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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%

#441

Post by tootie »

tobmlt wrote: post #150
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…

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 only has a certain set of levers it can pull and boosting wages isn't one of them. During the 2007 recession and now the Fed chairs have begged Congress to take the necessary actions that they can't. Now that Yellen runs Treasury we'll see how things work out.

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

#442

Post by Apocryphon »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #431
Apocryphon wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you then justify taxation? Presumably society comes with concepts of fairness, and that it is more fair to take someone's surplus means to share with those who are running a deficit. This need not be coercive either, as there are always incentives such as tax credits and deductions so forth to spur voluntary giving. I'm sure there are moral philosophers better suited to explain it than me. > And in order to…

> Presumably society comes with concepts of fairness, and that it is more fair to take someone's surplus means to share with those who are running a deficit. So your concept of fairness involves a person who has the power to assign and remove property from other people according to his judgments. > This need not be coercive either, as there are always incentives such as tax credits and deductions so forth to spur vol…

> So your concept of fairness involves a person who has the power to assign and remove property from other people according to his judgments.

Yes, and that person is Uncle Sam, Marianne, the Goddess of Democracy, it is me and you, because it is be formed from societal consensus and the republican process.

> Taxation is coercive, so offering relief from coercion as an incentive is coercion.

Coercion schmoercion.

> You must take responsibility for your own moral judgments.

Certainly, in the same way a fish takes responsibility for the water it lives and breathes in.

> And marriage means that its not possible for a husband to rape his wife.

Your entire stance is that marriage is unjust because it can be abused. While I'm arguing that abusive marriages do not necessarily form the majority, nor does it invalidate the concept.

> Its a lossy form of optimization and the labels have connotations that may not be justified.

I'm no audiophile.

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

#443

Post by ip26 »

fat_pikachu wrote: post #328
NittLion78 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found this graph enlightening, but strictly on its face: https://fee.org/media/17509/prices2-1.png?width=645&height=6... I don't agree with the argument FEE is trying to make: "Consider each product or service shown. College is heavily subsidized, regulated, and exclusionary, and the costs are soaring. The textbook industry is hobbled by extreme copyright regulation, and can depend on captive buyers. Childca…

The things that have seen large price increases are things that aren't scalable i.e. they still require the same amount of human input labor to produce Childcare is constrained by the fact that each childcare worker by law (for better or worse) can only look after so many children at once. This ratio varies by state but it's usually around 4 children per childcare worker. The result is that it has to be expensive bec…

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

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

#444

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%

#445

Post by Weebs »

DominikPeters wrote: post #419
Weebs wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% is a colloquial way of saying "those who own capital for a living, instead of working for a living". The high income of athletes and highly trained professionals has little to do with our situation. However, most capital and expenditure is controlled by a small group of people that have asymmetric power in employment agreements and political process, and that is concerning

The working paper that the article is about does not mean what you say 1% means.

I'm having trouble parsing what you wrote, but I assume you mean that the paper specifically looked at top 1% as defined by earnings or net worth?

My point is that while we frequently use the 1% as a reference for discussions on inequality, the driving force of wealth accumulation isn't that some people make 350k+, and people understandably get caught up in those semantics.

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

#446

Post by webmaven »

tylerhou wrote: post #283
Seanambers wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some nice graphs to go along; https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

A bunch of these graphs are misleading, especially the ones from the EPI. /r/badecon can explain better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/produc... TL;DR: 1. The pay line is for the bottom ~80% of workers, while the productivity line is for all workers. If you graph all workers wages vs all workers productivity, then the gap shrinks quite a bit. (Of course, maybe we should redistribute…

> Average hourly wages doesn't take into account workers' increase in benefits.

There is a pretty good reason for that. Most of the increase in benefits has been in the form of increased healthcare costs, which only somewhat reflect increased value, as much of that value is unrealized due to high deductibles incentivizing people to not use medical services if they can avoid doing so (which preserves an odd form of household rainy day fund dedicated to medical catastrophes).

Meanwhile, the segment of workers that are (precariously, so with litle to no leverage even in aggregate) holding one or more part-time jobs instead of a full time job with benefits has grown as well.

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

#447

Post by syops »

exabrial wrote: post #353
syops wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It came at such a great cost in fact. The vast majority of your taxes are simply wasted. If the US Government were on Charity Navigator they would have a 0-star rating. It'a absurd to defend such a position, especially one rooted in a traditional of violence via arguments that were used to justify the enslavement of entire races.

We aren’t talking about whether the tax rate should be lower or better spent. We are talking about whether or not they ought to exist at all. Bringing in, now, the fact that some are wasted is not relevant to the discussion. The arguments for taxation have nothing to do with the arguments for slavery. This is a false equivalence.

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

#448

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Apocryphon wrote: post #392
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So is property. So is language. So is symbolic thought. Language and symbolic thought are not opinions or value judgments. > 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. I’m not convinced that it is meaningful to make that assertion. But this is fine, I’m an ana…

> Language and symbolic thought are not opinions or value judgments. They are according to John Zerzan. > But this is fine, I’m an anarchist because I oppose coercion and you’re a criminal for supporting it. Anarchism, fwiw, is not meant to be a pejorative, but a reference to an actual ideological framework, albeit a radical one. One that has both left and right variants, including the aforementioned ancaps. > And so…

>> Language and symbolic thought are not opinions or value judgments.

> They are according to John Zerzan.

Thanks for this.

>> If agriculture was the original sin of History, the Fall was our descent into Symbolic forms which created a psychological removal best expressed by the use of artillery. With the epoch of History proper, beginning with the Neolithic, internal abstractions are projected outwards onto a terra nullius, a void now dedicated to the manufacture of first commodities, the domestication of animals and conflict management, in terror of the silences of a world made ancient by representation and signs. The great farming apparatus of this era mirrored institutionalized ritual and the codes of orthodox magic, which are the ancestors of surveillance technology and remote control. Division of labor lead to the great land enclosures and the dawn of the money form, nascent surplus-value with its classes of guardians, warriors, magistrates, clerics. Greek books were read in boustrophedon, which means ‘after the action of an oxen plowing a field’, each line progressing and then reversing back in a bi-directional motion, equating the patterns of informational technology with the golden gizmo of sedentary humanity. The subsequent Bronze Age saw pottery, the production of rich varieties of armaments, the complexities of credit and written script, and the formation of the great elites – and naturally, slavery. Early statecraft was far more ‘modern’ than is commonly acknowledged: banking, proto-welfare, heated toilet seats, the wide application of credit and debt enslavement (we have conveniently lost the custom of the Jubilee write-down), micro-breweries, were all part of the ancient world.

http://www.johnzerzan.net/

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

#449

Post by PartiallyTyped »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #3

Ah yes, the famous cabal of 1 percenters sitting around and committing grand larceny as they raid the bank accounts of poor people. At least that's what this headline would have you believe. The reality is much more boring. Thanks to "math," they've determined that if the ratio of incomes from 1945-1974 held steady , the bottom 90% would have "more" than they do now. Of course the bottom 90% itself is a fantasy and y…

Let's get something out of the way, it's not the 1 percenters that make things for us, it's the engineers, the programmers, the developers, the physicists, the biologists, the chemists, the grad students and every other poor soul grinding for progress on a computer screen in exchange for basic decency.

Why is it that nearly every company that puts first the shareholders ends up pooping the bed? Because the shareholders don't know jack except what the other people in the 1% want.

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

#450

Post by freeone3000 »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #356
NortySpock wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, we need to see loan-forgiveness for businesses then? Trying to figure out how you unwind it slowly when apparently "slowing raising rates" still destroys many businesses with a lot of debt...

The issue with loan forgiveness is that it is a massive wealth transfer from creditors to debtors. People who made bad bets by getting deeply in debt are rewarded, while people who saved and loaned money get shafted. That unbalances the economy and misallocates resources. Which could do even more damage. There isn't really a clean way out. If businesses started preparing & managed their money better while paying off…

Why would you prepare and manage your money better when you can always just get another loan at a great rate? It makes no sense to save when borrowing is more profitable.
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