Why do we get so upset at wall street but not at Hollywood?
I'm not saying you shouldn't be questioning why there is such a big wealth gap, I'm asking why celebrities get a pass.
Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
201–210 of 248 posts
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alturnative is letting things fail. It causes a lot of pain in the short term with people losing their jobs and general economic fallout. This causes a lot of suffering. But on the other hand, the rich will lose more, and during the rebuilding a different set of people will gain the upper hand and end up on top. It's hard to get the political will to actually allow what needs to happen to fix wealth inequality.
Inflation is wealth transfer from those who hold government fiat (the poor and the middle class) to those who hold assets (the rich). Deflation is the same thing in reverse. Makes it pretty clear why the government is fighting deflation so hard.
> Inflation is wealth transfer from those who hold government fiat (the poor and the middle class) to those who hold assets (the rich).
Nope, it's a wealth transfer from those who refuse to invest to those who invest and if you fail to invest you deserve it because you are not creating jobs and therefore make the lives of the poor and middle class worse.
>Deflation is the same thing in reverse.
No, since you are not investing your savings you are not creating jobs, you are directly responsible for causing unemployment. Please tell me, if you put cash under your mattress how is that cash supposed to employ anyone?
>Makes it pretty clear why the government is fighting deflation so hard.
The government is fighting deflation because it doesn't want unemployment because it doesn't want the economy to shrink because that requires the population to shrink. Do we just "cull" those useless people by killing them or sending them to Australia?
Now, lets talk about the real damaging wealth transfer. Low interest rates are a wealth transfer from people who invest into safe investments (bank accounts) to people who invest into risky investments (stocks and housing).
Interest rates are a function of inflation. Low inflation means low interest rates and therefore a higher wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#203Why do we get so upset at wall street but not at Hollywood? I'm not saying you shouldn't be questioning why there is such a big wealth gap, I'm asking why celebrities get a pass.
Big movie studio's and producers generally don't get a bail-out when they fail, but just go bankrupt.
Plus, most of Wall street gets their money from bonuses, which seems tied to taking risk with or against 'our' money.
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#204Why do we get so upset at wall street but not at Hollywood? I'm not saying you shouldn't be questioning why there is such a big wealth gap, I'm asking why celebrities get a pass.
Big movie studio's and producers generally don't get a bail-out when they fail, but just go bankrupt. Plus, most of Wall street gets their money from bonuses, which seems tied to taking risk with or against 'our' money.
Yeah true, I think the bail outs are the most absurd government actions. Corruption at a grand scale.
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#205Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#206A society with no technology has hardly any wealth gap. People who can leverage multiple technologies can multiply their efforts. Mass communication, mass distribution and automation of all sorts. But Wall Street bonuses are subsidized by the fact the government socializes their biggest failures. Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again.
While what you point out is definitely true, a very important cause of the wealth gap in todays world that barely anyone talks about is the accepted engagement in lending money with interest (i.e. usury). It's heavily built in to the society today. It's not for no reason that this practices (along with derivative practices) is prohibited in the major 3 religions.
A lot of companies (and the jobs those companies created) were built on top of that usury and the workers who lent out their money were even compensated for that!
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s easy to make a profit when everyone is strapped for cash and you have an infinite supply
There's no such thing as infinite money. Cash just symbolizes value its not actually "value", and you can't make infinite value by just printing infinite cash.
The banks don't have to manufacture the product. They just sell it. The easy money is the profit margin on the lending activity because the profit margin is usually constant, regardless of the state of the economy.
I'm not saying banks are evil but they do have it easy because they are core infrastructure that people don't want to live without.
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What kind of technology enabled wealth gap in feudal society? It seems it was more about religion being used to subdue people. I'd argue the advent of centralized currencies did more harm than any and all standing armies combined. When you think about what a parasitical entity does in biology, you realize that simply killing a host is not evolutionary advantageous--their are 3 types of parasitism, not to be confuse…
> Simply by demanding that peasants/serfs pay taxes and conduct all commerce in the coin Just tell the peasants you're the hand of the god, and the god wants you to give their cows and grain to you. I think that worked pretty well for a looong time.
> Just tell the peasants you're the hand of the god, and the god wants you to give their cows and grain to you. I think that worked pretty well for a looong time.
It did, until it didn't and you can read all about peasant revolts in a book all you want, which led to things like the Magna Carta.
But I lived in Italy and worked on a farm that sprawled for many KMs in what was a feudal lord's manor and it was baffling just how much absurd complexity from a supply chain and logistics view tending that much land entailed since it was so fractured and disrupted by hills and valleys, and the amount of bureaucratic BS that had to be created and subsequently put up with in order to survive as a serf: it wasn't just cows, wine or grain that had to be rendered, but actual members of your family were taken into the homes as slaves, physical or sexual.
I did the mistake of watching Passolini's Salo when I was there, and the level of somberness still stays with me to this day [0] when I think what horrid forms of cruelty Humans are capable of when they amass so much power and wealth. And this was just a modern take on things, just pondering the things they did openly during the dark ages and even in the height of Rome can send me to some dark places.
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taxpayers not only recovered everything from the 2008 bailouts, they actually earned a $15.3 billion profit. How is that “socializing their biggest failures”? From [1]: Early estimates for the total cost of the bailout to the government were as much as $700 billion, however TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6…
You left off an extremely relevant detail from your quote: "... annualized rate of return of 0.6% and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation"
If interest payments were the only thing getting bailed out people wouldn't be angry over it.
Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isnt that many jobs in a grocery store that need many people. Stocking shelves and cleaning mostly. Once those are automated there will be a lot less jobs.
If the jobs were that easy to automate they would have been automated at the current rate. Min wage going from $18-20 doesn't suddenly make that all-in-one supermarket bot doable. Automating real world jobs is hard and often not viable especially for dynamic work. Even the no-brainier automation like self-checkouts are actually not saving much apparently. (could be false, heard it on a anti-min wage channel).
Each year the cost of the technology goes down. At some point it'll be cheaper than labor and that point will just come earlier if wages are higher.