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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%

#291

Post by swiley »

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'm not even convinced owning an iPhone is a good thing. They're really the modern equivalent of a TV.

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

#292

Post by A12-B »

namelessoracle wrote: post #96
slowhadoken wrote: post #67

She had me with the history of income inequality and then she lost me with “wage gap” talk. Why is a plea for bipartisanship always followed by throwing shade at white men? It’s wearing on me.

It's the poison pill that Amazon/Walmart/et cetra have injected into the conversation to make sure they keep on top. Unless you think that all the top 1% have adopted identity politics out of the goodness of their hearts? It's just classic divide and conquer strategy. It's no coincidence that identity politics is so popular with the relatively affluent tech community who dont want to take a good hard look at themselv…

What's amazing to me about HN is comments like this don't get downvoted, but comments about how maybe we should tax the wealthy a little bit do.

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

#293

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Apocryphon wrote: post #265
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right of exit, as they say, is still there. The existence of rights does not obviate the possibility that they will be infringed upon. > 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. So I’d really like these leaders to quit push…

It does not require endorsement of the current leaders nor their system to recognize the very basic and banal fact that taxation is a valid mechanism that a society uses to sustain itself. This doesn't even require one to be in favor of specific current taxes, it's simply acknowledging that taxation as a principle is not some sort of ludicrously unjust abomination. Taxation predates central banks.

> very basic and banal fact that taxation is a valid mechanism that a society uses to sustain itself.

Validity in this case is not a fact it is an opinion or value judgment that implies that it is moral/ethical to use coercion to extract money from citizens.

You may agree with this. You may not claim it as a fact.

> taxation as a principle is not some sort of ludicrously unjust abomination

Thats your opinion and the oligarchs who decide how tax money is spent appreciate your conformity.

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

#294

Post by burntbridge »

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…

The Fed just implements the monetary policy of the Government in power. The board of governors are appointed by the president. The problem lies with Government and the failed economic policies they stick with through thick and thin i.e. Neo-liberalism.

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

#295

Post by _qwfv »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #231
_qwfv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Marx tended to focus on roles more than persons or transactions. Buyers and sellers, capitalists and workers, etc. Any individual might play any particular role at any given time. (For instance, I personally fill the role of worker with my day job and capitalist with my 401k.)

The reason I mention that is because his thesis was that, in aggregate, the role of capitalist must expect a positive return on MCM transactions, or they wouldn't occur. Individuals may suffer losses, but as a role it just be positive.

He's less data driven than Piketty, and he builds this notion on top of the idea that there is a desire to hold wealth. Or, put another way, it is natural in an economy of commodities and money to prefer holding money over any given commodity. Eg, having a hoard of money is more useful than having a hoard of wool, as it is generally easier to convert money into a commodity you need than to convert between two commodities.

So the natural inclination is to try and increase wealth, and MCM exists commonly, so therefore MCM must be a net engine for increasing wealth. (Even if individual cases are losses.)

I'm less confident in answering your first question. It hasn't come up in my reading, but I'm not a scholar. It could be in there. (One of the things Marx often does is open windows to look at something and then move on without diving deep on them. For instance he acknowledges inflation, and moves on rather quickly.)

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

#296

Post by OscarCunningham »

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…

Do you think the Fed should have not done this and allowed inflation to run below their 2% target (perhaps negative)? Or do you have an alternative suggestion for how to keep inflation steady without printing money?

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

#297

Post by tobmlt »

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…

I appreciate your counter argument and am familiar with it. I disagree about the Great Depression and pretty much everything else you’ve said, but I mean no disrespect, only contend that there is a whole body of economic thought that agrees with me, and that mainstream Econ (recognizing the plurality of schools of thought here) has swept under the rug, because it’s inconvenient. I know “my side” is unpopular and “discredited”. I think it happens to mainly be right, simpler, and generally disabling to the status quo, which I’d characterize as built to enable active interventions. I’ve said nothing about what to Actually do to fix this all, because that is more complex, and not addressed properly, in the main, by anybody. I think one has to recognize the pain that unwinding all of this must cause, and not just “switch it all out”. Heck of a mess!

I’ll be happy to get my (Of course discredited) books out and recite the counter case about the Great Depression if anybody really wants me to later. Basically the fed and various policies caused what should have been a short sharp correction/stock-crash (at the end of a runaway fed built stock market streak) to extend into a long drawn out mess. Forgetting innumerable details I am sure. But yeah, I know you don’t agree. I do not find your case compelling.

While I have a chance, here is a good book on the Austrian case against the status quo narrative on the great depression:

https://cdn.mises.org/Americas%20Great%20Depression_3.pdf

This is, in the main, what I allude to on that one point (caveat, I am not a gold bug and of course Rothbard is. I think focusing on specific instances of "the way to implement an idea" allows people to laugh at the specific to forget/discredit the greater idea itself. Similar issues arise with Austrian rejection of stats and involved mathematical analysis.). I do not subscribe to those ideas, but find the bulk of the economic analysis itself compelling.

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

#300

Post by tylerhou »

glsdfgkjsklfj wrote: post #280
tylerhou wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> by providing liquidity, which has the side effect of causing bad things because it lets the rich accumulate wealth. curious, what if the people driving that engine opted for wealth tax instead? Wouldn't that be a win-win and your phrase could have been instead: > by providing liquidity, with no side effect such as causing bad things because it lets the rich accumulate wealth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Fed doesn't the power to enact a wealth tax. It's powers were delegated to it by Congress. Congress does have the power to enact a wealth tax. But it chooses not to. The way to change that is by voting.
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