Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030
129 replies, posted
taxes help spend public projects that lead to more things like business owners, specialists, innovations with grants, and more efficient travel and micromanaging. These all feed back to the system by bringing in new income/jobs and cutting down on cost on businesses. Add that with a min wage boost (which could partly be paid by the gov for a short time with the new taxes) for inflation and you'll see healthy growth in the economy overall. What most plutocrats don't see is that the more money the lower/middle class has, the more likely they will invest/spend on companies. Henry ford proved this when he payed well over the min wage at the time at his factories, and said workers suddenly had cash to buy things like cars from ford himself.
But none of this solves the "issue" of a wealth gap, which is what we were talking about. I agree that shit's fucked, and that wages has to be increased, but that's not going to solve it.
A wealth gap isn't inherently bad, its normal for most circumstances. When its an issue is when the top 1% owns more than 3 quarters of the money that should be circulating in the system. Taxes and increased wages help resolve that.
I don't disagree with you at all on this then.
Look, I don't know what exact method of money shuffling we should do, I don't know how exactly we re-design our society so that this isn't happening as much.
But the fact of the matter is we have a society that disregards everything else in it's pursuit of a higher number in a bank account. Hundreds if not thousands of excuses have been developed to explain why this is okay, how this actually benefits us all, how this is actually for the good of society.
These are lies that need to be deconstructed. The profit motive has given us, as a whole, a better shake of things. The poor have better access to food, but there are numerous downside to all of this that are trade offs. Yes, we can better feed and clothe the poor, we can better integrate them into society, but the cost of that has been the power they wield as a citizen of a democracy, the information they have access to as a citizen of the world, and the confusion those two elements bring. Education has been crashing into the ground for several decades in the US, we're already seeing the results of people raised in the 70's and 80's having gone through paired down education systems being active particpants in our economies with little to no clue how things really work due to poor education.
I frankly don't know what the answer is, I know both the left and the right have made numerous miss-steps in trying to correct these issues that very well could have exacerbated them. But I do not see the perspective that wealth accrued in this manner is valuable as even having a smidgen of truth to it. Something must be done, or society will be impacted by this heavily.
By the time we're old, shits fucked at this rate.
If you live paycheck to paycheck, you don't really have anything left to invest. I barely managed to even start before losing my last job, but with Donald "Trade wars are easy to win that's why we're not in a trade war that we're currently winning but already lost" Trump at the helm, I've had jack-shit for gains with the whopping ~$400 I could afford to invest. And in retrospect? I wish I hadn't. On top of having lost $20~ or so already (that's half a tank of gas), that's also 80% of my monthly rent.
What are you saying? Because the only thing i can pull from this that makes sense would be you saying that people owning and investing in companies makes the wealth worthless???? I mean, you said that you haven't seen where a profit driven system has benefits us, but then go ahead to show ways that a profit driven system leads to innovations that benefits society. Getting money out of politics, is once again something I agree with. But we're talking about solving wealth inequality here.
Well that's what I'm saying. The more money you have, the more you can afford to invest with basically no risk to your livelihood.
Yes, that post was in agreement with yours.
Even at $10/hr., which is roughly 50% more than minimum wage (50%! That's A LOT, right?!), I still had barely enough to even start to THINK about investing.
Is this a good measure for standard of living? I honestly don't care if 1% of people own most of the wealth if the absolute wealth owned by the other 99% translates to a decent standard of living. If Jeff Bezos can be worth 100b and most other people can earn a decent middle class wage and afford healthcare, then good for Jeff
Taxes go towards a lot of services and infrastructure that lower the barrier of entry for new businesses. They also go towards alleviating hardship from the lower class, which is demonstrably important when elevating citizens out of poverty. You can't even begin to think about starting a business if any risk on your part could lead to the loss of your children's home.
You might consider that such a consolidation of wealth and assets serves to concentrate power in those few people and those people don't answer to you or I via the democratic process. Power is taken from us.
Once again, if the net result doesn't affect standards of living then I don't find it alarming. And once again, the richest 1% of the world includes the vast majority of middle class Americans
I sort of want a secondary source on that.
No way to link it, so just put in like, 72,000 if you figure in 20% in taxes for a $90,000 gross income
This just sounds like a pretentious way of saying Communism might be a bad idea. I can't really pull any position from you besides that we should probably uphold the status quo in service of some vague archetypal balance. What's your ideal scenario? What set of ideas do you think can help this problem? Is the current situation preferable to any alternative?
So it turns out that I'm going to be part of the wealthiest 1% in terms of income pretty much as soon as I get a job.
I still think something should be done about the wage gap and wealth inequality though.
So I'll break that into 2 pointa
1) it doesn't matter
2) most middle class Americans are the 1 percent
I'll do 2 first (I should have ordered differently but everything is a pain on mobile)
In the US the top 1% own 38% of wealth with top 10% owning 76%. This is by wealth in the US. Income isn't a good metric to go by sob e we're talking about wealth. So even in America distribution is skewed. Wealth is a better thing to compare against imo.
1 it does matter. We have representation in government via democracy as a sort of check on power, to ensure or at least try to ensure the government has the people's interests at heart. Abstracted the government serves its stake holders which is everyone in the country. A private corporation/actor only serves themselves and their stock holders. What's the difference? An entire city might rely on a water company (the users are amongst the stakeholders) but only the investors are stock holders, you may get a conflict of interest where a private company has the opportunity to cut costs at the expense of the stakeholder but benefiing the stockholder. If we let our government give away power (IE our power) thru shit like the ttip then we're gimping ourselves. Consider as thing s get consolidated you have less competition and less mitigation for failure, people argue against ussr style socialism saying that e state runs everything, imo that'd be comparable to a hypothetical mega corp running everything.
For the "life is good" argument. There's arguable. Most of my generation wont bf able to get a house. We're the first generation since the 1800s to be worse off than our parents. How is that possible when the economy is doing so well? All that increase is ironing straight to the top. In the UK record high number of people are using food banks.
One final point on inequality on an international scale. Ye international inequality isn't fair, personally I'd like to see something done but it's hard to convince others to agree since it's just a lot of pathos mainly. I do console myself that living standards and cost of living are different. 20k a year in the UK might be a struggle but in Morocco you'd be very ite.
That doesn't change the wealth imbalance issues.
Standards of living are raising as the general wealth increases, but the amount of wealth that exists to do little but to sit is absolutely staggering.
There are massive issues with our system of distribution and there are intrinsic problems associated with allowing wealth to become so poorly distributed.
If your problem is poverty then the current capitalist system with maybe a few more safety nets is all you should hope for given that it is what has been most successful in eliminating poverty or, at the very least, alleviating it. If you want millions to starve again because some idiot thinks he can decide what should go where better than free trading, then by all means, spill the blood you see needed to be spilled. I will have no part in this.
Even if you consider actual wealth (say, a home), then an $800,000 home in Northern Virginia puts you at the 0.92% mark. A $500,000 house puts you around 3%, so still up there.
Yeah, slowly and incrementally. Socialize more policies but do so in a way that balances with the realities of our time, and the limitations. 'Space-Communism', as I am choosing to call it, is a great idea idea on paper, but implementing it is more difficult than loosing a mob of people onto what we've built. If we do this it must be through the system and through the unfortunately slow method of progress that has allowed us to steadily climb this high. I mean, if you want to argue that it wasn't capitalism that drove this progress, but something else, then by all means go ahead, but I fail to see how you would make that argument short of divorcing the individual from the circumstance.
rise, proletariat, and seize the means of production from the exploitative bourgeoisie. automate all jobs that are possible, give those without homes the thousands of homes that are waiting to be bought, and feed the whole of the people. abolish money.
Do you understand what wealth actually is and why "taxing wealth" is one of the dumbest ideas ever for someone who doesn't want the global economy to crash?
Bloods spilled on a daily basis as people die of starvation through a lack of resources when tons of resources exist to deal with those problems, but they're not prioritized so they're disregarded.
I'm not saying "start a revolution", I'm saying "keep doing this, and bad things will happen".
It doesn't matter that capitalism deals with poverty better than anything else we've ever done. It works, but it also does so in a manner that is counter productive and erodes trust in the very system it's built on it's back.
I take Jesus pretty seriously when he says "It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven". Wealth is great, but not when it costs the overall society, which the excesses we're seeing today, and saw in the past have and will continue to.
So, starvation is the thing you are pointing to? If so, then explain why we have made more progress in recent history towards fixing that, and explain how exactly you think we can speed it up.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/166040/426b88cc-30bc-46ef-830f-5c6d26e7c68f/Starvation Statistics.jpg
Across the board, everywhere in the world, starvation is down, and it is falling. The fact that there are rich people who have their name on the stock ownership and subsequently buy stupid amount of yachts is not changing that fact. The poor might revolt regardless, you're right, but it wouldn't be because they are well informed about it. You will always be able to point to someone who is doing better than you, and the starving poor is no new thing. Until we actually finish BUILDING the means of production, and encorporating them into the lives of the very poorest, there is very few hamfisted actions we could take that wouldn't end up slowing down the progress we already have.
What policies am I okay with? Well, corn hoarding to drive up prices is dumb, and so too is overpriced education. These things should be legislated away. Before that is possible, I agree money must also get out of politics. More than that I would need a degree in contemporary economics to say anything intelligent, and that is the problem.
I used one word and you latch on the specifics of that, rather than the general maliase of the problem as described.
C'mon.
Will you accept the core problem that I have described, and you have dodged numerous times up to this point is even a problem?
Extreme wealth disparity erodes trust in the system as corruption rages and the balance of power and decisions is weighted in a very unfair manner.
Is this a problem, or as everythng else do you think this is a "might makes right" type scenario?
Ok, so trust erosion is your main point of contention, very well.
My point is that that eroded trust is based on false premises. It is not some over-arching scheme that has resulted in this, but rather just the way things tend to distribute themselves when they have a self-reinforcing function. The unfortunate truth of capitalism is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The important qualifier is that the poor are less poor than 100 years ago as far as living standards go, and, furthermore, there is a very real possibility of having a social safety net implemented at some point in the future. That will only become possible as the overall wealth and means of wealth get to a point where it can distributed in such a manner.
My point isn't fuck the poor, it is rather that the poor must be patient because we are getting there. Forcing things to happen to fast will just break down the system we already have if we don't do it with the utmost care.
I'm not against taxation. Companies, individuals, everyone should be taxed.
However, the rich's wealth is not something like a summer home. Their real wealth is in stocks, bonds, and investments. So tell me what a homeless man is going to do with a stock? He can't eat it. He's not going to sit there and let it mature. He's going to sell it, like so many others will. So now, you have a bunch of people dumping stocks, or in other words, the "wealth" you redistributed, and company values plummet, taking the economy with it. It's like setting us up for a stock market crash.
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