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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%

#511

Post by beervirus »

User23 wrote: post #185
Pfhreak wrote: post #23

This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest, leverage it into getting loans to build more capital, etc. If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more…

> This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest It is a natural law of usury, which is what you describe. This is why we used to ban usury as unjust.

Yes, poor people would be better off without access to loans.

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

#512

Post by notriddle »

tylerhou wrote: post #383
anchpop wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is risky, because if the fed accidentally injects too much money by buying back too many bonds, they can always un-inject it by selling the bonds back (and banks are compelled to buy). This lets the fed be more aggressive because it knows that if it goes too far and starts seeing more inflation than it intended, it can always walk back its decision. But there's no realistic way to do that after having given $100…

Taxes?

The Fed can't make taxes. Congress makes taxes, but Congress is subject to popular approval, and the population don't like tax hikes.

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

#513

Post by nexthash »

anonymousiam wrote: post #501

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. The whole premise that the rich make money by taking it from poor people is flawed. This premise has been the basis for many political uprisings (e.g. Venezuela) where wealth has been destroyed instead of created.

In Venezuela the rich were never destroyed, I'd argue that Chavez and his supporters rose into a new class of elites. They control the oil company, drug smuggling, etc. I'd argue that wealth as a zero sum game is a part of the premise - there is the whole pie (economy) and then there are slices (who reaps the benefits).

By growing the size of the pie you grow the economy, but then the task becomes dividing the pie reasonably to ensure stability and reduce societal problems. In Venezuela, the economy is shafted for numerous reasons - huge concentration of the whole pie into a small elite does no good for the rest of the country, and was worsened by sanctions punishing these actions.

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

#514

Post by beervirus »

User23 wrote: post #485
virmundi wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be absolutely terrifying. The economy we have now is due to experts tinkering. Allowing the masses, who can't organize their own lives, to attempt to organize the economy will lead to more deaths and misery than the current system. Would you want a democratically elected airplane pilot with no training?

Plenty of people think it's important that airplane pilots be democratically representative[1]. [1] https://www.ksby.com/news/national/new-law-looks-to-attract-...

Plenty of people believe ridiculous things, story at 9.

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

#515

Post by mattmanser »

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…

What a load of tosh.

Textbooks are now distributable by e-books, easily scalable. Yet somehow capitalism has utterly failed to deliver it's supposed benefits.

College tuition is now distributable by remote learning, theoretically massively reducing costs. Again, capitalism has utterly failed to deliver it's supposed benefits.

Housing has massively advanced, with cheaper construction, high rises, etc. but laws have been crafted to ensure that doesn't happen to protect rentiers. No taxes on unoccupied land, restrictions on where you can build, massive consolidation of available land without any desire to actually build anything but expensive condos. Again, capitalism has utterly failed to deliver it's supposed benefits.

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

#516

Post by coolreader18 »

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…

Inequality is bad, actually, and we should try to maintain low levels of it if we're given the chance to.

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

#518

Post by asdffdsa »

pembrook wrote: post #480

> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…

Please read the article. It clearly mentions income as a reason for income inequality and not asset value inflation which is due to the fed policy.

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

#519

Post by natenthe »

asdffdsa wrote: post #518
pembrook wrote: post #480

> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…

Please read the article. It clearly mentions income as a reason for income inequality and not asset value inflation which is due to the fed policy.

The irony...

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

#520

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

pembrook wrote: post #480

> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…

Exactly. Mainstream actually educated economists are right, not people hyperventilating about money printing.

On top of what you said about the effect of printing making valuations high, only temporarily and only on paper, the opposite lack of printing, is actual redistribution towards the rich in a much more real and persistent way.

Insufficiently inflationary money can be used as a way for the rich to withdraw from the private economy when things are getting too turbulent and park their wealth in government paper having greater than market rates of returns (on a risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted basis). If government money didn't exist, these people would have to stay in the turbulence when the economy hits a storm.

In a private economy, it's normal for returns on assets to occasionally turn negative. Wealth is sometimes difficult to keep constantly growing year after year. With low inflation, the rich can divest from private assets at the first sign of trouble, shrink or close businesses, kick employees to the curb and they get to park their wealth in government guaranteed paper. A deflationary government currency is basically a subsidy for causing unemployment and destroying careers, a subsidy that often gets indirectly paid by the poor. Money printer keep going brrr please.

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