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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%

#301

Post by chordalkeyboard »

_qwfv wrote: post #295
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transactio…

Thanks for the reply and that makes sense.

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

#302

Post by cromwellian »

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…

Blaming the fed is a common libertarian tactic to avoid blaming the capitalists. Oh yes, in a pure anarchocapitalist Austrian utopia, you'd never have capitalists paying workers shit wages, employing child labor, forcing workers into unsafe firetrap buildings, etc

It's a way of averting ye eyes from the real problems with the negative externalities and market failures, and the hard work to come up with policy solutions that patch the holes in capitalism.

The analysis of the OP also ignores the decreasing returns to labor investment and increasing returns to capex because of automation which almost guarantee that the bulk of ROI will accrue to capitalists in the future.

Hire some (temporary) middle class workers to build your robot factory or automated logistics warehouse, fire most of the workers in your old factories/warehouses, and watch as more net income is transferred.

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

#304

Post by sjy »

nostrademons wrote: post #228
JamesLeonis wrote: post #122

Earlier 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…

Why do you think wages haven't kept up with productivity? 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. Fir…

I’d say it probably has something to do with the collapse in union membership, deregulation and growth of the finance sector, and capture of the political system by those who can afford billions of dollars worth of advertising, but it’s a complicated story. Are you suggesting that wages haven’t kept up with productivity because inflation has been consistently high since the US abolished the gold standard?

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

#305

Post by coliveira »

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…

You're trying to convict a gun for the murder, instead of the person who pulled the trigger. The Fed is just a tool in the hands of the <1% who control the economy. If it was against their interests, the Fed would not even exist in the first place. The Fed policies are directed at stealing from the poor/middle class and syphoning the profits to the very upper echelons of capital owners.

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

#306

Post by Jochim »

username90 wrote: post #136
saint_abroad wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress over the last 400 years is being undone by regressions of the last 40 years. > individuals born in 1980 have only a 45% chance of outearning their parents at age 30, compared to 93% for those born in 1940. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

Sounds like progress stopped, not that it reversed. When things are stable you'd expect that a bit less than 50% are richer than their parents.

It hasn't though, the rate of gain for the wealthy has increased.

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

#307

Post by adam_arthur »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #296
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?

The fed should use a more comprehensive bundle of goods to measure inflation. Home prices, is a good example.

Once they do that, inflation numbers will read much higher. By some accounts, home prices have increased by over 10% since this time last year.

A healthy society needs room for social/fiscal mobility, which becomes increasingly difficult when asset prices are inflated relative to median income.

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

#308

Post by matwood »

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…

> you steal from the poor and give to the rich

At this point it's really future generations who are being stolen from.

I'm older, own a house, and paid for multiple degrees years ago. Inflation is good for me personally, but destroys young people. Salaries just can't keep up with how fast housing and education (and healthcare) costs have risen.

I do not think the fed is solely to blame though.

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

#309

Post by dcolkitt »

leetcrew wrote: post #196
dcolkitt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wages grow linearly at best. This isn't true at all. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...

gdp per capita is not a good proxy for wages.

Labor share of GDP went from 64% in 1950 to 58% today. That means wages grew slightly slower than GDP per capita, that’s certainly not enough to mean wages grew sub-exponentially.

For wages to grow linearly, labor share of GDP would have to fall exponentially towards zero.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/estimating-the-us-...

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

#310

Post by adamcstephens »

bartimus wrote: post #233
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.

A home isn’t an investment, at best it’s a low interest savings account. That people consider it to be one is part of the reason house prices continue to outpace inflation.

Buy a home to live in it, but don’t expect that you’ll make money from it.

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