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America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

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Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#81

Post by bequanna »

ryanmercer wrote: post #32

Around the same time this was shared to HN I Tweeted/FB/LinkedIn variations of the following >If I earned $10,000 a day it would take me 273.97 years to have earned 1 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Elon was worth about 20 billion a year ago, last month he was worth an estimated $185bn. Oof. In reality, I make a little over $17 an hour His net worth increased an estimated 4.66 million times my annual gross income in the…

> If someone gave me 100,000 USD...

The language you use here is concerning and not empowering. Why would someone 'give' you $100k? Despite some arguable edge cases (hft, etc.) money is only earned by creating value.

> Some days I just "can't even". With my faith, my wife, my friends, I try to be upbeat and positive when it comes to the future but when I see people like Musk, Bezos, even Gates ...

Comparison is the thief of joy. My (unsolicited) advise is to narrow your focus to doing whatever you can to make you and your family's life better. Leave Reddit/Twitter/whatever, stop consuming media and focus exclusively on what is right in front of you.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#82

Post by raiyu »

ryanmercer wrote: post #75
raiyu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same token, Elon Musk is someone who succeeded, while thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs fail, end up with debt, and don't have much to show for their work. So using survivorship bias to compare yourself to Elon Musk which is an atypical result when it comes to business formation doesn't make sense. You should probably compare yourself to the average business creator and see how you fare compared to the…

No, not remotely. It's like pointing out the absurdity of 1 man, over the past year, having his net worth increase 2.32 million times the annual median household income (of the U.S.) of $68,703 (2019, per census.gov). While something like 20% of the planet doesn't even have access to reliably safe drinking water and something like 800 million lack the amount of food require for an active life.

Well the original post was someone who had access to reliable safe drinking water, so I'm not sure where that is coming from.

Also if you look historically over the past 100 years overall rates of poverty have declined everywhere.

If you look even further back in time the amount of rights that global citizens enjoy today is fundamentally a million times better than it was 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago.

Humans were ruled by kings and queens, where land was inherited, there was no upward social mobility, slavery of peoples was much more rampant than it is today.

Humanity was never equal, in it's history, but today if you ignore the top 1% we as a people actually enjoy fundamentally more equality than our predecessors who weren't part of the 1%.

Also, while the inequality exists between the 1% and the 99% today, today actually have upward social mobility to become part of the 1%, where 400 years ago that wasn't really all that possible.

I'm not saying the world is perfect, but if you look at it has actually gotten better overall.

I'm also pretty sure that the implied worth of Rockefeller and some of those old guard monopolists on a inflation adjusted and power adjusted basis was probably many times higher than even Elon Musk's net worth today.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#83

Post by RIMR »

natenthe wrote: post #57

Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…

Lack of education is the #1 issue here. America's education system emphasizes nationalism and obedience. It doesn't encourage critical thinking or alternative worldviews.

We're so deeply entrenched in the "American Dream" (Capitalism & Trickle Down Economics) that we're unable to challenge the current status quo.

Worse yet, this is driving us towards the defunding of public education, and the further worsening of our problems.

Our collective ignorance manifests itself in a number of ways, from wealthy mainstream journalists blaming economic problems on the poor to their audience of middle-class Americans, to mass-delusions regarding conspiracy theories intended to divide people.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#84

Post by ChrisLomont »

koboll wrote: post #64
_qulr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is almost a natural law of wealth. The article is about how the post-1975 period differs from the pre-1975 period. So it's demonstrably not a natural law. Natural laws don't change over time.

From 1960 to 1985 the top marginal tax rate crashed from 90% to 30%. And then of course there's the demise of private sector unions, the effects of computerization, etc. Arguably, it was always a natural law, but the 1970s were an inflection point after which capital was allowed to accrue advantages at a much faster rate.

Marginal rate is not effective rate. In fact, when Reagan cut the top marginal rate multiple times while also changing loopholes the effective tax rate on the top increased after some of those changes [1].

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-...

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#85

Post by readams »

koboll wrote: post #64
_qulr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is almost a natural law of wealth. The article is about how the post-1975 period differs from the pre-1975 period. So it's demonstrably not a natural law. Natural laws don't change over time.

From 1960 to 1985 the top marginal tax rate crashed from 90% to 30%. And then of course there's the demise of private sector unions, the effects of computerization, etc. Arguably, it was always a natural law, but the 1970s were an inflection point after which capital was allowed to accrue advantages at a much faster rate.

It's mostly a myth that there was a 90% marginal tax rate. It's technically true, but when the top tax rate was removed they also removed all the loopholes and deductions that were being used to reduce the effect tax rate on top earners to below 45%. All the while the proportion of tax receipts as a percentage of GDP has remained constant.

Meanwhile, the proportion of taxes paid by the top quintile earners has increased from 55% in 1980 to 70% by 2013.

In 2017 the top 1% of income earners paid 38.5% of all taxes, vs the bottom 90% who paid 29.9% of all taxes. The top 50% of taxpayers paid 97% of all taxes in 2017.

But all this ignores the main fact, which is that actual rich people make most of their money not as income, but as unrealized capital gains. High marginal rates on income taxes affects high-earning professionals. Not the private jet crowd.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#86

Post by RIMR »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #3

Ah yes, the famous cabal of 1 percenters sitting around and committing grand larceny as they raid the bank accounts of poor people. At least that's what this headline would have you believe. The reality is much more boring. Thanks to "math," they've determined that if the ratio of incomes from 1945-1974 held steady , the bottom 90% would have "more" than they do now. Of course the bottom 90% itself is a fantasy and y…

>But is it possible that maybe, just maybe, wealth distribution isn't a 0 sum game? And maybe being in the bottom 90% is better now than it was 40 years ago, because of, I don't know, iPhones

Telling homeless people that they are better off than the middle-class 40 years ago because they have a smartphone is basically the 21st century equivalent of "Let them eat cake".

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#87

Post by tossmeout »

klmadfejno wrote: post #18

"But poor people have iphones now" when people can't afford food, healthcare, or any leisure time is the 2021 equivalent of "Let them eat cake". The balance of wealth is insulting when we have so many basic needs not being met for those at the bottom "Stealing" is a word that gets knee jerk reactions. But the more polite way to phrase it is that the rich benefit from societal structure 1000x more than the poor and ar…

I think it's perfectly valid to point out that improvements in technology are beneficial to the poor. Technology is the reason why most people would likely prefer to be poor in 2021 than rich in 1547.

It's not just iPhones. Even access to food is dramatically better thanks to technology. We no longer have wide-scale famines that we used to have in the past that would kill thousands. Even in the US, to my knowledge, food insecurity is much less of a problem today than it was in 1960.

So I don't see the point in implying that technological progress is worthless.

I do think it's correct that the rich benefit from societal structures more, but I'd rephrase: the rich are more capable of leveraging societal structures. Which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, so long as others are allowed a shot at utilizing those structures, too.

In other words, the fact that more money gives you more benefits isn't something to be sneered at. It's kind of the whole point of money. It should make your life better. Otherwise it fails as an incentive. What shouldn't be the case, however, is that people are unfairly barred from being able to make more money in the first place.

I think we focus too much on equality of outcomes, and not enough on the three important questions:

- It doesn't matter who can leverage societal structures the most. Kudos to the people who can. What matters tax-wise is, who is stressing societal structures the most? An example for illustration's sake: if Amazon is placing an insane burden on the road system and causing more maintenance work, theoretically they should pay more for that than the rest of society does.

- Why don't people have more opportunity to make money? Is our educational system failing them? Are there laws and regulations that are keeping people down? Is rent-seeking behavior edging people out? Etc. This idea that people can't make money because rich people are "taking it all" is silly and not the real problem.

- How can we raise the floor? How do we make it so being poor in America isn't so terrible, and ideally, is okay? We have so many problems with rising healthcare and educational and housing costs, segregation, crime, etc. Collecting more taxes doesn't seem to solve this. Look at SF. One of the most tax-rich cities in America. But do we even know how to deploy that budget effectively to curb homelessness? It doesn't seem so.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#88

Post by readams »

klmadfejno wrote: post #18

"But poor people have iphones now" when people can't afford food, healthcare, or any leisure time is the 2021 equivalent of "Let them eat cake". The balance of wealth is insulting when we have so many basic needs not being met for those at the bottom "Stealing" is a word that gets knee jerk reactions. But the more polite way to phrase it is that the rich benefit from societal structure 1000x more than the poor and ar…

The question is, based on standard of living, would you rather be poor now or some time in the past? I don't think there's anyone who would choose the past.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#89

Post by jellicle »

Pfhreak wrote: post #23

This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest, leverage it into getting loans to build more capital, etc. If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more…

This proposition, discussed and shown by Piketty in his 2013 book, was not at all obvious before that and even today many people would argue (wrongly) that it isn't true. So if it's a natural law of wealth, it is a very recently proven one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#90

Post by Grustaf »

No doubt the rich have been getting richer, at the expense of the rest of society, and this is getting worse as they accrue ever more power to control the government decisions that really count.

But you can't really calculate this transfer of wealth in the way they do it in this article. You can't simply change one parameter and pretend that the only thing that would have happened is that wages would be radically higher, for example.

Radically higher wages would have numerous effects. Many companies wouldn't have been able to remain profitable. Other would have been more profitable because they would have more customers. It's impossible to say exactly what the net effect would be.

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