The point of regulation is to make sure that the gambling is fair. Otherwise you have a shit load of cheaters. I don't gamble, so I agree with you. But some people want to do that, and want to make sure the places they gamble have some impartial oversight.
Yeah. I just didn't realize online gambling was illegal. Coming from Montana, there is a casino attached to almost every gas station, and then a bunch of bigger self-contained restaurant casinos. You could perhaps understand my naivety since its literally everywhere where I am from.
Laundering and fraud are also from disguising purchases as other things. I.e. 100 dollars to a "golf company" that actually goes into your gambling account.
These online sites had no regulation. They could have just stacked the deck with a computer algorithm every time, or had house players cooperating with eachother at the table. My brother use to play these sites and he said many times there would be teams of players that all knew eachothers cards. It makes it a lot easier to find out what the other opponents have and bet accordingly with unfair advantage. They presumably split the winnings.
Well, these guys broke the law. The decided to do fraudulent transactions that disguised "money for the purpose of gambling" as "money for X goods". That is a clear case of fraud. The money laundering part is probably the fact that they created other companies that they paid for some service with the illegitimate money, and this money was actually going into other bank accounts they had access to. There is a distinction in US law. You don't like current gambling laws? Lobby to change it.
Bullshit. I hear the same excuse time and time again from super-rich apologists and rich to super-rich people themselves. Its easily defeated by logic and evidence. Did you even read the link I had in my prior post? Does it make sense that the top 1 percent of the wealthy has had a 253 % increase in cumulative growth in salaries over the last 30 years while the rest of us Americans are getting a 5 percent cumulative increase? Inflation averages about 2-3 percent of the last ten years or so, so that means we are getting scraps off the table of all the wealth generated by this country while the rich people are literally getting approximately 95 percent of everything. Does that seem fair to you? Shouldn't the workers who actually generate this wealth share in the wealth or are we all the serfs of those that have property (money is property as well)? Contrary to your misguided beliefs, American citizens on average are not getting lazier, they are getting paid a pittance more for working harder or they risk getting laid off because some people on Wallstreet decided to be a bunch of greedy, unethical scum bags and caused a recession thus increasing unemployment rates. Competition for a job is up, hence productivity is as well. There is a finite amount of money at any particular time, the super-rich and rich own about 90 percent of it, so unless you advocate printing money enmasse and handing it out to poor people a group of people holding 90 percent of all US assets ACTUALLY DOES MAKE SOMEONE ELSE POOR. Go shovel some more shit out of your mouth with that platinum spoon of yours.
The poor sit around thinking "I may as well give up because I will never achieve anything. Ive tried very hard to get ahead and every time I fail because I get laid off, treated like shit and cannot tolerate it anymore, or am forced to work very hard for very little wages and I can't feed my family. I may as well take free handouts from the government because its a alot easier then being laid off, let down, and treated as second-class citizens while my family starves to death every day of my miserable life"
The middle class sits around thinking "Why is it that I work so hard, I am educated more than many rich people, and I never can get ahead? Year after year I get paid the same thing for more work or have to get laid off meanwhile being treated like I am owned by my boss who is a dilettante that brown-nosed and cutthroat his way into his position?"
The rich sit around thinking "What excuses can I make up to blame the middle class and poor for not being rich like me so I can justify being rich and continue being a selfish piece of shit that skims the majority of my underlings production and investments so that I make much more money than I will ever deserve? MY money works for me so I really don't have to do anything and I would still be richer than everyone else, so I have to think of some excuse to make the little-people more complacent as to how badly I am screwing them every day of their lives."
Its not possible to "do what they are doing". Furthermore, if you have any idea what they are doing or are aware of some resource to read about, share it with me and we'll see if you know what you are talking about. You need to go to an Ivy League school and be a schmoozer. Attending these schools is unaffordable for most people and undesirable for many since engineering may be something the want more. The competition for these schools is immense, you will be beat unless you are a born genius or the most charismatic person on earth simply because there is always someone more charismatic than you, or smarter than you and/or richer than you AND these schools want "diversity" so they take more people from overseas than domestically. You also need to be willing to enter into parasitic professions like law, finance or management. Im not saying these professions started out this way, but they are this way now if you want to get ahead. The rewards are high but the cost is that you walk over everyone else and are literally the reason poor people exist in the US in first place. If it were true that I could "do what the rich do" I would have already and I would be creating more jobs and donating a hell of a lot more than they do (which is probably why I am not rich since I am also not selfish). As it sits I achieved a level of education at the top 8 percent of US citizens with well above average grades, am attempting to get into the top 1 percent of US citizens in education and yet I still am not rich. No one wants to pay me to work in Scientific fields. They are too busy trying to employ people to steal money from everyone else in the stock market or as a lawyer.
I agree with you. The premise of my argument was to tax the rich more than everyone else. They already have 95 percent of the assets, and I think we should get 40 percent of those back minimum in ten years. However what I am saying, regardless of if my choices for tax havens is right or not, is that the rich will bolt if we tax them too much. A study would need to be done to find some optimal taxation rate to keep them here and still get the money. Frankly, they owe it to back to us as a society since our very existence enables them to be rich in the first place. But yes, we are of like mind on the purging of all corporate and wealthy campaign donations. Id actually like to see non-partisan, secular elections funded with tax dollars where people debate on government funded programs, are given a free platform to speak, and are able to run for office if they pass some preliminary vote. Then, ban all campaign contributions above a few million. Make the voter look harder for someone to vote for rather than being brainwashed by TV ads. Its utopian and probably bullshit, but Im absolutely positive that middle class people exist who would make a better politician or executive officer than any every single one of those men and women currently in office.
1) I would argue differently. I am educated, my GPA is good, and I am among somewhere around 4 percent of the US population who actually have MS degrees in STEM. Im not saying I am something special, I just think I should be more employable than I apparently am. I should at least be able to beat out most candidates for a job that requires a BS. You would be surprised how many grad students have lower GPAs and actually have work teaching, tutoring, etc. I have skills in image processing, signal processing and programming which are valuable to industry, my main problem is its an applied math background so I get beat by engineers simply because they have the paper saying so, even though they are no more capable than I am OR I am at least at a point where I would be valuable on a team of engineers since I have experience in other things they don't.
Rich assholes have ruined America from within making jobs unavailable to people that are willing to work hard. I am willing to work hard, Ive never been on social security or Medicare. I don't plan on doing so. I don't think I am owed a living, I am OWED A FUCKING JOB somewhere because I spent a lot of time educating myself while going into debt even with scholarships. I feel like I did what I was supposed to do as sold to me by the education system and politicians to get a job. If anything, thats what makes me a gullible idiot.
Create a job for myself? Sure, with what capital? Should I go beg some rich guy to finance me? The same rich people that have 95 percent of the money and fail to create jobs time and time again whenever they are given tax breaks? I actually have a good idea for something, but I don't have the expertise yet. I would starve before I could execute it. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
2) Graduating #1 out of your class literally doesn't mean shit except to pretentious asshats, or it means you are a genius which is something you are born with. It is absolutely no indication of what you learned or your capabilities. You could argue it shows you work hard, fine. I could easily graduate #1 in my class if I chose to do an MBA. I didn't because I firmly believe MBA's are worthless pile-of-shit degrees anyone can do. Its part of my principals.
3) I never say this to potential employers. I am not an idiot. The GPA is my MS-work GPA. As an undergrad I had a 3.8.
Im desperate because I am going to a new city for a PhD program and have no job to pay my bills. One of my recommendations was sent in late by a professor of mine in spite of me asking him repeatedly to send it in on time, and because of this I missed the priority deadline for a TA position and was beat out simply by timing. Meanwhile I have been applying to literally every single internship and research assistant position I can find. I follow up, but still cant get a damn job. At this rate I probably will have to get a job mowing lawns as you said. I used to work at horse ranches shoveling shit and building fences, and also at a machine shop where I would get my hands all sliced up, so its not that I am adverse to manual labor. Its just that I wanted to contribute to some kind of research because its my passion, and it seems like a waste of my entire education to become a manual laborer. Id be better off and more useful to society teaching high school.
Wrong. The wealthy managers, board members, and CEO's made the decision to transfer all the jobs overseas. If you don't have a job, you can't afford expensive things so you buy things cheaper. The person that just took your job in China is now selling the cheap shit to you, bleeding the money out of the states while keeping an ungodly massive portion for the super-rich. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
They are basing it on increase in output per-capita. This being the case the data is normalized this way. I.e. divide number-of-papers by a smaller number it is bigger than dividing by a bigger number. If A is less than B and C is some constant, then C/B is less than C/A . Since China has a population of 1.2 billion at the time their growth is incredibly impressive. Europe's entire population is about.85 billion which means it should be harder to have growth (measured with this metric) than here in the US since we have less population. Japan was sitting at about.12 billion so maybe you could say its not as impressive as it shows in the chart.
Sorry, correction. I used notation not thinking about it being parsed as html.
They are basing it on increase in output per-capita. This being the case the data is normalized this way. I.e. divide number-of-papers by a smaller number it is bigger than dividing by a bigger number. If A B and C is some constant, then C/B C/A . Since China has a population of 1.2 billion at the time their growth is incredibly impressive. Europe's entire population is about.85 billion which means it should be harder to have growth (measured with this metric) than here in the US since we have less population. Japan was sitting at about.12 billion so maybe you could say its not as impressive as it shows in the chart.
Nice Godwin. You have a better way to do it? It will never happen the way I said it, but higher taxes on the rich won't work in this day and age. They will take all their money to Europe, Japan, China, etc. Maybe if we were to institute some kind of huge tax on exporting personal funds and corporate funds overseas that is above a certain amount? Even that would cause all sorts of problems with selling American exports. If we tariff goods coming from overseas more then that causes international political problems. The problem is that now the super-rich have 95 percent of the money there is no easy way to get it back in the hands of who they stole it from. However, Id rather have a government run by the people in control of assets for the betterment of all of us rather than relying on the selfish and/or misguided philosophy of a supposed philanthropist.
Amen. I haven't found a job that will call me back even after follow ups, and I have an MS. Only 8 percent of the US population have MS's, and fewer in STEM which is what I am. Why shouldn't I be able to get hired? Im willing to work for lower than the average wage for my discipline, and I have a 3.65 GPA. I have to fucking ask my parents to borrow money to buy groceries and they aren't even rich, they are middle class. Which means they can maybe spare several hundred dollars a month without hurting themselves, but this money should be going to their retirement not some kid that can't get work. Im 27 years old for Christs sake, I shouldn't have to do this.
You will see these big corps move to Europe, Japan, and China. The US will be a empty husk that has nothing left but delusions of grandeur and a bunch of tribals in the streets. I say tribals because their will be uneducated, homeless, poor, sickly, uber-religious people that are afraid of the number 13, ghosts and demons.
Investment in science and technology projects is crucial. Then we don't lose engineers, physicists, and mathematicians to big business "pie-dividing" as you put it.
No problem with your point. The peons need bread-and-circuses to keep them preoccupied while the rich steal all the money. We really should force all the super rich to stay in America by revoking all of their passports, take half their assets, and invest it in science and technology projects and infrastructure. If we tax them slowly they will simply leave to other countries. Better to take it back with one fell swoop.
A major problem is that the US simply does not invest much anymore in science or technology projects. If you actually create jobs in these fields, people will line up at universities to major in what would let them get these jobs. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson had a great point. Paraphrased, he said that if you invest in science and technology projects, like NASA manned missions, etc, you will get people to apply themselves in something they are passionate about, and you would not lose them to the finance or business industry. There is a very, very high correlation between life expectancy, economic performance, fair wages, and the ability to withstand natural disasters in countries with high scientific and technological output. Look at Haiti. They had a 7.0 magnitude earthquake and 250,000 people died. Japan had a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear disaster, and less than 28,000 died. Japan has the highest output in science and technology per capita, and is also accelerating the quickest in scientific and technological output. Europe is second, China is third (as far as the rate in change in scientific/technology output). The US still has significant scientific output, but it is declining, and doing it RAPIDLY.
I went to a Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture last night. Interestingly enough, he showed a chart that resized each nation on a map based on their total scientific output. The US totally dwarfed the rest of the world except Europe and Japan. However, if you take the derivative of this (i.e. the rate of change in scientific output over the last decade) the US becomes a small country. We are falling HARD. China, Europe, and Japan with Japan and Europe leading the forefront are totally obliterating us when it comes to growth in science and technology. We are only riding out the rest of our momentum from our forefathers. A crash is inevitable unless we seriously invest in science and technology projects. Interestingly enough, the nations with the highest scientific output also have the longest life expectancies, the best economies, and the fairest wages for their people. They also weather disasters much better than other nations. Case in point : Haiti had a 7.0 magnitude earthquake and 250,000 people died. Japan had a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear disaster and less than 28,000 people died. Keep in mind that the Richter scale for earthquakes is logarithmic. So a 9.0 magnitude earthquake is thousands of times stronger than a 7.0 magnitude. As Dr. Tyson said, THAT IS A TRIUMPH of science. People need to seriously consider this when they vote next election and when they talk about cutting funding for our science programs like NASA, NIST, etc. Its an investment in our future economy. It takes longer than most MBA "captains of industry" are willing to wait for profits, but the payout is HUGE.
I apologize for the repost, but I had to say this to you as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of regulation is to make sure that the gambling is fair. Otherwise you have a shit load of cheaters. I don't gamble, so I agree with you. But some people want to do that, and want to make sure the places they gamble have some impartial oversight.
Yeah. I just didn't realize online gambling was illegal. Coming from Montana, there is a casino attached to almost every gas station, and then a bunch of bigger self-contained restaurant casinos. You could perhaps understand my naivety since its literally everywhere where I am from.
Laundering and fraud are also from disguising purchases as other things. I.e. 100 dollars to a "golf company" that actually goes into your gambling account.
These online sites had no regulation. They could have just stacked the deck with a computer algorithm every time, or had house players cooperating with eachother at the table. My brother use to play these sites and he said many times there would be teams of players that all knew eachothers cards. It makes it a lot easier to find out what the other opponents have and bet accordingly with unfair advantage. They presumably split the winnings.
Well, these guys broke the law. The decided to do fraudulent transactions that disguised "money for the purpose of gambling" as "money for X goods". That is a clear case of fraud. The money laundering part is probably the fact that they created other companies that they paid for some service with the illegitimate money, and this money was actually going into other bank accounts they had access to. There is a distinction in US law. You don't like current gambling laws? Lobby to change it.
I didn't realize online poker was illegal. However, the other things they were pulling is pretty bad.
Bullshit. I hear the same excuse time and time again from super-rich apologists and rich to super-rich people themselves. Its easily defeated by logic and evidence. Did you even read the link I had in my prior post? Does it make sense that the top 1 percent of the wealthy has had a 253 % increase in cumulative growth in salaries over the last 30 years while the rest of us Americans are getting a 5 percent cumulative increase? Inflation averages about 2-3 percent of the last ten years or so, so that means we are getting scraps off the table of all the wealth generated by this country while the rich people are literally getting approximately 95 percent of everything. Does that seem fair to you? Shouldn't the workers who actually generate this wealth share in the wealth or are we all the serfs of those that have property (money is property as well)? Contrary to your misguided beliefs, American citizens on average are not getting lazier, they are getting paid a pittance more for working harder or they risk getting laid off because some people on Wallstreet decided to be a bunch of greedy, unethical scum bags and caused a recession thus increasing unemployment rates. Competition for a job is up, hence productivity is as well. There is a finite amount of money at any particular time, the super-rich and rich own about 90 percent of it, so unless you advocate printing money enmasse and handing it out to poor people a group of people holding 90 percent of all US assets ACTUALLY DOES MAKE SOMEONE ELSE POOR. Go shovel some more shit out of your mouth with that platinum spoon of yours.
Got another one for you. What its really like :
The poor sit around thinking "I may as well give up because I will never achieve anything. Ive tried very hard to get ahead and every time I fail because I get laid off, treated like shit and cannot tolerate it anymore, or am forced to work very hard for very little wages and I can't feed my family. I may as well take free handouts from the government because its a alot easier then being laid off, let down, and treated as second-class citizens while my family starves to death every day of my miserable life"
The middle class sits around thinking "Why is it that I work so hard, I am educated more than many rich people, and I never can get ahead? Year after year I get paid the same thing for more work or have to get laid off meanwhile being treated like I am owned by my boss who is a dilettante that brown-nosed and cutthroat his way into his position?"
The rich sit around thinking "What excuses can I make up to blame the middle class and poor for not being rich like me so I can justify being rich and continue being a selfish piece of shit that skims the majority of my underlings production and investments so that I make much more money than I will ever deserve? MY money works for me so I really don't have to do anything and I would still be richer than everyone else, so I have to think of some excuse to make the little-people more complacent as to how badly I am screwing them every day of their lives."
Its not possible to "do what they are doing". Furthermore, if you have any idea what they are doing or are aware of some resource to read about, share it with me and we'll see if you know what you are talking about. You need to go to an Ivy League school and be a schmoozer. Attending these schools is unaffordable for most people and undesirable for many since engineering may be something the want more. The competition for these schools is immense, you will be beat unless you are a born genius or the most charismatic person on earth simply because there is always someone more charismatic than you, or smarter than you and/or richer than you AND these schools want "diversity" so they take more people from overseas than domestically. You also need to be willing to enter into parasitic professions like law, finance or management. Im not saying these professions started out this way, but they are this way now if you want to get ahead. The rewards are high but the cost is that you walk over everyone else and are literally the reason poor people exist in the US in first place. If it were true that I could "do what the rich do" I would have already and I would be creating more jobs and donating a hell of a lot more than they do (which is probably why I am not rich since I am also not selfish). As it sits I achieved a level of education at the top 8 percent of US citizens with well above average grades, am attempting to get into the top 1 percent of US citizens in education and yet I still am not rich. No one wants to pay me to work in Scientific fields. They are too busy trying to employ people to steal money from everyone else in the stock market or as a lawyer.
I agree with you. The premise of my argument was to tax the rich more than everyone else. They already have 95 percent of the assets, and I think we should get 40 percent of those back minimum in ten years. However what I am saying, regardless of if my choices for tax havens is right or not, is that the rich will bolt if we tax them too much. A study would need to be done to find some optimal taxation rate to keep them here and still get the money. Frankly, they owe it to back to us as a society since our very existence enables them to be rich in the first place. But yes, we are of like mind on the purging of all corporate and wealthy campaign donations. Id actually like to see non-partisan, secular elections funded with tax dollars where people debate on government funded programs, are given a free platform to speak, and are able to run for office if they pass some preliminary vote. Then, ban all campaign contributions above a few million. Make the voter look harder for someone to vote for rather than being brainwashed by TV ads. Its utopian and probably bullshit, but Im absolutely positive that middle class people exist who would make a better politician or executive officer than any every single one of those men and women currently in office.
In the 1950's - 1960's the tax rate on the highest earners was between 70-90 percent. They didn't leave then.
1) I would argue differently. I am educated, my GPA is good, and I am among somewhere around 4 percent of the US population who actually have MS degrees in STEM. Im not saying I am something special, I just think I should be more employable than I apparently am. I should at least be able to beat out most candidates for a job that requires a BS. You would be surprised how many grad students have lower GPAs and actually have work teaching, tutoring, etc. I have skills in image processing, signal processing and programming which are valuable to industry, my main problem is its an applied math background so I get beat by engineers simply because they have the paper saying so, even though they are no more capable than I am OR I am at least at a point where I would be valuable on a team of engineers since I have experience in other things they don't.
Rich assholes have ruined America from within making jobs unavailable to people that are willing to work hard. I am willing to work hard, Ive never been on social security or Medicare. I don't plan on doing so. I don't think I am owed a living, I am OWED A FUCKING JOB somewhere because I spent a lot of time educating myself while going into debt even with scholarships. I feel like I did what I was supposed to do as sold to me by the education system and politicians to get a job. If anything, thats what makes me a gullible idiot.
Create a job for myself? Sure, with what capital? Should I go beg some rich guy to finance me? The same rich people that have 95 percent of the money and fail to create jobs time and time again whenever they are given tax breaks? I actually have a good idea for something, but I don't have the expertise yet. I would starve before I could execute it. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
2) Graduating #1 out of your class literally doesn't mean shit except to pretentious asshats, or it means you are a genius which is something you are born with. It is absolutely no indication of what you learned or your capabilities. You could argue it shows you work hard, fine. I could easily graduate #1 in my class if I chose to do an MBA. I didn't because I firmly believe MBA's are worthless pile-of-shit degrees anyone can do. Its part of my principals.
3) I never say this to potential employers. I am not an idiot. The GPA is my MS-work GPA. As an undergrad I had a 3.8.
Im desperate because I am going to a new city for a PhD program and have no job to pay my bills. One of my recommendations was sent in late by a professor of mine in spite of me asking him repeatedly to send it in on time, and because of this I missed the priority deadline for a TA position and was beat out simply by timing. Meanwhile I have been applying to literally every single internship and research assistant position I can find. I follow up, but still cant get a damn job. At this rate I probably will have to get a job mowing lawns as you said. I used to work at horse ranches shoveling shit and building fences, and also at a machine shop where I would get my hands all sliced up, so its not that I am adverse to manual labor. Its just that I wanted to contribute to some kind of research because its my passion, and it seems like a waste of my entire education to become a manual laborer. Id be better off and more useful to society teaching high school.
Good god. That movie sounds awful.
Tax the rich. It would work if you taxed their money even more the minute they tried to move it overseas. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
Wrong. The wealthy managers, board members, and CEO's made the decision to transfer all the jobs overseas. If you don't have a job, you can't afford expensive things so you buy things cheaper. The person that just took your job in China is now selling the cheap shit to you, bleeding the money out of the states while keeping an ungodly massive portion for the super-rich. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
I disagree. If the rich weren't so greedy we would each have enough for us, and the rest of the world would still be progressing at their current pace. http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
They are basing it on increase in output per-capita. This being the case the data is normalized this way. I.e. divide number-of-papers by a smaller number it is bigger than dividing by a bigger number. If A is less than B and C is some constant, then C/B is less than C/A . Since China has a population of 1.2 billion at the time their growth is incredibly impressive. Europe's entire population is about .85 billion which means it should be harder to have growth (measured with this metric) than here in the US since we have less population. Japan was sitting at about .12 billion so maybe you could say its not as impressive as it shows in the chart.
Sorry, correction. I used notation not thinking about it being parsed as html.
They are basing it on increase in output per-capita. This being the case the data is normalized this way. I.e. divide number-of-papers by a smaller number it is bigger than dividing by a bigger number. If A B and C is some constant, then C/B C/A . Since China has a population of 1.2 billion at the time their growth is incredibly impressive. Europe's entire population is about .85 billion which means it should be harder to have growth (measured with this metric) than here in the US since we have less population. Japan was sitting at about .12 billion so maybe you could say its not as impressive as it shows in the chart.
Nice Godwin. You have a better way to do it? It will never happen the way I said it, but higher taxes on the rich won't work in this day and age. They will take all their money to Europe, Japan, China, etc. Maybe if we were to institute some kind of huge tax on exporting personal funds and corporate funds overseas that is above a certain amount? Even that would cause all sorts of problems with selling American exports. If we tariff goods coming from overseas more then that causes international political problems. The problem is that now the super-rich have 95 percent of the money there is no easy way to get it back in the hands of who they stole it from. However, Id rather have a government run by the people in control of assets for the betterment of all of us rather than relying on the selfish and/or misguided philosophy of a supposed philanthropist.
Amen. I haven't found a job that will call me back even after follow ups, and I have an MS. Only 8 percent of the US population have MS's, and fewer in STEM which is what I am. Why shouldn't I be able to get hired? Im willing to work for lower than the average wage for my discipline, and I have a 3.65 GPA. I have to fucking ask my parents to borrow money to buy groceries and they aren't even rich, they are middle class. Which means they can maybe spare several hundred dollars a month without hurting themselves, but this money should be going to their retirement not some kid that can't get work. Im 27 years old for Christs sake, I shouldn't have to do this.
You will see these big corps move to Europe, Japan, and China. The US will be a empty husk that has nothing left but delusions of grandeur and a bunch of tribals in the streets. I say tribals because their will be uneducated, homeless, poor, sickly, uber-religious people that are afraid of the number 13, ghosts and demons.
Investment in science and technology projects is crucial. Then we don't lose engineers, physicists, and mathematicians to big business "pie-dividing" as you put it.
No problem with your point. The peons need bread-and-circuses to keep them preoccupied while the rich steal all the money. We really should force all the super rich to stay in America by revoking all of their passports, take half their assets, and invest it in science and technology projects and infrastructure. If we tax them slowly they will simply leave to other countries. Better to take it back with one fell swoop.
A major problem is that the US simply does not invest much anymore in science or technology projects. If you actually create jobs in these fields, people will line up at universities to major in what would let them get these jobs. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson had a great point. Paraphrased, he said that if you invest in science and technology projects, like NASA manned missions, etc, you will get people to apply themselves in something they are passionate about, and you would not lose them to the finance or business industry. There is a very, very high correlation between life expectancy, economic performance, fair wages, and the ability to withstand natural disasters in countries with high scientific and technological output. Look at Haiti. They had a 7.0 magnitude earthquake and 250,000 people died. Japan had a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear disaster, and less than 28,000 died. Japan has the highest output in science and technology per capita, and is also accelerating the quickest in scientific and technological output. Europe is second, China is third (as far as the rate in change in scientific/technology output). The US still has significant scientific output, but it is declining, and doing it RAPIDLY.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich
I went to a Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture last night. Interestingly enough, he showed a chart that resized each nation on a map based on their total scientific output. The US totally dwarfed the rest of the world except Europe and Japan. However, if you take the derivative of this (i.e. the rate of change in scientific output over the last decade) the US becomes a small country. We are falling HARD. China, Europe, and Japan with Japan and Europe leading the forefront are totally obliterating us when it comes to growth in science and technology. We are only riding out the rest of our momentum from our forefathers. A crash is inevitable unless we seriously invest in science and technology projects. Interestingly enough, the nations with the highest scientific output also have the longest life expectancies, the best economies, and the fairest wages for their people. They also weather disasters much better than other nations. Case in point : Haiti had a 7.0 magnitude earthquake and 250,000 people died. Japan had a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear disaster and less than 28,000 people died. Keep in mind that the Richter scale for earthquakes is logarithmic. So a 9.0 magnitude earthquake is thousands of times stronger than a 7.0 magnitude. As Dr. Tyson said, THAT IS A TRIUMPH of science. People need to seriously consider this when they vote next election and when they talk about cutting funding for our science programs like NASA, NIST, etc. Its an investment in our future economy. It takes longer than most MBA "captains of industry" are willing to wait for profits, but the payout is HUGE.
I apologize for the repost, but I had to say this to you as well.