America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90% • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

kazen44 wrote: post #329

nostrademons wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard (from finance professionals) that big elephant in the room is corporate debt. Corporations need to roll over their debt when it comes due, and a fair amount of it is short-term paper. If interest rates rise, that debt will become a lot more expensive, which will make many of the more marginal companies insolvent. Not software companies, which are sitting on hoards of cash, but all of the ordinary manufactu…

which is highly dangerous to the general stability of society. When economic policy results in massive finanicial instability for the common worker (thanks to hyperinflation and insane asset prices) it creates a power vacuum which can be filled by those promising to fix the problem quickly and swiftly.

[deleted]

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

#342

Post by tobmlt » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #326

tobmlt wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “dis…

If you're talking Austrian economists, who are the primary proponent of the "fed is the bad buy, bring back the gold standard" argument, they explicitly reject any attempt at modeling or mathematical analysis. They are only interested in arguments based on "self evident" axioms. I've read many of the books you're talking about, and there's a reason they are "unpopular" and “discredited".

There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

Who cares about gold? Who cares about avoiding math? Not me. I guess I am no Austrian for those reasons. I do care, however, about restraining the inflationary tendencies of governments because I believe they are an engine of wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich and powerful. And sure, I suppose I do care about avoiding mathematical naval gazing, or statistical hackery. But those are side-issues.

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

#343

Post by AlotOfReading » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

salmonellaeater wrote: post #232

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 competi…

The concept of a 'historical baseline' is nonsensical. As you extend your timeline, inequality is going to decrease because most human societies have not had the kinds of disparity we measure today. Moreover, we're not beholden to historical norms of any sort. Collective action can change things. It's happened quite a lot historically.

If you insist on a specific citation, check out Ten Thousand Years of Inequality. The editors (whose detailed reasoning I ultimately disagree with) have spent years doing papers on this subject.

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

#344

Post by Apocryphon » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #330

Apocryphon wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is an opinion or value judgment that implies that it is moral/ethical to use coercion to extract money from citizens. Sure, and it is an opinion or value judgment supported by millennia of social contract even before Enlightenment era thinkers came up with the concept of the social contract. If you're going against one of the basic mechanisms or tools for how society works, you might as well label yourself an an…

> Sure, and it is an opinion or value judgment supported by millennia of social contract even before Enlightenment era thinkers came up with the concept of the social contract. Yeah, so is slavery. So is monarchism. So is marital rape. > If you're going against one of the basic mechanisms or tools for how society works, you might as well label yourself an anarchist. Which is fine, plenty of mutualist ideologies exist…

> Yeah, so is slavery. So is monarchism. So is marital rape.

So is property. So is language. So is symbolic thought.

> I’ll identify myself as an anarchist for being opposed to violent coercion of resources if you will identify yourself as a criminal for being in support. Sound fair?

Anarchism is an existing ideology with many school of thoughts within it. You seem to be an anarcho-capitalist, to be precise. I, of course proudly admit to being a criminal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEXTt9OmJis&t=1m18s) insofar living in modern society makes criminals of us all, yourself included, even under duress.

> Norms of wearing clothing are not dictated by puritans but arise and are maintained by repeated intentional participation.

As is tax law.

> In fact we invite you to explain how any tax is just.

Because it's cheaper to provide social programs than to deal with rolling peasant revolts.

> Not at all, one may as well say that arguing that slavery is immoral is arguing against all of human society since agriculture.

And indeed so. So are you then an anarcho-primitivist? Or anti-propertarian?

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

#345

Post by Jochim » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

A12-B wrote: post #292

namelessoracle wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a view that I once held and it's easy to agree with reflexively because it appears correct at a surface level.

Poor white people hearing about "white privilege" does alienate them, it implies they've failed even with a kind of starting advantage and can be taken as an invalidation of the hardships they face. Rather than inviting them to be empathetic to the additional issues faced by others it instead prompts them to be defensive of their own difficulties.

When GP frames the issue as one of income inequality and not racial inequality, he's partially correct. On the surface it is an income inequality problem, but for the black community that income inequality is the result of wealth inequality that is itself a product of historic racism.

The same goes for the wage gap which he's dismissive of. The usual argument here is that women simply choose lower paid work. But if we look past that surface level analysis there are still issues with employers not wanting to hire women because they think they might get pregnant, underpaying them because they're less likely to complain, or whether the types of work performed by women should be lower paid in the first place.

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

#346

Post by tastyfreeze » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #240

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 optio…

> What we have instead is a system where voters have to chose between the least worst of two possible options.

Its worse than that. We have a system where people vote for their team color regardless of changes to the team's positions.

2020 seemed to be a year that more people realized that the party they had been faithful to no longer represented them. The number of "why I'm leaving (republican|democrat) party" posts and videos last year was something I had never seen before. I'm hoping this is a trend that continues. Red or Blue, they don't work for you.

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

#347

Post by kgin » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

tengbretson wrote: post #316

standardUser wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...people advocating for more taxes no longer do so with an explicit intention to pay for something..." You should perhaps listen more closely. There are a wide array of programs proposed by people who are advocating for greater taxes on the wealthy. Universal healthcare, free education, a larger social safety net and investments in green energy are a few of the big line items being constantly and loudly discussed.…

> Those programs are intended to improve the majority of people's lives. You can interpret that as "more equal" if you want. If tomorrow everyone was given all of those programs, but the income distribution stayed the same as it were today, would everyone go home satisfied or would they discover new things that needed providing?

It's hard to be sure 100%, but I feel like whatever the outcome, this thought experiment doesn't really yield useful information unless you're hoping for the outcome be "they don't really want healthcare, they're just faking their desire for healthcare because they want to take things away from wealthy people". I'm pretty sure the desire for healthcare isn't just a ruse.

After everyone has healthcare, will there be people who desire a more-flattened society? Possibly. There are a lot of different people in the world with a lot of different ideas. But that's a separate conversation.

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

#348

Post by ItsMonkk » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

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…

This is an inaccurate narrative. The more wealth inequality there is in a nation, the less that increases in the money supply effect the economy. This is why we have no inflation with trillions injected. The rich simply store the money in assets like stocks and houses and it never touches consumption.

The only thing that needed to happen to keep the economy afloat was the Congress passing their bills.

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

#349

Post by lazerpants » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #258

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…

Great points! I disagree with you on this: Wages at the low end rise with the cost of living.

I think this is really an elasticity issue and that we have far too much low skill labor available in the USA (in part because we can import it easily). This means that low end wages have no reason to rise.

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

#350

Post by socialist_coder » Thu, Feb 11, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #260

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 perce…

Most Americans don't have disposable income to invest in the stock market.... there is no amount of investing that will turn their "barely making ends meet" wages into a living wage.