxes go to that DOES NOT contribute to the stable society that the wealthy benefit from, and in some ways goes to tearing it down (NEA, the bizarre helium storage for our non-exisant balloon fleet, and other strange parts of the budget).
That is where some of the objection comes from. I haven't seen anyone complain that property taxes (that mostly fund police and schools) hit the rich to hard, it's generally the income tax. Also, thinks like income and capital gains taxes don't hit the "wealthy" (who make their money off muni-bonds, etc.), but rather the upwardly mobile middle class.
Two upper midd
So you're making $47,500 or more each year, and you're having problems paying utility bills? Time to rethink your budget. No matter where you live, I promise you there are people working twelve hour days, seven days a week as wait-staff who somehow manage to live on a fraction of that. In all likelyhood the police who patrol your streets, the teachers educating your city's children, your garbagemen, they're all living on less than you.
Maybe things are tight, but I'm betting you live pretty comfortably. Do you have reasonably nice apartment? Do you have the luxury of not having a roommate, or if you do that roommate is your significant other? Do you own a working car or truck? Do you eat out regularly? Do you bother clipping coupons? Do you have a television? Is is larger than 25 inches? Do you pay for a cable or satellite television signal? Do you have a high speed internet connection at home? Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a computer purchased or assembled from new parts in the last 3 years? Do you have health insurance? Obviously you're not going to have all of these, but I'm guessing you have the majority of them.
Yes, you have a higher cost of living. But you also have a much higher standard of living than the majority of people in the world.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Seems like the free marketeers are dropping lot of talking points and propaganda, ignoring the reality anyone who isn't sunk in masturbatory ideology can see. A bunch of bobble heads parroting "a rising tide lifts all boats," or getting high thinking about the truth of how much good it's doing that the rich have their money in banks instead of a shoebox, or how much better off poor people are now that they have cellphones. News flashes: debt for working people is higher than ever. Health care is unaffordable. Wages aren't keeping pace with inflation. Pensions are evaporating. And our "high employment" is only true if you're down with a part time job in retail. The poor and middle class are getting poorer. Hence the recent increases in the minimum wage. All this and the rich are richer than ever. Why? Sqeeze the poor and make more profits. It isn't hard to see that that's what's happening if you take off the ideological binders. How about some warrants! A couple easy to read ones, broadly applicable. From http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/articl e?res=F50912F8385A0C758EDDA80994DE404482
"It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn't use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. ''How can this be fair?'' he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. ''How can this be right?''
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
''There's class warfare, all right,'' Mr. Buffett said, ''but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.''"
That's an interview with Ben Stein, by the way, not Krugman.
This one pulled the rug out from under my support of globalization. I think it speaks for itself. From the Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/886583be-7a00-11db-8d70-00 00779e2340.html
"The real income of the poorest 10 per cent of China's 1.3bn people fell by 2.4 per cent in the two years to 2003, the analysis showed, a period when the economy was growing by almost 10 per cent a year."
So can we get back to reality? The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, and that is, contrary to popular belief, a BAD thing.
Also in the newsflash department: a progressive tax structure is NOT the same as Stalinism.
If raising taxes on the rich bombs the economy, we can lower them again. Last time I checked, the economy rose and fell to a more mysterious tidal pull than that. The people at the bottom don't care whether their healthcare is delivered in the most "efficient" way possible. They just need it, period. When we're talking about basic necessities, we need to start putting all this juicy and crackheaded free market theory in the context of life and death, and then see how it stacks up. C'mon, guys, your bosses aren't here, you don't need to suck up with your impression of the WSJ editorial page.
... to be among the other 98% like y'all, sharing the other 50% of world wealth, huh?
HUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Later,
Bill G, I mean, ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Anonymous Coward.
Only for the fact that beads and trinkets (cell phones, MP3 players, etc...) don't really help people in a capitalist economy.
In reality, the arrival of cell phones is a major factor in the current third world rise out of poverty. The ability to make a few calls to check current crop prices, rather than have to sell to that one guy for whatever he feels like paying, can quite literally be the difference between life and death.
I would guess they can't afford decent food, housing or health care even though they are "richer" by your estimation. And by decent food, we're talking about fresh produce, meat, poultry, sea food and staples like rice, whole wheat flour, etc...
In reality, for the price of an MP3 player, you can buy more than enough rice to feed you for a year.
Wow. This is hilarious. If you think that 2% is a small number now, go back in time to pre-Industrial revolution times. Back then the number of people in control of the world's wealth, and property, was less than 1%, much less.
And even amongst those 2% of people today, you will find the same ratio - the majority of wealth among the 2% wealthiest people of the world is concentrated in the top 1%. While you might show up in the top 2% or 10% globally, Investor Billionaires, Sultans and Princes of the Middle East, and the sons of international financiers from the 1600s and 1700s eclipse you by leaps and bounds. Once you get into the billion-dollar net-worth range, the field is small enough that we're talking about no more people than an American football team.
And AliasTheRoot - that site isn't bullshit. You just need to consider what your money could do for others, instead of for yourself. Hell, the entire "1st world" needs to do that.
You can't afford a home in YOUR area. Go to Wisconsin and you could afford a home in a rural area without any major financial hardship. One country over, Mexico, you could afford a mansion, body guards, a driver, a grotto, and house servants to relieve you of every household chore but assisting you in going to the washroom; actually, people would still gladly wipe your ass for what we consider pocket change: it beats making your living in a garbage dump fighting for scraps.
And even further south of Mexico, in certain Central American nations, that same money could afford even more.
Across the pond, in a country like Bangladesh or India, you can literally buy entire villages. You could be the personal saviour of hundreds of people there.
So don't think of yourself when wondering how you could be one of the wealthiest human beings on this planet - look to the impoverished nations for where that money has its real impact. Yeah, that's how dirt poor millions of people are. And eventually, as the world's food supply shrinks, that poverty could result in major regional conflict.
While $10 bucks buys a Starbucks coffee here, in the third world it buys an AK-47 with thousands of bullets. That's no lie - AK-47s literally cost less than Starbucks coffee in the third world. If you think you can't afford much, a group of gun-wielding Militia-men in Darfur has so much power that, with about $1000 US, they can form a roving band of raping, murdering, looting, ethnic cleansing militia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict
Ironically, the latest studies show that obesity is now more prevalent than starvation worldwide. And it is frequently linked with low income (not just in western countries). Granted, I'd rather die from eating too much chicken than too little.
Also ironic is that studies show that income does not correlate to happiness. It seems that once basic needs are met, the percentage of people that are happy is constant. Again, I'd prefer to be rich and happy than poor and happy. But an interesting stat none the less.
And finally, as someone who has traveled to several dozen countries on 4 continents, I'm rather struck by how the US (and Canada) is not very far ahead of most of the world. We have more stuff, but we're not all that different. Most people aren't being bombed, most people have homes, and most people have food and water. There seems to be a misperception here and in other countries that Americans are to be hated because they are different.
And a final irony for you. Canada is a huge country. Plenty of room to spread out. Yet 90% of the population lives within 200 miles of the US. Seems that not everyone there is a bitter, narrow minded jerk-wad like you. If they were ("no one likes Americans") they'd be living a bit farther north.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It helps to have a Confucian society, where leaders (of government and business) are taught to be benevolently paternalistic, and workers to obey. Dirigisme just loves that kind of environment, and industrialization is not exactly rocket science as long as you have a culture amenable to central control.
Missing from these little bits of political theater is the acknowledgment that richest segment of the world's population is also the most productive. In short, they own lots of stuff because they make lots of stuff. As long as you have asymmetries in the level of productivity, you will have asymmetries in wealth. End of Story. Even if you could wave a magic wand and redistribute the world's physical assets equally, asymmetries in ownership would appear almost instantly as the more productive began to require assets. Attempts at to radical redistribution end up hurting everyone because they destroy the assets produced by the most productive but don't often raise the actual productivity of the recipients. Nothing changes except that the population as a whole is poorer.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
They would send you one bill for services rendered and another bill (or check) for your mandatory wealth transfer to the poor (or payment from the rich).
> Carving out special exceptions here and there, and taxing this person more than that one, and generally trying to do social engineering
> with the tax code as a bludgeon, is a terribly flawed idea.
You are missing the point. There are dozens of better ways to raise money to run the basic machinery of the State that don't require the overhead of running the IRS. But the whole POINT isn't about money per se, it is about power and control and the Income Tax is the perfect instrument for that purpose for the exact reasons you complain about. It so easily allows social engineering through special exceptions and bludgeoning those out of political favor into adopting the policies desired by the ruling class.
Democrat delenda est
You can take somebody's money because... it is advantageous for you to do so? (Isn't there a word for people who do that?)
Exactly! Don't forget, much of the world's wealth is not valuable without wealthy people. And it is not directly useful to impoverished people. They can't eat plasma screens, art, gold, jewelry, iBooks, fancy cars, etc. If the wealthy didn't have disposable income to purchase those things, they would be worth less. Also don't forget the livelihoods earned by folks making "luxury" goods.
As the parent says - you want to keep the pie growing. Redistribution shrinks the pie. Redistribution, for redistributions sake is a waste. If you could wave a wand and magically redistribute every tangible and intangible asset equally, a lot of wealth would simply vanish. Many things have no intrinsic value, especially the premiums paid for designer goods. Other items would literally rot away over time; delicate art and fancy houses both need lots of care to maintain their value.
A small example; Let's say Bill Gates were compelled to sell all of his MSFT stock, TODAY (regulations restricting this, aside). What do you suppose would happen to the share price? Supply and demand would kick in, the price would drop and there would simply be less "wealth" in the world. While many a slashdotter might be happy at Bill's misfortune, not a single poor person would materially gain. (In fact, in this scenario, they would be worse off, figuring the effects on Bill's philanthropic endeavors.)
On balance, I think the world is better of with rich people.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"Shall we steal money and use it for noble purposes?" Well, how do you vote?
I keep seeing these statistics thrown around, but they just don't ring true.
There's a reason!
The thing they are looking at is "assets" calculated by how much you have - how much you owe. Under this model a very wealthy couple who together make $300,000 per year, own a million dollar home, drive $70,000 cars, have a nanny, a maid, take expensive vacations, buy anything they could possibly want and are by most measures very wealthy could be considered having nothing. The fictional couple above, if they are young or not saving properly for retirement, may have debt exceeding their assets in which case they would be considered as having no net worth at all. To this study they would be "poor" which they are most definitely not.
The problem with using net assets as a measure of wealth is people use these numbers in discussions of societal fairness and equity. These numbers are completely meaningless in that context. The only thing its really appropriate for doing is discussing how well people are saving for retirement because that's the primary reason to have money pooling in the way that would show up here. People use these numbers to point out economic inequity and imply things about standard of living which are completely inappropriate.
someone please add some tags to this article:
lies, damnlies, statistics
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
> Actually the FairTax is the only tax reform suggested in America to completely remove the tax burden from the poor.
Which is my primary objection to the plan. The poor MUST be made to pay their 'fair share' of taxes, even though in the bigger scheme of things their contribution will be fairly minor. Otherwise we have the situation we have now, or even more specifically the situation we have here in Louisiana with the Homestead Exemption. Because the 'poor' are totally excempt from property taxes the local politicians quickly figured out they could count on the poor to vote for almost any increase in that tax if the threat was an increase in another tax (say sales tax) if the vote failed.
No, we either must ensure everyone pays enough taxes to hate the idea of raising them or we must adopt a two class political system where only taxpayers vote. Since I really like the current (legally at least) classless system we have in the US I'd prefer to spread the tax burden.
Democrat delenda est
Right, there is a convenience of not having to worry about it. I have a lot of accounts to track, none of which are that big, because I try to take advantage of these tax sheltering opportunities. It's a real headache, and makes it harder to figure out what is going on. The net effect is that we're leveraged to hell, our "net worth" isn't that high because huge liabilities that almost match the assets. The theory being that in the long run, my assets are returning a few points more than my liabilities, so I keep the spread.
The problem with Bush's ownership society push was that people want, set it and forget it. All these accounts (IRAs, Roth vs. Traditional), 401(k) (Roth vs. Traditional), 403(b), SEP-IRA, Simple-IRA, Keogh, etc., confuse people, so they do nothing. There was talk of a simplified retirement planning system, where you would have a business retirement account and a personal one, and consolidate this big mess, but nothing came of it.
The fact is, most people would prefer the "good ole days" which only really applied to the WW II generation, where you work for a company for 40 years, pay your 30 year mortgage off by retirement, had health care covered, and when you retired, collected your pension and social security. When you died, your house was sold and your kids split the sale, and life continued.
The odd effect of this was that nobody obtained "wealth" because they simply had lifetime income streams.
The idea of the ownership society was that instead of just getting payments, you'd accumulate wealth. People would earn returns off this wealth. The problem is, during your lifetime, there is no benefit to this, you just get more headaches. The difference is that when you die, your heirs would receive the wealth, because you owned assets, instead of getting a stream from the pension fund.
One of the things that the right-wing think tanks were proposes was this "neo-conservative" (economic policy, not foreign policy) idea where the government would encourage you to build wealth, but support things like annuities to make it easy. If people convert all their wealth into an annuity at retirement, they keep their "paycheck," which makes things easy for them, but then they didn't really get any wealth because it all goes to the insurance company. Which is why you're seeing the business publications running models where people annuitize part of their wealth at retirement.
The fact is, people will glad trade some "expected return" for a stable return, which leads to no wealth creation. Of course, the politicians turned it into wedge issues, on the theory that the more people had in the stock market, the more they were likely to vote GOP, so the GOP pushed for replacing government guarantees with stock ownership, and the Democrats opposed it. The social security debate was such a travesty because it ignored the actual effects on people, and was only based upon the GOP wanting people to own stocks so they'd become more conservative, and the Democrats wanted people to not own stocks because it would cause them to vote GOP. The joke of the matter was that since it required buying an annuity at retirement anyway, there was no wealth being created, it was simply moving it off the government budget.
For people to acquire wealth, they have to own assets. But people don't want assets, they want the income that the assets generate. So somehow, the market will need to capture this, which you are seeing, as more and more 401(k) plans offer automatic "annuitization" at retirement. In addition, for people to gain these benefits (individual investments with a historic return of 10%, compared to pension funds with a historic rate of return of 8%), they had to take the risk. Even though the average person would be better off, and some would be much better off, some people would be losers.
How much potential "gains" would you trade to know that you never have to worry about housing, food, healthcare, and education. For most people this is a lot, which is wh
The simple truth of all this is, MOST PEOPLE ARE POOR. No matter what country you go to, you can find people forced to live with what they can get. It's this top 2% that make sure of it. Have you ever heard the saying, "the rich get rich and the poor get poorer"? Well, that is by design. There is more than enough money to "fix" what is wrong, but the greed mongers won't allow it. Does anyone realize what you could do with 60 billion dollars? Does one person really need that much money? That is enough cash to keep some of the worlds largest companies afloat, does one person really need that much. As far as the US is concerned, this is Capitalism central, if US style government takes over the planet we are all screwed. Here the policy is get rich and do as little as possible to help your fellow man. I'm not saying people in the US have a hard time. This is the "richest" nation in the world but, most of those riches are concentrated in a small group that the general populace never gets to see. We have laws to protect the rich and do nothing for the poor. Take OJ for example. A proven concept of what money can do. If I had cut off my old ladies head, it's very unlikely, do to my limited finances, that I would be "free". Even justice is for sale. In closing, my suggestion would be to get used to it. Throughout history it has always been the same. A small group controls the large. Large wealth gets to make all the decisions that control the poor. It's sad really, that one of the "seven deadly sins" is the motivating factor behind life as we know it. Might as well get used to it. You're never gonna be rich and the rich will never be poor.
A flat tax on what? Income? Assets? Baldrson advocates a flat tax (excluding a base amount) on assets. I strongly agree with this and think this is fairer than a tax on income. Ie, tax the assets not the creation of assets.
so the richest 2% of adults... but what about all the billionaires still in grade school? this study is clearly flawed, i declare shenanigans!
The problem is negotiated rates.
So long as you have a health plan, your plan can negotiate the costs for even uncovered expenses incurred inside your deductible, using the covered group (you and everyone else inside the plan) as bargaining leverage.
What people outside the health insurance system in the US find is that free-market rates for the same services are markedly higher. Absent coverage, plan, and negotiating power, there's no leverage to bargain for lower prices. So it's not a simple matter of budgeting for healthcare and paying out-of-pocket (without coverage) or an annualized insurance premium, but a real difference in prices faced. Much of the current debate over the recently enacted US Medicare drugs benefits, in which the US Government is prohibited from negotiating lower drugs costs, follows a similar vein.
That said, your model, with a set deductible and group coverage in which costs are negotiated, can work well for many people.
Yes, but when the the rich started taking the pheasant eggs....they rose in revolt! They pecked the eyes out of all of those evil rich commie bastards!!!!
You are right, things change over time, and my health care needs will change over time. But in my late 20s, I don't have routine costs. The thing with the high deductible plans that I like is that I KNOW my downside risk (the high deductible), and the paired HSA (part of the medicare debacle was the HSA creation) is that I have a debit card in my wallet that as more money in it now (after two years) than my deductible.
I carry insurance not to regulate my expenses (like the other poster does), but to shield my downside.
In fact, I propose that this insurance is BETTER for managing costs. A traditional medical plan cares 80% coverage, meaning if I have something bad happen to me and end up with a $40,000 medical bill, I'm on the hook for $8000. With my high deductible plan, I'm on the hook for $2,400.
The question is, is routine medicine an insurable event? Should it be. I suggest that regular things (for example, birth control, which is controversial when plans DON'T cover it), isn't really an insurable event. We've basically decided that the insurance companies should regular our medical costs, and we'll hand them $500-$1000/month and they are on the hook for our costs. This makes insurance much trickier to price.
I agree with you that in 10 years, my medical needs will be VERY different. However, what is nice about this plan is that my "medical expenses" are $1400/year for insurance, and $2400/year in my HSA, which means out of pocket $3800 (all pretax, because it's done through my company), but at the end of the year, I have $2400 in my account. If I cared traditional insurance, I'd be spending about $3600/year on insurance, and in these healthy years, it all gets kept by the insurance company. If I roll snake-eyes, I just lose my $2400 that is socked into the HSA, but in other years, I keep most/all of it. Ten years from now, I'll have a stockpile of medical related cash in the HSA, that I can use to cover all these medical related expenses.
I really don't see a downside to the high deductible, HSA compliant plans. They are cheaper because the insurance companies are running normal actuarial tables, and only charging me for their "risk" of something catastrophic, instead of what they expect me to use.
Alex
And what sort of brilliant insight did you provide for us, other than pointing out in a most brilliantly sardonic fashion the supposed non brilliance of another poster?
That's why I'm not rich. I can't afford it.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Google microcredit, the idea finally won the nobel peace prize in 2006...
It's not that poor people have no choice, it's because we, the rich, have been too ignorant to make this widely available (even though according to wikipedia, the idea has been around since the marshall plan post WWII and has mostly been successful where available), and of course sadly, not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur to get themselves out of hand-to-mouth existance.
Fortunatly, the tide is changing on microcredit and more opportunties are opening up, but sadly not everyone will be able to avail themselves of this new type of opportunity, but that doesn't mean no opportunity exist at all for people that find themselves in a hand-to-mouth existance.
I'm not saying that the poor deserve it (because they can't save money, etc, as intoned by the grandfather post), but all is not doom and gloom for the dirt poor, but entrepreneurial. To say they have no choice is to both misunderstand their situation dismiss the value of their daily efforts to survive. I would categorize both views as being ignorant myself.
I think that people that pity the "poor" for their lot in life are often group apologist for any bad decisions indivduals may have made and are almost just as bad as the people that prejudice people that deride the poor for their unfortuitous lot in life. Maybe all people don't have the same choices as you or I, but that doesn't mean they have no choice and the could have done some things better (or worse) and that some people don't succeed where others fail. To dismiss anyone with a "no-choice" is to disrespect their humanity and dignity.
It is sad that there aren't more opportunties availble to poor people as a group. It is not sad that they are poor. The first is something we have experience with and could change if we wanted to, the later is something that we have no experience with (assuming we are all typing on computers, we don't fall in this category). We don't know if a particular individual who was poor had a choice or not, we are not them and we should not stereotypicalize the group.
"A 'rich' person is anybody who makes $1 more than you." -Maharushi
My father did it, grew up on a farm (family lost the farm), joined the military, got out, went to school became a multimilionare.
My maternal grandfather worked in the mines in johnstown, the steelmills, drove a bus in philly but somehow wound up being a med school professor, head of dept of anesthesiology at columbia presbeterian and a multimillionare.
I didn't grow up in nearly as humble beginnings and I am not a multimillionare, but I am halfway there to my first million (none of it inherited), granted I am only in my late 20's though. After recieving my BS i did have move than 120k saved up though due to wise investing and saving nearly everything I had made working my entire life. My older brother is signifigantly ahead of me and did it all through hard work, saving/investing wisely.
My father and grandfather did it all through hard work, taking financial risks and saving like crazy.
Want to know the difference between rich and poor people?
Poor people spend first, save later.
Rich people save first, spend later.
Granted things are different outside of america, but if you want to be successful you can be provided you work your ass off, have a bit of luck and dont spend foolishly. Basically have the right additude and don't need to depend on others for your own success. Face it, most people just don't want to work hard, most people are risk adverse.
Education helps, but isn't necesscary if you want to work for yourself. If you want to work for others, or manage other people's money/companys it will be more usefull.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Yes, you will find when you go to areas of equivalent standards of living in less developed countries, even a relatively high U.S. income will not be considered anything particularly spectacular...behind the gates, that is.
There far are better reasons than that to avoid the big news sites. --Abandoning the distracting nonsense of the 'Liberal vs Conservative' shell game is one of them.
That whole tactic is designed to divide and conquer the populace. Labeling one group automatically sets yourself into the opposing camp regardless of how poor the rationality happens to be on either side. Both sides are deeply flawed, which means anybody who participates in the game will be unable to advance until they manage to let go.
It's better to engage in honest appraisal of one's internal workings and belief systems without fear, anger and ego getting in the way. It's often painful and humbling, but true power, clarity and freedom are the prizes.
-FL
I don't know if you guys watched the interview of a homeless man on Oprah, but this guy was the example of idiocy. He was screened before hand to make sure he wasn't a drug addict or crazy. He was homeless for 20 years or so and given $100,000 from a documentary producer to see how he would handle it. He was given financial counseling and other forms of help to give him the right path, he got a license and had job opportunities, but he didn't take them. Less than a year later he had nothing, he actually OWED money. He blew over half of it on vehicles (gotta get my dodge ram and buy a friend a car) and was generally wasteful. I didn't feel sorry for this man one bit, how could he be so stupid? This story was a test of what keeps these people down, was it bad luck or just stupidity, and guess what, it was stupidity. Go home poor people, oh thats right you don't have one.
20% hold 80% of the wealth apply again 4% hold 64% of wealth apply 80 20 once again 0.8% hold 51.2% of the wealth so this proves wealth isnt so unevenly distributed
I agree - I am puzzled every time I see an article claiming junk food is cheaper, because that's just not so.
However, your chicken breast and vegetables need to be cooked. Who's going to cook them? If you're a single parent, with multiple part-time jobs and several kids, you may not have the time or the energy. Even middle-class folks with more choices (daycare, nannies, cooks, spouses, quality prepared foods) often buy junk food in similar circumstances.
Also, the knowledge may not be there. Sure junk food is bad, but isn't salad good for you? (McDonald's had a sald whose dressing had 18g of fat.) Cheerios have oats in them - that's just as good as real oats, right? It says there are only 5g of fat (in a 30g serving - it's a 180g bag). What's the difference between trans fat and saturated fat - they're both fat, right? These drinks have real juice in them!
Choices are not equivalent when the factors that go into them - such as education and resources (time, cooking equipment as another response points out) are not the same.
Dude, you're CANADIAN. What are you talking about? It's like 2% different than being American. It's good that you're more able to empathize with the struggling people of the Congo - cause we were having a difficult time with that one down here.
All your base are belong to them.
Good counter-point. This invites discussion and thought. Please mod it appropriately.
Most of those that are considered "rich" have worked for it. Who cares about lazy poor people that won't put the work in necessary to raise themselves out of poorness? The answer is, gullible short-sighted people who are primarily of the liberal persuasion.
By donating to charities that do nothing to help poor people help themselves, we only further enable them. Those that are perpetually poor would seem to enjoy being poor based on their inaction. I feel for their children, though, who likely don't enjoy this sort of life.
"Those who do not understand statistics are doomed to use repeat stupid statistics."
If the richest 2% of the people owned only 2% of the wealth, then they wouldn't be the richest 2%, now would they?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That's not true, because on what basis have you to argue that their increased benefit from government is non-linear?
With a percentage-based tax, the person making more money pays more in taxes -- reflecting the greater benefit they get from government and a stable society. But I think this logic falls flat when it tries to justify taking 15% of one person's income and 30-40% of somebody else's. If they were paying the same percentage, the person making more money would already be contributing more. I see no justification for a higher rate of taxation on them.
Progressive tax supporters seem to be saying that the 'disproportionate benefit' increases non-linearly with income; that a person making $100k benefits more than twice as much from the presence of government as does a person making $50k, and I've never seen any convincing argument why that's the case. If anything, the person with more wealth can cope with more risk, and would probably be satisfied with less government, than the person with less.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
economics is NOT a zero-sum game. it is no mystery that a large proportion of the world's wealth is owned by people living in the most productive and inventive countries - because they created said wealth in the first place
Well, when you're talking about capital gains, it becomes more complicated; you have to specify whether it's "unrealized" capital gains (a stock that you bought at $1 is now trading at $100, but you haven't sold yet) or "realized" capital gains (the money you get when you sell said stock). IMO, "realized" capital gains should just be income. But unrealized capital gains -- the inherent value of securities that you might own, but can't be used until they're converted to cash -- shouldn't be taxed until they're liquidated.
There was another discussion about this higher up in the thread, using the example of Bill Gates; most of Gates' "wealth" isn't taxed every year, only his dividends and income that he gets by occasionally liquidating stock are. To some, this seems unfair -- certainly the 'richest man in the world' should pay a lot in taxes, right? Of course, to say that ignores the huge tax liability he has on his assets, should he choose to liquidate and use them at any time. So he's not getting a total free pass on taxes, he's just deferring them.
Where he clearly is getting a free pass, is in paying only the capital-gains maximum when he does liquidate, rather than the maximum income-tax rate; this is financial gerrymandering at its worst, and simply favors one kind of personal income over another.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The problem with the site is that it only calculates based on your annual salary. It doesn't factor in income generated from investments or from other assets like homes. For most Americans, their homes are their major investment. Once you get into annual salaries in the $100,000 per year range, you'll find people with lots of investment income that significantly augments their annual income.
...this wouldn't count as News for Nerds. It is, however, news for Communists, and given that the economic philosophy of the average Slashbot is the same colour as a tomato, that's highly appropriate. I'm still wondering when CowboyNeal is going to trade in the current /. favicon for a hammer and sickle.
;-)
Onward, Comrades!
It is very easy to attain monetary gain in Europe and the US if you have a brain. I've never met an educated and intelligent poor person in the first world. There are so many ways not to be poor that you'd have to be dumb to be poor.
The best line I saw in relation to this article is that people in rich countries with a lot of debt (negative net worth) are actually POORER in wealth than the poorest in the world. I totally agree. They are slaves to overspending and owned by society. Especially here in Europe.
A. Houses in San Francisco are a bad investment. Housing prices are at a peak level and are dropping. Buying a house in that market now is stupid.
B. Millions do not have the financial resources to buy a house in the Bay Area but live quite happy lives.
C. Yes, you can buy a house in SF with an income of 100k and still be fine.
The average price of a house in the Bay Area is 611k (5k less than a year ago).
A 30 year mortgage can be had at 5.58%
At 30 years that mortgage would be $3499.92 / month if 100% financed.
The yearly cost of the payments would be $41999.04
Over the term of the loan you would pay $1259971.20
The average rental price in the Bay Area is $1450.00
The 30 year cost of this rent is $509400.00
The cost savings in renting vs. buying a house in SF is $750571.20, or $139571.20 more than the value of the house you don't have to sell (assuming it keeps it's value).
The idea that the possessors of 50% of the world's wealth pay 50% of its taxes sounds to me like the highly optimistic view of a populist idealist.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I find it hard to believe the global tax burden actually falls so evenly.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#US_i ncome_gini_coefficients_over_time
.394, while for 2006 it is .496
this is a valid statistical measure of the degree of income inequality in the nation in question.
Important points:
1. The US has greater income inequality than almost all other industrial nations
2. Income inequality has increased over time, in fact since the immediate post WWII era. More recent numbers are for 1970 the Gini Coefficient is
Again:
- Income inequality is greater in the USA than in other countries with comparable standards of living (Japan, Australia, Scandanavia)
- Income distribution has become more unequal during most of our lives
you live in buffalo and you're talking about shitholes?
What do you expect, with headlines like "CEO resigns!" and "Steve Jobs is my hero!" and "Google is #1 advertizer!". Humans are programmed to depend on leaders and pay their leaders 250x their own income. It's been this way for all time. Your solution is to pay your leaders yet more money in the hope that they'll be benevolant, but all you do is make them richer.
> In all fairness, you or I could probably afford to *drastically* change the standard of living for at
:)
> least one person in a developing nation.
And be pissing away your income to salve your feelings of unworthiness.
> My wife and I give to a pretty substantial percentage of our income to charity, but the truth is, that
> whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we mostly choose to have stuff rather than to help people.
Do you think you are stealing your income? Are you not providing value for what you receive? Do the people who pay you think your efforts on their behalf bring them more income than what they pay you? If they thought they could get the same results by hiring someone else at a lower rate would they? Should they?
No. Odds are you are being compensated fairly so what you have is yours to do with as you see fit. Yes, it is a good thing to help others in your community, even help strangers in a faroff land a bit but it is YOUR decision how best to utilize your assets and you shouldn't let others get you on a guilt trip if you buy a plasma TV.
In the end there is only one way to help the poor, especially those in blighted third world nations. We don't need a better distribution of wealth, that only makes everyone poor. We need to enable them to create MORE wealth. Doing that requires a few things, none of which require much in the way of cash:
1. Education regarding how wealth is created and how to save and invest. Even the poorest of the poor can do it, if only on a small scale. It adds up quickly.
2. Education regarding How a Free market, Free political system and the Rule of Law work, how they interrelate and how to get all three established. Some outside cash many be required for this stage to buy guns to kill the local despot with.
3. Learning how to manage the transition from dirt poor to up and coming economy and buying some plasma TVs.
4. Ensuring that the Socialists who will crawl out of the woodwork wanting to redistribute the newly created wealth are promptly shot/deported.
Democrat delenda est
What purpose does this jealousy serve?
Personally, I believe that if we, as a society, can make sure that each and every person has access to food, water, shelter, education, and medical care, then we are doing something right. Let those who wish to pursue wealth pursue it.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
At least, in the U.S. the primary benefactors of the tax dollars are the wealthy. (Also, the progressive tax system are based on income, not wealth; so your 50% figure is incorrect.) Neither our airline nor our food industry could self-sustain without tax dollars. Interstate highways and railway systems will fall apart without upkeep as well. Corporations could not resolve disputes peacefully without our court system, and their property would not be safe without professional police force. A significant portion of our tax revenue flows into armed forces upkeep, which is necessary to protect our investments overseas.
The wealthiest few own pretty much everything. Let's take one example. . . Haroldson Lafayette Hunt; arguably one of the richest men on the planet until his death in 1974, is somebody we don't hear much about, if at all. His name did not appear on the list of the 500 largest international corporations, although he was probably among the top five. In the 60's Hunt owned and controled companies the names of which have never even been associated with his. The Hunt assets are staggeringly huge, estimated to be equal to those of such corporate complexes as General Electric.
--As a point of reference, the assets of General Electric, the fourth largest American corporation, equaled $4,851,718,000 in 1966. Yes. That's four trillion. In the 60's! Haroldson Lafayette Hunt had neither stockholders nor board of directors. He owned 85 to 90% of the shares in all of his companies. His family owns the rest.
Now that is wealth. By comparison, Bill Gates with his measly few billion is a bell boy. This Hunt character, and a small handful of people like him, own the world. Hunt had has his own intelligence network, his decisions were carried out by a powerful general staff. His business interests were so extensive that he subsidized (along with other big oilmen) most of the influential men in Congress, men like Lyndon Johnson. Hunt was one of the financial backers of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose deputy Roy Cohn attracted his attention and had since worked for him on several occasions.
Hunt was the most powerful American propagandist of the Far Right in the day. In 1951 he financed "Facts Forum," a series of radio and television programs which was later replaced by "Life Line," a one-sided series of 15-minute radio broadcasts carried daily on 409 stations throughout the country. His propaganda campaign cost him $2 million a year, financed by companies that he owned, or on which he was in a position to exert pressure.
Okay. So what did he do with all that power? What kind of guy was Hunt? Well, you can measure a man by taking stock of his likes and dislikes. He didn't like President Kennedy.
As an interesting aside, Hunt was nearby on the day of the infamous assassination in Dealey Plaza.
So when people here talk about trickle down economics and the quality of life being measured by the availability of iPods and the number of rooms people have to live in, or the available good food, I am fairly certain the point is being missed. The point of view needs to be pulled waaaay back, because there is a much larger picture. Slaughterhouse chickens have resources and lives of similar relative quality; shelter, heat, food, society of other chickens, and enough room to walk around and pluck about and play 'pecking-order'. (Meat chickens are not individually caged). I'm sure if you gave them some iPods and jobs and general distraction, they wouldn't even realize thta they were owned. But they are, and their lives are severely limited. --Genetically, physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. And they don't realize it.
The typical pattern in a free-cho
Look at it this way- would you rather live in 1980 on your present salary or 2006 on your present salary? Sure, in 1980 your salary could buy a nicer house, but there would be no internet, no cell phones, 25 years of lost medical advances, and hugely expensive computers. I would prefer living in a society where even the 'poor' have access to cheap, useful technology.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
If you have a positive net worth, you make it into the top 10% or so. .... In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
If you actually have equity in your home or own your retimement money, you are probably at least in the top 5%.
The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which -- with 37 million members worldwide -- is far from an exclusive club...
"You don't pay tax on the unrealized capital gains"
Ever hear of property taxes? My property taxes have gone up over 1000% and I have no realized capital gains.
Also, I recall that some stock options (or grants) are taxed long before they are realized. I remember someone who was taxed far in excess of the worth of their stock options during the dot com crash.
The article actually mentions that there were people with negative wealth in developed countries- mostly caused by massive credit card debt, as you described. That's why buying a house is usually vastly superior to renting- while you pay slightly more per month, most of the money becomes assets- while renting only gives short-term benefit.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Those are entirely valid questions, but not nearly so paranoid as we might wish. Gates isn't even in the running.
I tried to address this in a general post nearer the top of this same slashdot article.
Basically, people seem to have a tendency to severely under-estimate just how huge some personal fortunes actually are and the natural implications which lead from this. The fellow I chose to illustrate this with, aside from being a trillionaire in the 60's, was a hard-core right wing Christian who abhorred atheism and believed strongly in war and who maintained friends high up in the military. --Which neatly puts him in that strange discordant nether-world between, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and weapons manufacture. Essentially, the man was functionally insane, and had both the will and the power to extend his brand of insanity over the rest of the country. And in conjunction with other big power brokers, that's exactly what he did. That's where the Nixon Admin came from, and by extension, the current one.
So it doesn't matter how much this might sound like paranoid fantasy, history unfortunately agrees with its conclusions. But only if you pull back the lense of your viewpoint. As Bill Hicks put it, "Watching TV is like taking black spray paint to your third eye."
-FL
Okay, I had my deductible/HSA contributions off, it's $2200, not $2400. I also have the HMO plan, not the PPO, which means jumping through hoops for referrals for specialists, but also means 100% coverage. I checked my benefits, and my max-out-of-pocket is my deductible of $2200. After that is met, I have $0 copays on everything (except non-routine equipment, which has another $2000 deductible).
In addition, on prescription drugs, I get the Aetna negotiated rate (and the same things for medical visits, I pay the HMO negotiated rate). So, I do have coverage for the bad situation. However, drugs don't count against my deductible, as I went without the drug plan to keep costs down.
I'm sure that in a bad situation, some stuff will be uncovered, and I could end up with a higher bill. However, knowing that I have $3500 currently in an account for medical purposes (money that was essentially free, because the high deductible plan + monthly contributions to the HSA was about the same as the same HMO with normal co-pays/deductibles), makes me more comfortable than I would with a plan with a $500 deductible and something that I need to track.
Basically, my concern is the major event. It's not just cancer or heart attacks, it's ANYTHING non-routine. However, the cheaper premium COMBINED with my placing those savings in an HSA leave me MUCH more comfortable that if the unfortunate arises, I am financial prepared for it. If I carried more traditional insurance, I would be LESS prepared.
Basically, I accept the routine care risk, and in return, I have a much larger financial cushion for the non-routine. That to me is a happy tradeoff. Sure I'm on the hook for a few hundred dollars if I need medical care, but that to me is a much easier scenario to cover than the major situation.
OTOH, one of my former employees decided that she hated our package (despite that I matched contributions to the HSA, which everyone did), and complained that she had to put off medical care because it would have cost her $100 or so because our "crappy insurance" didn't have a $15 co-pay. I stared at her and asked about the thousands in her HSA that I had deposited since we established the plan... well, she didn't want to use that.
She was like the other poster, she couldn't handle the idea of shelling out for routine care. Never-mind that she would have shelled out $450 or so in the time she put $2200 in the account, she couldn't handle spending that kind of money. I think that its irrational, but I understand why people respond that way. OTOH, our small business was able to GIVE everyone insurance (small groups need to have 100% participation, so they paid $0 for the coverage), which I could NOT have done with a traditional plan. And, by matching the HSA contributions, everyone did that to (to get free money), and I knew that my employees were covered, except the woman who wanted to be mad at me.
That's awfully bitter.
While I agree that there is something to your point, there is another side to it.
The problem is that some of the most miserable, un-creative, un-romantic, bitter and spiritually locked-down people I know are 'successful' in a purely monetary sense.
The trick is finding a path which takes you into the realm of 'success' but which uses a means that does not also enslave. Working 40-50 hours a week in a soul-sucking job is hardly commendable if it prevents spiritual growth and refinement. Commendable is finding a way to power without destroying the self.
I know from my own experiences that until I was able to construct my own means of self-employment, I simply could not make myself work a cruddy job. I couldn't deal with the 'Office Space' reality and simply refused to allow bosses to walk over me or make me perform insane tasks which made no sense. Some would say, "That's life. Suck it up.", but I just couldn't bear to turn off my brain enough to become another miserable worker drone. Nor could I put up with the similar insanities associated with adult education which would lead to higher paying versions of the same nonsense.
Finding a path I loved and building my own company and means of surviving in this world was the only solution for me. Anything else would have led to suicide.
--I think many of the people you indicate as lazy and short-sighted simply recognize the futility of a soul-sucking job and refuse to play. I have a very hard time blaming them. Self-confidence seems to be the thing which stops people stuck in such place from taking the next step toward building a viable system which works for them, (a system other than living on government hand-outs, that is).
-FL
I don't care if the parent was being serious or trolling I still think it was funny (being an american myself).
Mod it up!
The worth of an something is determined by it's desirability and competition for its ownership. Both of those variables are subject to drastic change.
How much is a vault full of diamonds really worth? Their desirability could vanish tomorrow. Or competition for diamond ownership (driven by supply) could vanish because of the ease of acquisition (meaning abundance of supply).
Real estate works the same way. If a large percentage of the worlds "wealth" is based on real estate prices, I wouldn't trust this "wealth" study.
Let me summarize...
American: It is no concern of mine whether or not your family has... what was it again?
Peasant: Umm... food?
American: Ha! You should have thought of that before you became peasants.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120917/quotes
See http://www.lcurve.org/WealthDistribution-1998.htm for some statistics on US wealth distribution.
It is my personal experience that the twenty to thirty families I have know who net-gained less than $1000 per year generally spent 50% of their income on things they didn't need, but rather just "wanted".
Drugs,
Alchohol,
Soda,
Cruising Gas,
Lottery Tickets,
Clothes,
Bling,
and Tobacco products.
About in that order.
Some of them had incomes under $15k a year, but one in particular had an income over $190k a year.
The thing they all had in common, besides spending habits, was attitude. They felt "owed" somehow by everyone and blamed everyone but themselves for their situation.
The exceptions are mostly those people I've known who were from other countries, who saved more than $1000 a year, so they could move here. They started businesses and own houses and help each other out. They were all much "wealthier" than, and consiquently, resented by, their "native" counterparts.
Now, I know a lot of the world hates the USA, again from personal experiencem, and some are even rightly angry. But I would also suppose, based upon experience, that about the same percentages are angry because they are "owed". It's hard to care about such people.
I would also summize that if everything was "split evenly" accross the world it'd only take two generations or less to be back to where we are now. It's a feeling, no facts.
yet most of the world natural resources these top 2% exploit come out of Africa. Diamond, coltan, cobalt, magnesium, aluminium, gold , copper, steel, titatanium, platinum etc. Things that would shut down the world economy within six months if the people on the continent of Africa were to come to their senses, and demand market rate prices for these materials.
When we are actually less equal in income distribution than just a few decades ago, and are less equal than every other comparably affluent country.
Social equality has decreased. You have not proven that point incorrect - you are only spinning.
I am not disputing that in some respects people's standard of living may have increased overall (though by some measures real wages have stagnated since the 1970's).
You were proven wrong about "social equality" and are now trying to change the subject.
That is possibly the most insane thing I've ever seen. These basically are shifting from having a mutalistic relationship with the capitalist economy (benefitting from what it produces and contributing their own labour to it) to a comensalistic relationship with it (benefitting from what it produces but contributing nothing). So the like capitalism enough to consume its products, but not to actually contribute. Subsistence farmers at least have a vague claim to standing outside of capitalism. Freegans are just deluded mooches.
Plus, this ignores the fact that freegans are performing incredibly low-value labour that benefits only themselves -- dumpster diving and scrounging -- rather than labour that might positively affect others -- like turning low-value resources like dirt, water, and air into high-value products like pot or bourbon that actually make other people happy.
FSA is a flexible savings account. It's a corporate based account, where you put money aside, and can spend UP to the FSA limit and get it back. However, it's a company account (not personal), and if you don't use it, the company keeps the difference. That's the incentive for the company to offer FSAs...
The HSA is a personal account. It's yours. You put money in, your employer can match, but it's your account. There is no use-it-or-lose it. It's like an IRA, only you can take money out tax free for medical. After retirement age (I believe the same 59 1/2 that IRAs have, but it might be different), then you can take the money out, pay taxes on it, and use it however you want.
The weird thing is combining the two. You CAN do it, but the laws are supposedly tricky. My wife and I were considering the option of her hopping on my insurance, putting the 4400 family amount in the HSA, and then putting $1k or so into her FSA through work. In that case, on our first $1000 of the year, we pay cash (not withdraw from the HSA), and get reimbursed from her FSA. That way, we can keep the HSA as an extra IRA unless we need it.
However, you have to be careful if you are doing it, but I think that it's because of double-dipping. The FSA can cover un-reimbursed medical, as well as child care and some other things. The problems would lie if you pay with your HSA debit card, and then claim it as un-reimbursed medical.
There are a lot of tricky tax games with health care... the thing that I find stupid, is if the feds want medical to be tax free, why not just make it a schedule A write-off, instead of a schedule A write off exceeding 7.5% of AGI (or MAGI, whatever). I don't really get why I can write off 100% of my health costs if I fill out a lot of paperwork, but it's done with post-tax income otherwise. Similarly, why the hell can I not write-off health insurance on schedule A, (or schedule C for the self employed... I don't think that you can, but who knows), but a C-corp or S-corp can... the whole system is overly complicated.
If the wealth of the millionaire were essentially illegitimate, the state would not need any further rationale for his expropriation. On the other hand, if he were in some sense entitled to his astounding fortune, what moral arguments could yet be brought to bear that would override his right to property? One broad line of reasoning might maintain that "All people have some duty X, which happens to require that millionares in particular be rather charitable—and the state may compel its citizens to live up to their ethical obligations."
You're right in that wealth is created by people actually doing the process. Providing a good or service that someone finds valuable creates wealth. In addition, certain commodities are inherently valuable, so the extraction of them creates wealth by the amount exceeding the cost of extracting them.
Ayn Rand makes a lot of good points on where wealth is created, but the simplification that I made was true to a point... Wealth is the increase in your assets over your liabilities.... your Net Worth on a personal balance sheet. If through selling my labor for $100, I only need to spend $80 to continue, I have added $20 to my wealth.
Sure, you can do it on your own, come up with something unique, and create your own wealth (we're not following GAAP, value your own business assets using whatever fair metric you can), but that's not the point of this exercise.
The point I was making, is that there are SEVERAL types of retirement accounts for businesses and self-employed individuals, all with different contribution limits, and it's not clear what public service these tax shields provide. The goal of the tax-incentives for retirement investment into publicly available commodities is the social benefit of not having a bunch of indigent elderly people that choose to vote themselves wealth at the expense of the Republic.
However, why on earth is the SIMPLE IRA capped at 10k, but the 401(k) at 15k? This used to be because of the compliance costs of the 401(k) and the means testing to avoid being top-heavy, but now the "safe harbor 401(k)" let's small businesses run a 401(k) with 401(k) contribution limits and no means testing if they follow the same guidelines as the SIMPLE-IRA, only the 401(k) requires lots more paperwork that is a pain for any business that can't justify an HR person or enough HR time to handle it.
Why do we have strange accounts without a contribution cap in dollars, but percentage caps, but are designed to only work for the self employed (have to put the money in for ALL employees pretty much eliminates doing a 25% retirement plan, and others only are allowed for family-run businesses, no employees other than spouse or children).
A simplified retirement system (Bush's proposal or trial balloon was consolidating all the IRS code into two accounts, Individual and Corporate, each with a 15k limit I believe, and there was also a lifetime savings account that had a smaller limit of around $5k/year, but could be taken out whenever, basically to encourage additional savings because you could use it to save for a house, or a car, or whatever). The idea was to provide standardized guidelines for businesses, to eliminate top-heavy testing and all the other garbage to encourage small businesses to take on retirement accounts, and large businesses to stop needing to spend a fortune on compliance.
The public markets allow people to invest small amounts of capital into the ventures of others, who take that capital and invest it (true the public markets are a secondary market, when you buy a share of IBM, no money is actually placed with IBM, but IBM raised money through their IPO and secondary offerings at a higher level because of this public market, so it's abstractly the same thing, and when you buy shares off other investors, this money is freed up to be deployed elsewhere). Most people don't have the willingness to create wealth independently, but by leaving below their means, can create a small stock of capital that can be invested in small amounts into the businesses of others, helping create wealth by deploying that capital effectively.
The issue with social security... even if we pretend that the trust fund is real and you are contributing to your future retirement (which on an accounting basis is sort of true, but isn't true in a cash manner), it doesn't create wealth because you have no ownership of that capital. While you get an annuity benefit of sorts at retirement from the SSA, it has no cash value because you're not allowed to sell it. It isn't
Government's primary proper function is to protect the lives and property of its citizens. Since paying for what you get is the honest way to do things, it follows that citizens should pay for the protection of their selves and their property through taxes on their selves and property: hence head taxes and property taxes. Taxes not based upon the principle of paying for what you receive are dishonest.
As a secondary consideration, stagnant resources do not advance human wellbeing. A person who has a huge amount of property but cannot afford to pay taxes on it is not making good use of that property. He should sell it to someone who can. This is the exact opposite of your baseless claim that wealth-based tax schemes lead directly to heavy government dependency, because wealth-based tax schemes lead to the productive use of wealth.
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Capitalism is human rights applied to economic transactions.
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I think that the future will bring a host of new automation technologies that have the potential to dramatically increase the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, because much of the kinds of work done today are going to be unnecessary, and the kinds of new jobs that are created will require a level of skill held by very few, and the number of those jobs will also be far less than the number of jobs they eliminate.
The bright side is that borth rates in the developed world are also falling.
However, the situation isn't as bright for the developing world.
The future will probably also bring some incredible new abilities to mankind, which can be shared to benefit all of us, but if we want to avoid a world in which the vast majority of people have much less of an income than they do now, we are going to have to forsee both the negative and positive implications of these new technologies and find ways to change the path we are on.
We should basically re-engineer society so that the kinds of activities that are a detriment to society as a whole are discouraged. If we can't figure out a way to do that (don't ask me, I wouldn't begin to know..) we are doomed..
If we can't figure out a way to share this wealth more evenly, in particular, the human race will probably destroy itself within our lifetimes.
The poor are predominantly immigrants who come to this country with nothing; the recent flood of (mostly illegal) immigration is why the statistics on the poor don't seem to be improving. It is not the fault of the American economy that those who are not a part of the American economy are coming here and dragging down our statistics. Generally, the poor don't stay poor long provided that they work and aren't fools.
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Selfishness is acting in one's own self-interest. To act in an unselfish manner is to act in a self-destructive manner.
Would you like to explain how a system based on self-destruction will flourish? Would you like to explain how any system that does not allow self-improvement will improve?
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And today the rich can affort to pay bail, and the poor can not. The rich can afford to hire expert attorneys, and the poor cannot. The poor go to jail, and the rich do not. Henry Kissinger can commit war crimes and continue to advise the president, but Saddam's fate hinges on the caprice of an American president. In terms of power structures, the same feudal arrangements exist today as always. The main thing that has changed is that, in the west at least, we can use political and capital tools to usurp our masters. We can vote them out of office, instead of going after them with pitchforks and beheading them. We can launch class action lawsuits against powerful corporations. But let's not pretend that poor people running around the mall with cell phones (a few ounces of oil and melted sand) somehow indicate that we've entered a golden age of egalatarianism. Wealth is power, the people with the gold still make the rules, and the rest of us must obey them.
As is usually the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle - there are indeed high marketing expenses AND there are high develoment expenses. I have a bit of knowledge in this area, having worked in the big pharma clinical trials information management field for awhile. I can tell you that there is a tremendous amount of government mandated paperwork and oversight involved which consumes massive amounts of labor, which, as we know, is very expensive. And many drugs don't actually make it through the approval stage. As an example, Pfizer just dropped a very promising drug in the late stages of development (http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/12/04/torcetrapib. reut/index.html), after many millions have been spent, all for naught.
Regardless, my point holds - new drugs are initially expensive and hence available only to the wealthy or very well insured. Some percentage of these profits (we can debate how much) funds development of future drugs. Patents expire and generics then become cheaply available to the masses.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Time for a revolution!
"of adults?" You mean they're excluding all of the billionaire babies out there? Why specify "adults?"
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
You said "There is no security for any person who refuses to take responsibility for his own life." and that is the great lie of the Ayn Rand dronehood (neo-con fascists, if you prefer).
The masters of inherited wealth take no responsibility for anything, even their own feeding and orgasms.
I live in the county with the highest percentage population of millionaires in the world. These people leave vast wealth to their children, and those children have every need catered to for their entire lives. They have layers of beaurocracy between themselves and their generation-skipping trusts and swiss bank accounts, that they do nothing to control. Their forbears set up a self-perpetuating system of checks and balances, with interlocking corporations, trust funds, and legal advisors that permits their descendants to have no social or commercial responsibilities whatsover.
Having spent some time in service industries, I've met a lot of these people, and their servants.
Sado-masochistic sex play is common among this crowd.
And they all vote GOP.
Wake up!
Taxing just one billionairre another single percent (10 million dollars) could offset large taxes (30%) from poor familes ( It's not just a matter of everyone paying the same percentage. You have an M&M. I have a chocolate cake. We adopt a child. We each agree to give the child 10% of our food. Now, you have 0.9 M&Ms for yourself, and I have 90% of a cake for myself. Is that fair? In a strict libertarian sense, it is. But in a sense of wanting to do good for your common man, it is absolutely unfair. (Yes, my analogy is all fucked up, and I'm too lazy to fix it, simply hoping you can see past my presentation to MY POINT.)
-Clio
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Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I also meant to say -- the extra $10M could offset all the taxes for thousands of poor families, allowing them to possibly be able to afford things like, say, COLLEGE TUITION SO THEY DON'T STAY POOR.))
-Clio
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So while it may not be the government's job to do it, it is happening whether you or I like it. Accept it, or revolt. Now, given that this is happening no matter what, I would prefer it to be done using an algorithm that creates the most help while creating the least harm. The simple matter is that the rich can afford to help the poor. If we're already being "forced to help our common man by the government", then we should be forced to do it in a proper way.
This isn't about being objective. It's about being purposely subjective and realizing, the poor need the money more than the rich. If you are going to tax $X, most of it should come from the rich. If the toop 2% own 98% of everything out there, they can certainly afford to pay for the bottom 2%. Hell, probably the bottom 50% (considering the top 1% pay 30% of all taxes -- I'm sure they could afford to pay 100% of all taxes and STILL have money left over).
The consolodation of wealth is one of the things that is holding us back, as a species. I vote libertarian, but I think some libertarian ideas are completely unyeilding in thier acceptance of certain subjective realities, such as fairness.
Say you were only worth $1000, and someone took 10%, $100. That hurts. You have $900 left.
Say you were worth $100,000,000, and someone took 10%, $10,000,000. That hurts. On paper. In real life, you still have $90M and are still going to be able to live the exact same lifestyle that you were before.
It's not about the number of dollar bills, it's about the harm associated with losing them. Harm those who can afford to be harmed...
-Clio
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Both communism and capitalism are idealist paradigms, both destined to fail utterly. The best solution is a mashup. (I really want to use "2.0" in a joke here.)
Another anology: Imagine if a single hair on your head could save a life. It's no harm to use to use it, so is it really a crime if I pull that hair out? Maybe, but I think that's a bit idealist, and not very practical.
Communism is a good idea. It just doesn't work because there's no incentive. Why be a rocket scientist when I can be a garbageman and make the same money? I'm not talking about converting to communism; I kind of think your leap to that is a bit of a slippery slope.
Robin Hood was on to something...
-Clio
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But I wasn't arguing for communism, athiesm, concentrating political power, forcing doctors to work for free, or any of that. You put words in my mouth.
Your equating my tax distribution to that is what... a straw man? (I'm not too versed on the names of logical fallacies as I find them a bit pedantic, but still I want to join the pedant bandwagon nonetheless.)
Not everything is 0's and 1's, and this is the problem in many people's thinking. I'm saying that we need something like 0.9, but you are saying there is only 1 or 0. There are many shades of grey to how many things can be done.
40 million americans without health care would not agree with you one bit about socialized medicine. Go tell some of them dying of cancer that it's for their own good. Wake up to reality. Not everything in reality must be the implementation of an unyielding idealism.
Remember: As we progress as a species, with more robots, nanotech, genetics, the cost of technology and medicine go down to 0. But the # of jobs will decrease as well, once everything is automated (I'm talking more about 1,000 years in the future.) At some point, free handouts WILL become the norm, as a species. It *is* possible for everybody to have everything, eventually -- but not with your attitude. (IMNSHO)
-Clio
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I think that was true in the 1800s, and even in the 1900s, but I think as technology progresses, and things get cheaper, capitalism just wont hold up. The limit of pure capitalism as time reaches infinity is corpratism and/or fascism. Capitalist ideas were based on a smaller world with less technology, and I do not think they scale one-to-one to the world today.
What happens when there are fewer jobs than people? When robots run our farms, our manufacturing, our service. What happens when there is only 1 job to 1000 people? Do we let the rest starve? What if person X could afford to save their life for $1, but can't make $1 simply because there are no jobs? Yes, this is a pie-in-the-sky hypothetical situation, but if we suceed as a species, in 1,000 years this is how it should be.
We can still create art, entertainment, etc. But honestly, will we become a species of slackers and dreamers who wont have to work? I think so. I actually hope so. We don't NEED to be constnatly consuming and producing to be happy. That is a paradigm thrust upon us by the system. The american flavor of capitalism isn't making me particularly happy, and seems to be screwing everybody left-and-right (I'm at least fortunate enough to have a positive net worth, but most of my friends making >$50K/yr are still in debt!).
Admittedly, this discourse is completely impractical. But I hope it at least illustrates why I think the way I do.
I think it IS in your best interest to keep these extra people alive, rather than let them die because there's "not enough money to save them" (when there IS -- just look at how much we spend on DESTROYING life! Take half that, put it to medicine, bam, problem solved. Rich people can still pay for extra service, but at least poor people would have baseline services. This isn't changing capitalism to communism; this is a mashup. Health Care 2.0.). These people can provide value. A person is worth more alive than dead. "The illogic of waste." It is illogical to let people die from lack of health care when SO MUCH MONEY is being spent. It makes sense in the 1800s, and the 1900s, but not in the 2000s. And it will make even less sense in the 3000s.
Now give me a time machine so I can prove myself right! :)
-Clio
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if corporations are giving free drugs to indigents, why are they fighting so hard to NOT release cheap AIDS drugs to africa? I call shenanigans on that one :) Helping 10 people at place X while hurting 10000 people at place Y is a great p.r. move "against" those who live in place X.
-Clio
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You are right about the happiness thing. I'll be happy when housing contractors are out of my life, but that's a different story.
"There just isn't enough tax money out there to give every citizen best-in-class medical care, even if you thought it were ethical to use tax money to do so." :))
That's very true. The cost of keeping an old person alive for another 6 weeks is often greater than the cost of saving 1,000 lives (of, say, premature babies). There are all kinds of issues to work out, but I think simply giving 0 care to people who can't pay it ignores the problem, and creates many more problems; problems that likely exceed the scope of this conversation. (For example, being carjacked and shot to death because someone needed money for an operation. Contrived example? Yes. Has it happened? I bet. Do I come up with shitty examples? Usually, but if you have imagination, you can hopefully think of a better one.
Lucent.. hahahahaha..... At least you didn't have MCI or C&W.
348 pages? I'm a bit ADHD and PDF-hating for that. Got something closer to THIS? (Well, maybe not, but that link is interesting -- check out the others.) I believe you though; we just still spend A LOT on military, and that money could go elsewhere.
I guess... I'd like to live in a world where charity isn't necesary. Wouldn't that be nice? I'd also like sugar faries and gumdrop lanes...<sigh>
Like a mathematician, I can define more problems than solutions.
-Clio
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You can't simply aggregate your payments together to determine the real cost of interest, you have to take into account inflation and the time value of money (depreciating your cash flows accordingly). Also, I'm curious how you arrive at a figure 3x more than the principle unless you're a bad credit risk and/or choose your credit poorly. A 30 year fixed mortgage at, say, 6% on 20K comes out to about 18K in real interest over 30 years (subtracting inflation ~2%, ignoring TVM). Yet you somehow are paying 3x more than this reasonable interest. This is also ignoring the fact that the government subsidizes your interest payments in the form of tax deductions (and ignores the fact that your equity in your home is probably appreciating in value more quickly than the interest)
- Start at age 25.
- Get a Commercial Driver's License (CDL).
- Move to an area of the US with a low cost of living, such as the Southeast or Midwest, to maximize your buying power and savings potential.
- Get a job with any major carrier in the United States (this is easy; all trucking companies are screaming for drivers, offering sign-on bonuses, paying for new drivers to go to truck driving school, etc.)
- Earn $0.36 per mile. This is the base pay for drivers with one year of experience - you start with less, but get raises at 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year, with the 1-year raise being the one that puts you at 36 cents per mile. You also get an annual raise, but for the purposes of this illustration, I'll assume you never get another raise after your 1-year raise up to $0.36/mile.
- Average 2500 miles per week, 50 weeks per year. I took 4 days off for Thanksgiving, and still managed to rack up 2200 miles from 12:01 AM on Sunday till I got home Wednesday. I have had weeks where I got 3600 miles, and weeks where I got 1800 miles, but average is about 2800 miles per week.
- Contribute 6% of your pre-tax income to your company's 401(k) plan. Pick a fund that averages at least a 10% rate of return. I contribute the maximum tax exempt amount (15%) and the funds my 401(k) goes into have averaged about 13% over the last 20 years.
- Your company will typically match half of what you put into your 401(k), up to a maximum employer contribution of 3% of your pre-tax income.
- Retire at age 60 with $1,207,413.56 in your 401(k).
Yes, I've worked out the details in a spreadsheet. I started at age 32 with zero savings, zero experience, and $10,000 worth of credit card debt. After following the advice of Dave Ramsey and working from a plan, I am now debt free with about $25k in other-than-retirement savings and am on my way to retiring with at between $1.4 million and $1.8 million in my 401(k) at age 60, using $0.36/mile and 2500 miles/week as my averages. That doesn't include my other investments. I'm actually shooting for closer to $2.5 million to $3 million in liquid assets when I retire, including the 401(k).If you can read this, pass a DOT physical exam, pass a 3-week training course, and aren't afraid to work, you can retire a millionaire. There is no excuse for any able-bodied person in the US to sit around on his/her ass, bitching about being poor.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Great post. I don't have much to add except:
Your company will typically match half[emphasis added] of what you put into your 401(k), up to a maximum employer contribution of 3% of your pre-tax income.
I don't think 3% is the max employer match; mine does a 100% match and maxes at 4% of my pay.
But, far more importantly, I wanted to thank you from the depths of my heart for saying "half" instead of the much longer, more cutesy, "fifty cents on the dollar", that everyone seems to use instead when talking about 401k's. Why they do it, I'll never know. I just wanted to thank you for fighting the right side of that war.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Some food for thought: If the wealthiest
I don't know what the legal limit on employer matching is. I do know the trucking company I work for will match half of what you put in, with a max employer contribution of 3% of your pre-tax income. Not the greatest deal in the world, but free money is free money...
;-)
Or, you could say they put in 50 cents for every dollar you put in, up to a max of 3%
I won't name the company I drive for here, but we run some of the slowest trucks on the road (governed at 63mph) and our logo is also the current United States Air Force roundel.
Posting from the Pilot truck stop just south of Waco, TX. I get home for Christmas on the 23rd, after 4 weeks on the road.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.