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'The Second Gilded Age Is Upon Us' (theguardian.com)
Robotron23 writes: Wealth inequality is at its highest since the turn of the 20th century -- the so-called 'Gilded Age' -- as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells further. The report, commissioned by the Swiss banking giant UBS and UK accounting company PwC, discusses the impacts of technology and globalization on the situation, and arrives weeks after the IMF recommended that the world's richest pay higher taxes to ease the disparity of wealth.
The uber-rich really are selfish and shortsighted. Selfish I understand, but the shortsightedness is ridiculous. No matter how nice the masses have it (and at least where I live, you have to be pretty poor before you're not 'rich' in a global or historical context), when a relatively small number of people have so much wealth they can buy and sell the rest of us without a care in the world... the masses will eventually revolt.
And it's so stupid, because the uber-rich are wealthy on the backs of a society that runs on the poor, managed by the middle class. They wouldn't be rich at all without everyone else doing their part. And they are so rich it's nearly impossible for them to lose enough to become one of the commoners again no matter how badly they screw up.
Unless you believe they were born better than you by divine blessing, you have to see how ridiculous the current wealth disparity and distribution is.
The problem with trying to fix it is that much of their wealth is liquid, transferable, and fairly easy to disguise; unless we can get every nation in the world to tighten their taxation laws at the same time and in the same way, whoever acts first simply sees wealth hidden a little more carefully, or watches it bleed away to somewhere with more favorable regulation.
Guillotines serve no purpose. If you look at what happened in France, you just got a different type of tyrant, a far more dangerous one running the country. Same happened in Russia.
Chopping off a nasty head doesn't mean you'll get a nice new one. We do need change but it shouldn't come with a sharp blade.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Liz Holmes got where she got because of connections. Just because her company lost it's value doesn't mean she's out on the street. She was the CEO of a $4 billion dollar startup that appears to have been a scam. She would have drew a multi-million dollar salary for years until somebody noticed it was all B.S..
Bill Gates didn't work his way up from nothing. Donald Trump never really went broke. Only the poor and working class have to worry about collapsing into poverty. The elites take care of their own. I sure wish the rest of us yahoos did.
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in our country alone the poorest of the poor are still better off than the rich in many places around the world.
This statement is only true if by "many places around the world" you mean those few remaining primitive tribes in a south american jungle or chunk of rock in the south pacific.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
how rich other people are is un important.
Well, unless they have so much wealth that they can distort markets - particularly the housing market - or have disproportionate influence in politics.
in our country alone the poorest of the poor are still better off than the rich in many places around the world.
The median net worth of the bottom quintile of American households is about -$6000. That means they have less than nothing. Everything is borrowed. So what do you consider the poor and what do you consider rich elsewhere? What do you know about the homeless? What do you know about alcohol and drug addicts? What do you know about prison inmates working for next to nothing?
Get out of here with your "poor people should stop being so uppity and be thankful for what they have" garbage. The poorest of the poor ain't got shit.
Wealth inequality of the 1% is not a problem so long as the 99% are taken care of too. Not everyone needs their own private jet. So long as a family can buy a house, a car, put their kids through college and pay for health care -basically cover their needs and have a few luxuries too, that family shouldn't care that some other family has a castle in the south of France. And that family is not going to care. And that's fine. Where the problems will start is when a sizable portion of the population CAN'T afford their basic needs. That's how people like Trump gets elected.
Currencies may not be pegged to Gold anymore, but that doesn't mean they are limitless. A limitless currency has no value. Growth has to be restricted for it to be useful, and if only a small percentage of the population consume all of that growth (or more than the growth, as is the case today) then those billionaires will prevent you from living a better life than your parents.
Capitalism is the best system we have for efficiently managing resources, but it is not perfect. It has a natural tendency to accumulate wealth at the top. If left unchecked all of the wealth gets trapped at the top and the whole system collapses. This is why you need the counterbalance of a government taking money from the top to inject it on the bottom.
If you have ever played Monopoly you can see this in action. The victory condition for Monopoly is one player controlling all of the money and properties, but this also represents a complete collapse of the game's economy. No more commerce will happen, the money instantly becomes useless paper. One much reviled but popular house rule in Monopoly is to put all fees in the Free Parking space and award those fees to anybody who lands there. This is a very crude form of wealth redistribution, and what does it do? It redistributes wealth to the players, causing games to go on for much longer than normal. In the real world we want the economy to keep working forever, we need to redistribute the wealth.
I read the internet for the articles.
That "study" is from the Cato Institute. I have no interest in reading the whole 52 page paper on it, but I'd take whatever Cato has to say with a grain of salt. They and other Koch-funded groups have been pushing this whole "welfare queen" narrative for decades, now.
I don't respond to AC's.
The French Revolution was far from perfect, just like the English Civil War, but it definitely changed things for better. Democracy doesn't just spring forth fully formed, it takes a long time to get right and guillotines are just the first step.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Excuse me, but I know people who've done that for years, come back to the U.S. and been horrified at how terrible the quality of life here is in comparison (even holding a job, etc) They'd actually much rather be back in those mud huts. Mud huts and bugs aren't that bad. Different than the xenophobic ideas we're brainwashed to believe? Yes. A bit hard to live, and poor? Yes. However, the quality of life isn't de facto awful and can be quite relaxing and enlightening.
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have lost all of their net worth. Not a one. They've lost some paper money that had little or no impact on their quality of life. They've lost some power, some of the ability to make politicians and workers dance to their tune. But they've never really lost anything. They've never lost their only home. They've never had to choose between food and medicine for their kids. They've never looked at their mounting debt and wondered if they'll make it, because they always know that bankruptcy law will protect them (any anyone else with more than $100k in debt, which is the cut off where you can't discharge).
Are you actually this naive or do you work for them shit posting to shut down progress?
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I'm pretty sure multitudes in Venezuela would rather be living under a bridge here where they could get food stamps, section 8 housing, medicare, etc.
Irrelevant. GP's assertion was comparing the poorest yanks to the richest Venezuelans, and there's literally no contest there.
99% of people living under a bridge are there because they refuse to avail themselves of available services
Source?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The bottom quintile benefit from a myriad of government programs. They aren't living in mud huts eating bugs.
Nobody claimed that the poor in the United States have it worse off than the poor everywhere else. The game of Who's Poorest is one without winners and that's not what we're playing here. The claim was that the "poorest of the poor" here are better off than the rich elsewhere. So name one country where wealthy people live in mud huts eating bugs because that's all they can afford. Name one country where those in the top quintile can't afford a car...or socks. Name one where the rich have to sleep outside and get harassed by police on the regular. Name one country where the rich must depend on handouts simply to stay alive.
The French Revolution was far from perfect, just like the English Civil War, but it definitely changed things for better. Democracy doesn't just spring forth fully formed, it takes a long time to get right and guillotines are just the first step.
I have to disagree here. The American revolution was carried out primarily by practical, science-minded thinkers who just wanted their interests represented. The French revolution was carried out by romantic philosophers who turned on each other and executed the rich, the poor, and anybody who dared to question their flawless ideology. We ought to look to Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. for inspiration on reforming unjust political systems without substituting a more unjust one. When you introduce mob execution, the chances of creating a more just society after the destruction trend towards zero.
There seems to be this notion that capitalism and socialism are binary concepts, and that socialism and communism are the same. The truth is, they are on a spectrum, with capitalism and communism at the extremes. Somewhere along the spectrum is likely the optimum solution. Where productivity is high, and inequality is low. Everyone is too focused on the advantages and disadvantages of the extremes to explore the area in between.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The physical structure of a house that gets built by people isn't the thing going up in value, it's the land. Land is finite, and when some folks can afford to buy significantly more land than they need to live on and do so just because they can raise the price and resell it, that makes it more expensive for those regular folks that build houses to get one of their own. You know what else? They can affect every other finite resource on the planet the same way.
Here's the problem. We're living in a system where the rich are just playing a game trying to score the most points, while people are dying because they don't have enough points to get life-saving health care. The points that belong to the richest players could easily rectify the fundamental stresses of the lower classes.
Money is not sacred. It's an artificial construct created to facilitate trade and distribution of goods. Taxation is not theft. It is not even about funding the government. It is about destroying money (not destroying wealth, but destroying currency). If we think of money as points and economics as a game, the whole purpose of taxation is to remove points from problematic areas (players who abuse massive collections of points to the detriment of other players) or to dis-incentivize antisocial behaviors that can be used to generate extra points (like using taxation to discourage polluters). You also need to destroy points to balance out the many points in the system where points are being created from nothing - otherwise the value of a point will plummet and you get crazy inflation that causes undesirable imbalances in the system.
So here's the thing: Americans believe in meritocracy, or at least claim they do. We ought to have a society that allows successful players to be rewarded for their contribution, and that still allows unsuccessful players to have their fundamental needs met, even if at a reduced capacity. It's pretty simple to see that you rectify this imbalance by removing points where you don't really need them (from people that already have more than they can ever use) and adding points where they can do the most good.
Let's get rid of this ridiculous concept that money is the most sacred thing in life, and get back to things that actually matter: liberty, for starters. Our broken economy is needlessly depriving people from their fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have the resources as a society for all people to have access to decent health care and education, and only a rigid ideological attachment to an arbitrary government construct is keeping us from correcting the system.
more often than not, these "tax 'em all and let god sort 'em out later" plans end up netting and hurting small- and mid-sized business owners more than it does the truly-Wealthy.
Good news! There is absolutely no sign of "tax'em all" in Trump's current tax plan. The truly wealthy and large corporations will enjoy huge tax cuts (quite probably at your expense), but it definitely isn't anything that could reasonably be described as taxing everyone.
I ran the numbers. Assuming you give up $100/mo of Starbucks ($5/day 5 days a week, that's a lot of Starbucks) and poured all that into your 401k that you somehow have matching funds on you'd have $51,000.... if you started in your 20s. Early 20s.
Now, taking inflation into account that's like $25k. Congrats, you strugged through 45 years of labor without sugar and caffeine (no cheating and buying cheaper coffee or it drops to $15k - 20k) and you can pay for one night at the ER after Medicare goes away.
fyi, the guy that invented the 401k said himself it's not meant for retirement. It was meant for the well to do (think $300k/yr minimum) to shore up their savings. It's a smokescreen the wealthy elites use to make us ignore the growing insecurity in life. That way they can blame the working class for not saving enough, kinda just like you did. Congrats, you fell for it.
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I guess it was too self evident and they didn't think it would need to be spelled out in big bold letters for you.
As you concentrate more and more wealth at the top, the money is drained from the poor and middle class. The problem is that the poor and middle class are the drivers of the economy. Trickle down economics is a big lie the Cato Institute made up to hide the fact that they're just giving billionaires huge handouts. The economy is largely driven by demand, not supply. As you squeeze the majority of the population demand drops. The drop in demand slows the economy, further reducing demand. In the long run your economy collapses.
Increasing supply only helps when the economy was supply constrained, and that is typically not the case in a well functioning economy and definitely not the case in one where the capital is too heavily concentrated up top.
An economy where everybody was equal would be the most efficient, but that's kind of like saying that an airline that didn't have to worry about wind resistance would be the cheapest to fly on. True, but academic. The goal is then to reduce inequality down to reasonable levels to avoid choking the economy to death.
I read the internet for the articles.
That America is continuing to prop up the rest of the socialist world by continuing to be the only country besides Japan which has people that actually do something?
Interesting claim, I'd love to see the stats that support it. Don't worry I have them here: https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/g... Spoiler: USA is near the bottom of the OECD in similar pattern to health, education, corruption, quality of life etc etc. Sorry to burst your bubble dude, the USA has money, but most of that is held by only handful of your citizens. For the rest, you are effectively a third world country on pretty much all metrics.