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…
America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
221–230 of 961 posts
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#222Correction: 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…
Especially when coupled with the excessive fiscal stimulus. We should absolutely help those most impacted by the pandemic, but the amount of money being injected amounts to gross negligence. Why were people who made 6 figures and still employed being given checks, for example? The stock market is on fire, and many businesses are smashing earnings expectations, yet we inject another $2 trillion? I've got a sizable por…
Because it's easier to do this than to gauge need, and with the paltry amounts handed out it doesn't add up to much compared to the big picture. The real question is why this has become a political talking point, and the answer is to distract from that much larger rapidly-implemented scam of bailing out the bond market that you rightly point out is "Really unfortunate for those without significant assets that ever hoped to own a home". Hiding the large scale theft is much easier when you can distract people into bickering about their financial neighbors.
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except this wasn't the federal bailouts. Those are an entirely different beast. It's talking strictly about income stagnation. The study shows that if wages kept up with productivity (as was the case in the immediate post-WW2 era) the bottom 90% would earn $2.5 trillion per year more. > We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate…
Even with income remaining stagnant, the prices for goods and services should have been continually going down due to technology and outsourcing. Price optimization is the fundamental mechanic of any market! For example, when most manufacturing was moving to China the promise was that it would benefit consumers via lower prices. However the Fed's overt policy is to erase these gains by printing money via low interest…
And there's a lot of pseudo-productivity here that is mostly just rising healthcare spending (without commensurate changes in outcomes) and land value. This sort of makes sense since these sectors have massive capture problems.
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#224Usury, which is to say lending at interest, will inevitably in aggregate lead to a tiny minority owning virtually everything. This is obvious to anyone who has basic high school math and understands that interest compounds geometrically and wages grow linearly at best.
> wages grow linearly at best. This isn't true at all. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#225I'm definitely not 1%, and sympathize with/understand somewhat some of these claims. Bail-outs and unchecked government spending or borrowing from future generations worry me. However I'm also pretty aggressive at investing. I feel like in general my retirement and taxable investing has benefitted me financially, though I'm solidly middle class. I feel (with data to back me up) like I'm upwardly mobile, though still…
>The main barriers to me personally are not billionares, but myself and my goals. I believe this feeling is misguided and here is why. You would be richer today if there was more equality. But instead you are held back by the same forces that those at the bottom 50% are. Even the rich managerial and technocratic class that you and I are part of (upper middle class) are poorer than we would be if it was more equal. So…
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "But poor people have iphones now" What makes that especially awesome is that Apple and the telecoms have gotten into the business of supplying credit to consumers who would otherwise have no business (literally and figuratively) owning a $1,500 phone when a $250 phone would do.
Given that the thread is about how $50T has been appropriated from the poor it seems odd to say that the poor should use $250 phones, and they have no business owning anything which costs more.
I would argue that yes, in the first world a smartphone is almost required, but there are plenty of great <$200 Android phones that do everything one would deem essential. $1500 smartphones are now simply a status symbol alongside Nike's and Rolex's, and have been for some time.
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#227Correction: 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…
Yep. The fed is an engine, whose purpose is to move wealth silently from the masses to the powerful monied few, via time-asymmetric inflation. (Mostly Inflation of assets presently) The resulting data looks like corporations have used their power to directly disenfranchise/disempower workers, and so the mass clamber for protective laws. More laws will be enacted by those in power. The time is certainly right for it.…
That's one of the reasons why the Great Depression was so bad: the US was on the gold standard at the beginning. The US can't create gold out of thin air, so the USD started deflating, people stopped spending, and capital stopped flowing. Companies went bankrupt, people lost jobs — all because much needed dollars were stuffed in people's mattresses instead of being spent.
The Fed is increasing the money supply by purchasing bonds because corporations need cheaper capital to pay their workers and their bills. When the pandemic is over, it will sell back these bonds the banks it bought them from. Without the Fed's intervention, this recession and pandemic would have been far, far worse.
Of course, helping corporations also helps the people who own the corporations: the rich. That's a distributional issue, and the main solution is tax policy. We need to raise income and estate taxes on the rich, increase the tax on capital gains, and institute a wealth tax.
The Fed is like an engine. But engines are a tool. Tools can cause good things and bad things. Right now, the Fed is causing good things by providing liquidity, which has the side effect of causing bad things because it lets the rich accumulate wealth.
If the Fed is like an engine, then it serves to move a train — the economy. If the train is runaway — if the economy benefits the rich far more than normal people — that doesn't mean engines are bad. It means we need to stop the train, fix it, and start the engine again.
If we restructure our economy, the Fed will still continue to do good things, with fewer negative side effects. That would be, on net, good. So the problem isn't with the Fed, it's with the economy. And claiming that the Fed is the root of all our problems misses the bigger picture.
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#228Correction: 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…
Except this wasn't the federal bailouts. Those are an entirely different beast. It's talking strictly about income stagnation. The study shows that if wages kept up with productivity (as was the case in the immediate post-WW2 era) the bottom 90% would earn $2.5 trillion per year more. > We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate…
The decoupling of wages from productivity started around 1971-1973, which is suspiciously close to the Nixon Shock and beginning of the 1970s inflation. In periods of inflation, firms with high bargaining power (notably monopolistic corporations, corporate executives, and right now, software engineers & quants) can extract the excess money floating around. Firms in highly competitive industries (notably restaurants, family farms, and ordinary workers) get undercut every time they try to raise prices. Therefore all the gains go to the rich.
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#229Correction: 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…
The Federal Reserve is just one tool used to achieve this. One of the most important ones sure, but to put too much emphasis on it is missing the forest for the trees.
Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every government has taxes. Running the government isn’t free. The cost of living in a given society are the taxes and abiding by the system of laws it has. In the U.S. you have the option of leaving if you find the cost too high. You willingly stay here and as such you ought to willingly pay the cost for doing so. Besides, are you certain the amount you pay in tax really ought to be considered yours? It’s strange pe…
> Every government has taxes. > In the U.S. you have the option of leaving if you find the cost too high. So you acknowledge that there’s no alternative, but you still act like people have the choice of an alternative. > This is the system we have developed for people to pay for the privilege of earning in this society. Some people believe that the freedom to earn a living is a right, not a privilege.
Earning a tax free living clearly isn’t a right according to the U.S. Constitution. Go elsewhere if the cost is too high or advocate for lowering the cost. It’s a strange position to take that the benefits of the society you live in ought to be free to you when those benefits have costs.