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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%

#251

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mywittyname wrote: post #246
loudmax wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optio…

> reelecting the people who appointed them in the first place. Everyone loves their Congresspeople. It's the other 433 who are screwing everything up.

I'm pretty sure everyone hates their congresspeople, if they are of the opposing party.

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

#252

Post by Apocryphon »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #237
syops wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discussi…

There's a difference between pointing out government waste, wanting to lower taxes, wanting a smaller government, etc. and claiming that taxes are inherently violence, as the original post did.

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

#253

Post by findthewords »

naveen99 wrote: post #198

The 1% allocate capital that are best at allocating capital. If they aren’t good at it, they rapidly lose capital

Only because the government has provided poor alternatives. Is Uber a better allocation of capital than infrastructure projects?

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

#254

Post by jay_kyburz »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #187
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.

How do you run the economy without interest?

In utopian reality, you could run a state owned bank that was run not-for-profit and only charged interest enough to cover losses and expenses.

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

#255

Post by mindslight »

danans wrote: post #220
mindslight wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Even with income remaining stagnant, the prices for goods and services should have been continually going down due to technology and outsourcing. The price for goods did go down. Everything from food to toys to tools got much cheaper than it was before. However, the price for cornerstone needs that govern access to opportunity - i.e. healthcare, housing, education, physical security - and the percentage of income a…

> The price for some cornerstone needs that govern access to opportunity - i.e. healthcare, housing, education

First, I wholeheartedly agree that this is the major stakes. I mentioned consumer goods prices because they're immediately tangible. The differences in the others are all too easy to handwave away as improvements.

> Everything from food to toys to tools got much cheaper than it was before

I don't know about toys, and they seem hard to compare. Food has gone up over the past few decades (groceries that used to cost $2 now cost $3, $3->$4, etc). From one of the first hits for historical milk price (https://www.in2013dollars.com/Milk/price-inflation): "Between 1997 and 2020: Milk experienced an average inflation rate of 1.73% per year". Note that I'm talking about sticker prices here, not any "but they actually went down with inflation", as the original argument was referencing stationary wages.

Tools are being made much more flimsy and disposable - eg real high speed steel has been replaced by inferior foreign steel with gimmicky coatings to "prolong" its poor wear characteristics. If you look at good quality tool brands today, the prices are higher than what tools cost several decades ago. This goes for appliances as well - take a look at "commercial" offerings that are built to be maintained.

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

#256

Post by syops »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #237
syops wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discussi…

If the cost of living in a different country is too high then I suppose you are destined to feel oppressed for the rest of your life. It’s a strange position to take. Given that very few people feel your way perhaps it is worthwhile to consider that your position is an extreme one and causing you unnecessary distress.

The Constitution gives government the power to tax. Therefore in this society earning a tax free income is not a right as far as this society is concerned. I apologize for not making that clearer.

The person I responded to did not claim there was unnecessary waste and thus taxes ought to be lower. Their position appears to be that the act of taxation is theft (since it’s done through violent means). Then you chimed in without stating that your position differs. You didn’t give any indication to having a different position to the person I responded to.

Thank you for the discussion. I will read and contemplate your response but will not respond further. It appears to me that we have irreconcilable differences of opinion on the matter.

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

#257

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#258

Post by pessimizer »

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…

A lot of magic is happening in your second paragraph.

Inflation reduces debt and wealth at the same time. Wages at the low end rise with the cost of living. Debt and wealth are denominated nominally. The cost of a new car may go up, but the cost of the car you're currently driving (and haven't paid off) is going down.

Printing money doesn't steal from the poor. Printing money and giving it to the rich steals from the poor. Speculation on assets comes with low inflation, not high inflation, because with low inflation comes low interest rates. The only reason this is bad is because when this speculation crashes the economy, the rich will be saved by direct payments from the government.

Nominal asset appreciation due to a rise in the money supply isn't a rise in value, and the poor aren't competing with the rich for assets. It seems like that in housing because it is an extraordinarily safe asset to drive up in value (when interest rates are low) based of the history of the US government bailing out losses in real estate.

Wealth inequality in America is due to direct payments to the wealthy, and the government consistently stepping in as the silent guarantor of last resort behind every asset bubble. If the government were instead the asset buyer of last resort (not at par like after the mortgage crisis, but at market value), crashes of asset bubbles would be a boon for the public, not a boon for the people who participated most in the bubble.

edit: The problem with the Fed is that it focuses on a goal of holding down inflation while not considering employment in enough detail. The quality of jobs, whether jobs are in bubble (or fragile) industries, rate of rise in wages, and the quit rate are ignored in favor of a simple percentage of unemployed, and administrations even narrow that down to the proportion of people currently collecting unemployment instead of the prime-age (25-54) employment rate as would make sense.

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

#259

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

No they haven't.

The premise is "had growth rates among the quintiles remained as they were post-war, then..."

That is nothing like "one quintile has taken from the others".

Growth rates change all the time, and the transition from a labour economy to a knowledge economy has the effect of reducing the pool of "winners" as the returns to knowledge form a greater share of total returns.

This same transition is visible in most developed countries. Some have welfare systems designed to prevent it, and their overall growth is lower for it. They contribute less of the global groundbreaking progress (like new cancer treatments, Covid vaccines, etc) commensurate to that fact.

This is a false premise. Do not fall for it.

Just because you are in a group whose growth rate has been higher than the other group, doesn't mean you "took" something from them.

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

#260

Post by hedora »

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…

There's a hole in your argument:

It takes $500 to build a well-diversified portfolio with a roboadvisor, and that portfolio will behave comparably to a larger one (it'll be a bit worse, but also taxed at a lower rate). So, if everyone invested their savings rationally, then when the Fed propped up stock prices, it wouldn't change the distribution of savings across the population.

The real issue is that a larger percentage of the poor's assets are in items that depreciate.

In the '08 crash, a the percentage of people in the US that owned a home dropped from 69% to 63.5%, and is only starting to recover:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rat...

The Fed has been keeping mortgage rates low, and that has certainly helped home ownership rebound. So, it's more nuanced than "the fed steals poor people's money".

(Don't get me wrong; the system is rigged to transfer wealth to the rich. I'm just saying there is more than one mechanism at play.)

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