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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.
ENOUGH. Time to roll out the goddamn guillotines. They will never release control with out a fight. This economy has and culture have taken so much from all of us. If it comes down to blood in the streets so be it. My life sucks already. Knuckle up Daddy Warbucks - it's clobberin' time.
Trump and his proclamation that he's for the working person and the riots - whatever they are: Atnifa, BLM or whatever are just symptoms of the social unrest that occurs when inequality gets too large.
That's all. The platitudes of "work harder", "take risks" or "don't major in Russian Medieval Literature" does shit for for the poor bastard who majored in Computer Science at State and the best he sees at the job fairs is jobs that require you to ask, "Have you tried turning it off and then on?"
When folks who are doing well are cast off because their company - like IBM - decides it's best to go overseas. And then they are competing with thousands of their co-workers.
Or when Mark Zuckerburg says that folks over 30 "don't get it" and have nothing but twenty somethings on his workforce.
Or when you go into an interview and asked about "where do you see yourself in five years?" and you're thinking, "hopefully NOT looking for another job because this one was offshored!"
And you get the job because you answered some gibberish that the interviewer liked (and you read on an airline magazine) and then lose your job in 15 months because the company offshored.
And then you actually get feedback about your resume and are told, "You look like a job hopper. What's your problem?!"
What?! In the 90s (my problem right there), working for more than 2 yeas meant that you're not willing to learn new things. You're a stick in the mud.
Now, the fad goes, you're a "job hopper".
Tech is too fickle. Employers are like irrational school girls who can't figure out who to be boy friends with in the Summer.
Just because there are numbers in a computer doesn't mean that those numbers translate into material wealth. Remember Elizabeth Holmes? Her net worth went from $4 billion to zero in a blink of an eye. Was her wealth ever real in a material sense? Are any of those net worth numbers actually real?
https://www.cheatsheet.com/cul...
The problem that so many of these initiatives have, when it comes down to IMPLEMENTATION, is that governments have a major problem with "wealth" as distinct from "income". Because wealth can be hidden, obfuscated and invested in so many ways, most give up trying to tax it by traditional means. So they focus on Income.
And there's a HUGE problem there, because income != wealth. At least, again, the way most governments choose to define "income".
I'm a small business owner, and when I get my K-1 every year, it never ceases to amaze me about the spread between how much money I'm being taxed on, versus how much money I took home. Technically, if I were to somehow, magically, close up the company without any spin-down expenses or other costs, I could capture that money and be "rich". But, in reality, the amount of money sitting in the company for expenses, payroll, etc... that is "mine", but I will never see, touch or capitalize on, is significant. So every time you talk about taxing the "rich", you're taxing guys like me who run mid-sized businesses, and are personally allocated a share of the company's earnings, THAT WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN HOME, AND NEVER WILL.
Tax policy is a steaming pile of dung. I'm all for taxing the truly rich... likely because I pay more taxes than most of them already!! But you need to be very careful about how to define "rich", because 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.
My $0.02...
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is another man's justice. Most wealth comes from two sources: Natural resources and scientific discoveries. The ruling elite claim both simply by virtue of being present when they were first discovered. When our managers do this to us we get pissed off. Not sure why it's OK when rich elites do it.
Besides, study after study shows that unless you're willing to do some really nasty shit (death squads and the like) then taking care of your working class saves more money. Crime rates drop when people have heath care. Productivity goes up when folks aren't living paycheck to paycheck. And it takes desperation to put a man like Mao or Stalin in power, so it even stabilizes your politics and prevents out of control government oppression.
Of course, if you're actually OK with all that oppression so long as it doesn't happen to you and yours then that's another matter all together. What was that old line? "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". But you'd never actually come out and admit that, would you?
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It could apply to most countries in South America, Africa, Asia, and even eastern Europe.
I'm fairly certain a USian living under a bridge in a cardboard box would much prefer to be a billionaire from one of the many countries available in the areas you listed.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
...of course the begged question is if inequality is ACTUALLY bad, or if it's bad, is it even avoidable?
(Setting aside that this exact phraseology was used by Krugman in 2014 http://www.nybooks.com/article...)
Picketty, probably the modern Patron Saint of Inequality Demonization, failed spectacularly to demonstrate it. His "Capital" essentially said that the system trends toward inequality regardless of context; the only instances he could point to where it hadn't were after regional or global cataclysms. Even the most ardent of 'levelers' would have to admit that WW2 in total was a worse thing than having a few more billionaires, certainly?
His third section simply asserts, "...since inequality is bad, then we should do X..." but never bothers to prove why this is so. Even Adam Smith - who was in fact very concerned about poverty - really only managed to complain about very subjective impacts of inequality: that people would admire the wealthy, who were not generally particularly admirable people. (Personally, in what amounts to at-least-the-closest-thing-on-Earth-to-a-capitalist-meritocracy, I'd rather admire a successful asshole than a moronic failure who is JUST AS LIKELY to be an asshole, just nobody cares...)
Serious economists have savaged Piketty, as from The Journal of Political Economy: âoeCapital is, nonetheless, unpersuasive when it turns from description to analysis. . . . Both of us are very liberal (in the contemporary as opposed to classical sense), and we regard ourselves as egalitarians. We are therefore disturbed that Piketty has undermined the egalitarian case with weak empirical, analytical, and ethical arguments."
If you can't gin up actual reasons that inequality is inherently bad in an 800+ page magnum opus, it's not there.
-Styopa
Life is about a lot more than meeting basic needs, though that's certainly required. The social contract is predicated on a level of fairness, and there's only so much pay-to-win that the masses will put up with before they decide to flip the table. I'd argue the reason Trump won wasn't affording basic needs. It was the sentiment that everyday folks weren't getting their say in the government, and were ready to throw a grenade in it rather than put up with the status quo.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
The rich are the people that create the jobs. You know... that pay people money?
No, they are not. The vast majority of jobs are created by businesses whose owners, based on income and net worth, are solidly within the middle class.
This "rich people create jobs" mantra is easily disproven, and in fact has been time and again, but of course the rich tend to have the loudest voices, so it keeps coming back despite its ludicrousness.
You seem to think you're clever, so look it up. I would say I think you'll be surprised, but I know you won't do it. You have a narrative you've decided on, and you're not going to do anything which might interfere with your belief in it, are you?
Of course, there is a somewhat crude but easily seen measure of how the wealthy really feel about job creation. Consider how their favorite instrument for taking wealth from others (the stock market) reacts to large layoffs. Massive job destruction is rewarded, frequently handsomely, every time.
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.
Well, to be fair, Americans are thoroughly propagandized to think that Capitalism is some natural force like electromagnetism. They also think it's inseparable from democracy. We're voting with our dollars, right? Basically, we are so bamboozled we can't see straight.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If the main approach to easing disparity is taxing the rich more, the rich will eventually influence the government agencies assigned to extract these taxes. So, regulatory capture.
A less risky approach would include wealth generation in the poorer classes. Not making them 'employable' - making them 'job creators' - even if it's simply self-employment.
That is what agrarian reformers of yore did with land redistribution, farm loans, cooperative setups, scientific assistance, etc. That is why app-development looks so attractive (even though there are sharp limits to wealth generation possible there).