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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.
more unions are needed!!
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.
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!!!
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
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.
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.
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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Everyone is involved in job creation. If I steal a car tonight I'm contributing towards a lot of jobs in a lot of diferent industries -- criminal justice, law, insurance, auto repair/manufacture.
It's a pointless phrase invented to make the ulta-rich feel better about themselves.
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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They will never release control with out a fight.
What do you base that on?
The comparison with the Gilded Age is apt, I think. The Gilded Age was the culmination of the weath concentration effect of the Industrial Revolution. Large changes in technology create massive increases in productivity, and when that happens most of the benefit accrues to those in the best position to grab it, which is the founders of the companies enabled by the new technologies and the existing owners of capital. This is what we saw in the 19th century and into the early 20th, and it's what we're seeing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
But, guillotines weren't needed to end the Gilded Age, and I see no reason why you think they're necessary to end the new gilded age. Market forces have done the job in the the past and (with two caveats, which I'll get into below), I see no reason to think they won't do so again.
What happens is that as the new technologies and new production methods get established, they become commoditized. When that happens, consolidation reverses and competition builds. Competition among equals drives tight profit margins and pushes wages up, since the competitors are using similar processes and workers have portable skills that can move between them (individual bargaining). In addition, as job roles become more well-defined, collective bargaining makes more and more sense.
The two caveats are both ways in which this time may truly be different. The first is the way that automation, especially strong AI, when it is finally achieved, has the potential to eliminate not just some jobs, but nearly all of them. In theory, there's nothing that humans can do that robots cannot except, perhaps, be human. So it's possible in the most extreme outcome (well, the *most* extreme outcome involves the robots getting rid of the humans, but we'll ignore that one) the only jobs left are service jobs, because people like to be served by people. Less extreme outcomes could still see us in a post-scarcity world where very few people are needed to work.
IMO, the effects of that caveat do not require guillotines. It will become obvious that there is both a huge surplus of labor and a surplus of production, and the answer will be to tax the owners of the automated production systems to fund a generous basic income -- and then figure out how human society adapts to a life of nearly 100% leisure. As long as the voters are in control that's what will happen. And voters are in control. All of the lobbying in the world is useless in the face of sufficiently-focused voters, and massive unemployment and underemployment will motivate the voters.
The other caveat is that several of the new Internet Age wealth concentration machines (including the one that pays my bills) seem to benefit enormously from network effects. For example, it's very difficult for multiple players to compete in the social media space, because everyone wants to be where all of their friends are. We have some fragmentation in that space, but it's fragmentation more than competition, because the "competitors" are all occupying different niches. There's some room for competition in search engines, ad networks, mobile operating systems, etc., but there's also a strong tendency towards consolidation that I don't think we've seen before. Online retail seems powerfully biased towards a single competitor model.
My opinion is that this second caveat also does not require guillotines. I think there are enough different areas, and I think enough consumers are sufficiently uncomfortable with doing everything with one company that enough diversity will be driven, and enough competition will exist. If necessary, we may need to enact legislation to impose some limits that consumers don't impose through market means. Time will tell.
Bottom line; I see no compelling reason to believe that this time is different in any way that requires violence.
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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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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.
Sorry, but I don't think history supports that claim. The peasants didn't revolt because their lords and kings were rich and powerful, almost every revolt came when there was a crisis that drove the lowest in society to desperation. The French revolution? Oppression + food shortage. The Russian revolution? Tired of war + food shortage. Even the fall of the Soviet Union was mostly because the stores were empty and the rubles almost worthless. That Roman that coined the term "bread and circus" was mostly spot on, as long as you got food stamps and TV most people are placated.
Take a look at all the people who quite willingly vote for a "strong leader" because they don't really care about freedom or civil rights, they want a strong economy and order. As long as they can make some money (bread) and spend that money (circus) without too much interference they're happy to be a cog in the machinery. Take a look at China, I know everybody here wants to remind about Tiananmen Square but it's 25+ years ago and in a booming economy the masses just aren't remotely unhappy enough to support a revolution. Venezuela, maybe. But it's increasingly rare.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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".
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.
France was a fairly dominant force in science prior to the revolution. However, the revolutionaries disbanded the Royal Academy of Sciences, executed at least 6 scientists, indirectly caused the death of another 4, and general created an anti-intellectual atmosphere that praised lofty-minded but vapid philosophers and shunned empiricism.
Look at pre-revolution science - the scene is dominated by French names, Ampere, Legendre, Laplace, Lagrange, Fourier, Poisson, Lamarcke. The French revolution was decidedly authoritarian, militaristic, nationalistic, and fairly indiscriminate in its violence. If, instead, France had followed a more peaceful trajectory and rebelled against the government by instituting a more just replacement, many, many lives would have been saved, their intellectual dominance might have been preserved, and France might be a much more powerful nation today.
I fully believe that inequality is a problem, and it needs to be addressed, but many solutions are worse than the original problem. Guillotines and lynchings don't have to be part of the equation, and all historical evidence suggests that peaceful revolutions are far more likely to result in actual improvement.
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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But, guillotines weren't needed to end the Gilded Age, and I see no reason why you think they're necessary to end the new gilded age. Market forces have done the job in the the past
Market forces did not end the Gilded Age, it was ended by two world wars and significant inflation (in part for countries to pay of debts from the wars). These were major shocks to accrued wealth globally, breaking apart, or inflating away the value of, most family fortunes. Sure there were no Guillotines, but I don't think we want to go through the disasters of the 10's , 30's and 40's again just to get some wealth distribution back.
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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.
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)