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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%

#451

Post by hnick »

_qwfv wrote: post #108
jellicle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This proposition, discussed and shown by Piketty in his 2013 book, was not at all obvious before that and even today many people would argue (wrongly) that it isn't true. So if it's a natural law of wealth, it is a very recently proven one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

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…

> why turn your money into commodities and back into money if you weren't going to get more money as a result

I'm guessing this is oversimplified, but I haven't read the book. Otherwise, the simple fact is no trade in business is guaranteed, there will be plenty of such exchanges that lose money due to speculation. At the very least your buyer could pull out or go bankrupt before finalising the sale resulting in a fire sale and a loss.

Of course, by sheer probability if not talent, some people will win more than they lose and get ahead. The real danger is the plays that an excessive force of money can enable, like predatory and monopolistic practices in buying up a market (or legislators), or driving a competitor out of business. That's where money really makes money.

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

#452

Post by throwaway2245 »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #266

The top 1% changes a lot. Most people don't stay in the top 1% for many years in a row. Many people below the 90th percentile benefit from the growth of the top levels when they have their brief time in the top 1%.

This is simply wrong.

Most people are unlikely to reach top 1% for income in any one year of their lifetime.

The top 1% for wealth is even a much higher bar to reach: you need to hold over $10 million. People ain't moving in and out of that bracket very often.

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

#454

Post by pmiller2 »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #436
pmiller2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potato, potatoe. Who do you think controls "the Fed?" Cui bono ? Your comment would also imply that before there was such a thing as a Federal Reserve, income and wealth inequality didn't exist. This is false.

The Romans literally debased their currency into lead as they hit hyper inflation-- then instituted price controls which led to a booming black market. The particular tricks have changed a little over time, it is just more efficient with digital money now. Ruling classes had the basics figured out millenia ago. And it never works.

You are correct, except they didn't debase it into lead. Late Roman coinage was largely copper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency#Debasement

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

#455

Post by Weebs »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #320
brandonr49 wrote: post #21

The problem of inequality in general needs to be framed as one of power asymmetry. There are a handful of people that have managed to garner, through their wealth, similar power to states with millions of people. The solutions to this involve either making money less able to purchase power, or taking some of this money away. I suspect the latter is more likely to happen but I'll happily support either method.

This is exactly how I take it. We thought it was Capitalism vs Communism, but what we learned is you can have Centralized Communism(Cold War Russia) and Decentralized Capitalism(Cold War USA) but it is just as much possible to have Decentralized Communism(Any examples?) and Centralized Capitalism(Current USA). As it turns out it's the Decentralized that's the important part. You need many people making decisions for…

> Decentralized Communism

There's not much to point to other than short lived revolutions and communes, or ongoing struggles, such as:

* Aaragon/Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War

* Ukrainian Free Territories in the Russian Civil War

* The ongoing rebellion in the Chiapas, Mexico

* Rojava

* Paris Commune

* Shinmin Prefecture in Korea

And likely some others I am struggling to remember. All of these communities were/are attacked by competing states with enough force that it's hard to get a sense of what decentralized communism would look like outside of an active conflict scenario.

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

#456

Post by hntrader »

Retric wrote: post #388
tylerhou wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rich simply store the money in assets like stocks and houses and it never touches consumption. But these do affect consumption. 1) Stonks going up means that companies have more capital (through stock issuances and equity raises). Companies use this capital to buy things and pay workers, so the dollars end up recirculating through the economy just like if a regular person spent it. 2) Buying houses is consumpti…

1) No. Stock prices only directly impact companies when they actually sell stock. So, propping up the market has zero long term impact as the value of future cash flows is unchanged. It’s simple a handoff of money from the government to people selling stocks over a short period. It’s popular because it keeps highly leveraged investments viable.

It has a huge long term impact. There's been hundreds of near dead companies that have had their stock prices pumped and have raised loads of money through an at the market offering or secondary offering which would've been impossible a year ago.

AMC is the most public example, where they dumped their at the market offering into retail investors. But there's hundreds of other examples.

Big caps: CCL, TSLA both with multi billion at the markets with little dilution thanks to stock price being propped.

Small caps: Literally hundreds of names, check DilutionTracker on Twitter.

The parent post is correct in that an increase in the stock price in the secondary market has a material impact on the prospects of the company, especially if it's struggling. Raising money isn't the only mechanism, employee retention is another. In this sense, Soros' positive reflexivity has some merit.

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

#457

Post by User23 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #254
throwaway123x2 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In real reality, Danish banks are charging 0% interest for mortgages and making their money off of closing fees[1]. Also the natural rate of interest is zero[2].

Just because you've been raised from birth to believe usury is necessary for the payment system (not the economy!) to function doesn't make it so.

[1] https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/danish-bank-introduces-new...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16414199 http://www.moslereconomics.com/wp-content/graphs/2009/07/nat... (link is broken in the HN post)

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

#458

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Apocryphon wrote: post #442
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Good, then you’ll have no objection to me helping myself to your surplus. For “the good of society.”

> Coercion schmoercion.

Its interesting how people are often quite concerned with someone else’s perceived lack of things, but references to someone being a victim of violence are dismissed.

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

The fish didn’t try to justify his aquatic lifestyle by reference to moral philosophers.

> 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.

My entire stance is that a moral wrong doesn’t become acceptable on the basis of someone asserting it as an integral component of some other thing. Theft/robbery doesn’t become ok because you believe it to be necessary or good for society, and rape doesn’ become ok because the victim is married to the perpetrator.

> I'm no audiophile.

Just deal with the arguments as presented rather than trying to link them back to some ideology as a convenient means of dismissal.

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

#459

Post by freeone3000 »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #274
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…

> ...increase the tax on capital gains... How about proportionally? Stock trading apps now make it easy enough for Joe 6 pack to invest in the market at any income level. I could see a x% higher tax if you're buying 10,000 shares of Amazon, but it seems to me like putting < $1,000 in the market a month should be somewhat painless.

Capital gains is still a percentage of earnings and currently caps out at 26%. Hold your stock for a year, and it drops to 13%. Increasing cap gains could be as simple as taxing it the same as regular income.

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

#460

Post by hnick »

Weebs wrote: post #426
machello13 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and many other things that 1 percenters have made for us? Jesus christ, this has to be satire. The people "making" these things are not in the 1 percent. We don't have to look up to the elites in gratitude because they deigned to give us their magical gifts.

A professional trains nearly 20 years under the guidance of other dedicated professionals to develop the potential to advance technology. The can't get the capital on their own to create technology, and instead sell their labor to ownership class They go on to develop revolutionary technology. The owner class claims the IP, massively profits, and maybe gives the professional a bonus if they're lucky before being told…

You reminded me of The Wire's piece on McNuggets :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvq3Pf3j61c

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