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

time.com

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

#231

Post by chordalkeyboard »

_qwfv wrote: post #108
jellicle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Marx presented this idea back in the 1860s. He phrased it a little differently and built the idea up from the idea of exchanging commodities. In Marx's text, he discusses the history of commodity exchange, how people usually exchanged Commodities for Money which they exchanged back into other Commodities they needed. (E.g. I'll sell you my wool for coin, which I can use to buy food.) He called this CMC exchange. (Com…

I don’t think this should be downvoted.

Did Marx address the notion that collection of rents on capital create an incentive for the creation of more capital?

How did Marx address the case of MCM transactions where the capitalist has erred and lost money?

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

#232

Post by salmonellaeater »

The framing in the article is ahistorical. The post-WW2 period was a period of exceptionally _low_ inequality. If you look back to just the 1800s there were swings in inequality comparable to the present day. We're now moving back to the historical baseline.

There are some contributing factors to the shift in inequality, a major one being that labor is now oversupplied compared to the post-war period, and the competition is driving wages lower. The U.S. has much higher immigration rates now, which contributes to the oversupply of labor. The late 1800s and early 1900s had similarly high immigration and high inequality. [1]

Whether the historical baseline for inequality is the best amount of inequality is a different question though. It's clear that as redistribution flattens the income curve there is dead-weight loss as highly productive people stop wasting their time doing taxable work. It's also clear that investing in children who would otherwise be malnourished or lack education or healthcare is a net positive for society. It's not clear to me that the current level of inequality is the wrong one - we're admitting a lot of immigrants who are vastly improving their life prospects as a result, the economy is growing, and technology is amazing. Spending more money on health care would have limited benefits [2]. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether inequality should be higher or lower (it's hard to find a good-faith analysis in these terms), but the Time article uses an arbitrary timeframe and doesn't shed any light on the question.

[1] See Ages of Discord for a much more detailed dive into this. http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/

[2] Robin Hanson gives an argument with lots of evidence here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-med...

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

#233

Post by bartimus »

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…

Not to mention the low interest rates that caused the housing prices to sky-rocket.

Also not to mention this new trend where younger generations prefer to spend their paychecks on vacations, smartphones, fashion as opposed to long-terms investments like a home.

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

#234

Post by Apocryphon »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #214
syops wrote: post #188

Earlier 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.

The right of exit, as they say, is still there.

> Some people believe that the freedom to earn a living is a right, not a privilege.

There is also freedom in the security of living in a content and happy society that isn't setting up guillotines because massive underclasses have been pushed to their breaking points. The price you pay for civilization, and so on.

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

#235

Post by syops »

exabrial wrote: post #203
syops wrote: post #188

Earlier 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…

I think it's absurd to defend the violent nature in which these funds are acquired, regardless of the outcome. The end does not justify the means.

It’s absurd, in my opinion, to think that the society that created the opportunities you have to earn money ought to be enjoyed by you at no cost. We can’t all be free loaders and leeches. Acting as if taxes are immoral is nonsensical.

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

#236

Post by PeterStuer »

bequanna wrote: post #81
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 t…

"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."

Where are you looking away each time they pour another few trillion into the stock market?

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

#237

Post by chordalkeyboard »

syops wrote: post #230
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is an alternative. Go somewhere else if the cost of living in this society is too high. 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.

> There is an alternative. Go somewhere else if the cost of living in this society is too high.

What if the cost of living is high somewhere else as well?

> Earning a tax free living clearly isn’t a right according to the U.S. Constitution.

The US Constitution recognizes rights, it doesn’t confer them or exhaustively catalog them.

> Go elsewhere if the cost is too high or advocate for lowering the cost.

This discussion could be an example.

> It’s a strange position to take that the benefits of the society you live ought to be free to you when those benefits have costs.

Its a strange position to be accused of wanting things for free when one identifies unnecessary waste.

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

#238

Post by quickthrowman »

tylerhou wrote: post #227
tobmlt wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The Fed is stabilizing the price of the USD because of the coronavirus pandemic. If it were not printing money, then there would likely be a deflationary spiral that would cause a depression. 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 stoppe…

> When the pandemic is over, it will sell back these bonds the banks it bought them from.

This remains to be seen, the market had an absolute fit when they said QE was tapering in 2013, and also had an absolute fit when Powell was raising rates in 2018, particularly in December.

The Fed may have painted themselves into a corner here, nothing is certain with regards to unwinding QE or raising rates.

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

#239

Post by kansface »

User23 wrote: post #182

Usury, 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.

I have strong doubts given the amount of churn among both the ultra rich and our biggest companies. No one seems to stay in the top 10 for more than a few decades.

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

#240

Post by loudmax »

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…

Who do you think appoints the people who run fed Fed?

If you're looking to cast blame on bad policies, then blame those ultimately responsible: the politicians and the voters who put them there.

Ideally, the United States would have a mechanism that would allow voters to choose politicians with the best policies. What we have instead is a system where voters have to chose between the least worst of two possible options. Both parties are beholden to the top 1%, but the are not equally so.

What I find amazing is the lengths people will go to to blame government bureaucrats while reelecting the people who appointed them in the first place.

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