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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.
more unions are needed!!
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.
I should write a cookbook! ... Wait, never mind.
I'll call it "100 Recipes for Cooking Rich People!"
It's brilliant! Everyone will spend their last few dollars to buy it!
I'll be rich!!!
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?
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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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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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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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.
I don't have to, I've got gold. I can wipe my ass with that.
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.
Lol if us means USA then no, your poorest are definitively not better off since the lack of decent health care or labor laws. In fact they will be much better off in most other countries.
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!
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.
Because "fair" is a politician's weasel word that cannot be given a proper definition that even a majority can agree to on a universal basis?
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Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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 rate of social mobility in the USA is no better than most other countries.
So if you think that if you just work hard you too can become a millionaire/billionaire you are wrong, you will actually have more chance winning the lottery.
" Of the eight countries studied—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK and the US, the US had both the highest economic inequality and lowest economic mobility. In this and other studies, in fact, the USA has very low mobility at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with mobility increasing slightly as one goes up the ladder. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Remove some regulations for starting an enterprise that only the megawealthy can afford?
Like what, specifically? At least in my line of work, I'm shocked at how little regulations there are.
I don't respond to AC's.
Debts: Yes, the rich have the ear of congress and certainly played a role in oil related debacles like Iraq, and Revenge of Iraq. As such the rich should help foot the bill better for the overseas adventures they helped instigate and profited from. Much of the debt is due to tax cuts that mostly went to the rich in the past, so maybe it is time for the chickens to come home to roost.
Hand outs to poor: If you mean decent funding for public schools, fixing roads and bridges, having good job retraining and income replacement to those who lost jobs to off shoring, then yes. We need much more money spent to keep our nation and its workforce maintained. I would like to see the rich who can most afford to pay higher taxes and whose businesses benefit from well trained job applicants help foot that bill.
Net worth is a meaningless number. I've had times in my life when my net worth was less than zero. But I was still able to pay rent, eat food and own a car. If we calculated personal net worth the same way we measured corporate worth, then it would be based on expected future revenue not current asset/debt ratio. This might be a more accurate metric.
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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Yeah, refuse to, that's the ticket... and have you met my wife, Morgan Fairchild!
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!
Try uninformed, you insensitive clod! And who keeps information out of their grubby little paws?
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.
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 REAL issue is that when you have enough money, legally avoiding taxes that would otherwise need to be paid is both easy AND financially worthwhile.
As governments have RECENTLY realized in the circle of International Megacorps.
The Appallingly Rich do NOT need more taxes , they do NOT need higher taxes, they just need less "get out paying taxes" opportunities.
http://www.azquotes.com/author/2136-Warren_Buffett/tag/taxes
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
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.
Socialism doesn't work. History proves this.
So western/northern Europe, Canada, and and similar countries are all hell holes?
I'll try to remember that next time I go see a doctor of my own choice without paying a rediculous co-pay, or take a drink of water from my tap where it comes out clean and pure, rather than brown sludge.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
They "myth" of the USA greatly outshines the "reality"
Health, welfare, education, life expectancy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, democracy, corruption, law and order, capitalism, environmentalism, social mobility, etc etc etc the US does not do that well in.
This is what happened in Germany just before the Nazis rose to power - massive wealth inequality.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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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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.
And it is their fault for being mentally ill! I say we beat them, dunk them, chain them up, force them to work, in shackles, at the 'elf bench' for 16 hours a day assembling stupid little trinkets, and starve them now again. That will teach them to be mentally ill! We should also do the same to heart transplant patients too, and people born with things such as cerebral palsy. After all, they did these things to them selves, and God says they have to pay!
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.
There are not economic solutions to mental problems.
Um what?
Mental health is guess what... a health issue. This can be largely addressed with decent healthcare funded by...money!
It is exactly why countries with socialised healthcare have much lower rates of homelessness. Where I live, a lot of these people get help (including somewhere to live). That is an economic solution.
That's funny. I know people in Canada and Germany that would like to take advantages of the things I can in the US. I wouldn't mind diversifying into those countries myself but find that it's entirely unfeasible.
This sounds like the sort of "study" that ends up directly contradicting the personal first hand experiences of people with actual experience.
There will always be individuals with contradictory experiences to the average. That's why studies like this take a large sample to even things up.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The bottom quintile benefit from a myriad of government programs.
Lol! Like what? You pretty much have to be disabled, or a woman with children, to get any help at all. And the assistance you receive is a pittance, an amount no one can live on. And even then, you’re cut off pretty quickly, and expected to work. You ought to look up the requirements for "welfare" sometime. Welfare, as people still think of it, has been dead for twenty-five years now. Yet, I hear idiots complaining about how “illegals” are getting welfare, when citizens can’t even get it. Google “bill clinton welfare reform"
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
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)