341–350 of 355 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using the term "marginalized communities" as a broad descriptor for people with a certain skin color in America is misguided and counterproductive. It paints a distorted view of reality and is a political statement more than anything else.
Many things are political statements, including (obviously) your comment
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cases like the Manhattan project team are rare. Cases like grossly overpaid managers and executives in FIRE industries are common.
If managers and executives are so overpaid, why aren't top firms outcompeted by companies that offer lower wages for such positions? Lower wages would allow those companies to offer the same services at lower prices and take over the market.
I wonder what would happen to the suicide rate with medicare for all, and creating a max-wage that is (avg of contractors + employees * 150), or something similar, w/ additional 'bonus' multipliers for increasing # of U.S. hired. UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight. There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecu…
Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments. [1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-can...
(the leader, not the car company; the brother of the crack smoking mayor, the white one)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it as much of a dystopian nightmare as, say, having no food at all?
We already have soup kitchens in America. We have solutions of last resort regarding hunger. So this is a total strawman. Yes. Having every man, woman and child line up for government potatoes, government bread, and government cheese at some government office is unequivocally a dystopian nightmare.
There's also no reason that distribution has to work that way. How about an EBT card mailed to every home, which can be used for potatoes, cheese, and bread at any grocery store?
As the old saying goes: Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy a jet ski. And you never see an unhappy person riding a jet ski.
That's rubbish. A lot of rich people suffer from depression, to the point of suicide.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have soup kitchens in America. We have solutions of last resort regarding hunger. So this is a total strawman. Yes. Having every man, woman and child line up for government potatoes, government bread, and government cheese at some government office is unequivocally a dystopian nightmare.
Saying that "every man, woman and child" would be lining up is a straw man also. "Every man, woman and child" does not currently line up at soup kitchens. There's also no reason that distribution has to work that way. How about an EBT card mailed to every home, which can be used for potatoes, cheese, and bread at any grocery store?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't you include home equity into wealth? Perceptible gap widening since 2007: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
Because housing prices were in a bubble fueled by fraud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 is already mostly true at the federal level.
not for payroll it isn't
FICA Payroll taxes paid 50k * .0765 = 3825
Tax Burden 50k - 24800 (Standard deduction MFJ) = 25600
25600 = $2676.90 in FIT taxes owed before credits
Child tax credit $4000 EITC ~$750
Total Credits $4750
Total Federal tax burden -4750 + 3825 + 2677 = 1752/50000 = 3.5%
So not zero, but pretty darn close.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand. That chart shows very clearly that youth rates of death by suicide have gone up since 1999. It shows a climb from 10.x in 2007 to 14.x in 2015. That's not quite a third, but it's not far off. More importantly it shows that deaths from suicide are i: no longer declining and ii: increasing. This increase appears to happen around 2007 onwards -- this is when we had worldwide financial insecurity, wit…
You are cherry picking, or else I am confused. On the linked graph I see the highest suicide rates in the late 90s. They dropped in the early 2000s and then at some point start climbing. It’s like, one can pick any window from a graph like that to make a point. Think if someone did that with the stock market. You could prove the market was going down, or up, merely by choosing the window that suits the claim. Now, th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because housing prices were in a bubble fueled by fraud.
Did people magically get their mortgages reduced because of the fraud? If not, then it doesn't matter why the prices were the way they were.
But by that point more people stopped paying completely and got foreclosed, or declared bankruptcy.
My point is that it’s logically inconsistent to say on one hand, the banks are to blame, it was all fraud, it was a fraudulent bubble caused by greedy banks, etc — and on the other hand say, look at all this wealth that was destroyed, because the wealth itself was caused by the bubble.
To clarify, I’m talking about “wealth” that is equity caused by home value appreciation, not caused by paying a lot into the mortgage. Remember that most of the distressed assets were subprime (0-down, no doc, etc) loans — the sales pitch at the time was, put nothing down, and in a year your homes appreciation will make it like you put 20% down. The gains that analyses like the link above count as “wealth” were all smoke an mirrors.