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20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

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Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#401
post #354
post #352

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No, you are being fallacious. There are many thousand ways of "giving people money". Supply-side economics prescribes exactly one way of "giving people money", that's by lowering taxes. You cannot claim that because supply-side economics supports one way of "giving" people money that every way of giving people money is supply-side economics. You see that, right?

Grandparent said “giving people money is demand side economics”.

Fair enough.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#402

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Absolutely. Piketty showed that wealth inequality peaked right before WWI and was very low in the 60/70s. The amount of wealth between these two periods does not even compare.

We have to thank socialism and communism for reducing wealth i equality in western Europe and in the US. But no, make no mistake, NOT because they are good , but because they're so disastrously bad , as was demonstrated by the USSR, that western elites did a lot to improve the working conditions of their workers, so they would put aside the comminust manifesto and would start caring about their nice car and a cosy ho…

Worker rights in the USA had been a big issue before WWI and the Russian Revolution.

The USSR was bad because they were neither socialist or communist but an oligarchy bent on maintaining power at all cost -- just like China is today. The people at the top are the aristocrats in revolutionary France.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#403

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Not sure about politicians, but it is still widely used by anti-tax republicans. Even if they don't explicitly refer to it as "trickle-down", they use its supposed implications as an argument.

Where do you draw the distinction between "Trickle down" and "investment creates wealth and opportunity"?

When you try to argue that it can replace taxes. Sure, Bezos did create jobs. His money did "trickle-down" by creating more and more jobs, that much is undeniable. But he is not paying even a small percentage of what he should be paying in taxes.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#404

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Didn't Norway just bought into the stock market via their pension fund? That is literally the opposite of investing it themselves. They take the largest part of the money and put it on the market, believing that the private companies can grow those money better than they can. And they were right...

"Didn't Norway just bought into the stock market via their pension fund? That is literally the opposite of investing it themselves." A pension fund is payment to a group of people over a period of time. Traditional investment from a government into a country comes in the form of building infrastructure and military. Dollars spent on infrastructure and the military will not pay yearly cash dividends. A factory can tak…

Doing a quick lookup over the budget of Norway, it seems like they invest directly about 4 billion USD each year (this is for year 2007, but it can't be be wildly different today). Compare that to the government letting the pension fund invest 1400 billions on the open market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

I would say even the government of Norway recognized that the free economy will do better with the money that they can (and how right they were!)

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#405
post #392

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Moving assets is labor. Just like making computers copy data over the Internet is labor.

Labor is what makes a wage. Moving assets is called investing. With labor the pay is tied to the number of hours worked.

The Interweb's dictionaries disagree with you. Wages are not mentioned in any definition of labor. It is simply synonymous with work, particularily the physically exhausting kind, which sitting in front of a computer shuffling numbers all day long arguably is.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#406

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There’s a lot of folks living an upper-middle class lifestyle who need to accumulate a handful of millions to support that lifestyle in retirement. (Raise capital gains taxes and they might need two handfuls to sustain their lifestyle in retirement.)

The combination of lower birth rates, not having a socialized retirement system and not having any significant estate tax seems tailor-made to build up an aristocracy over just a few generations. 1. Because birth rates are lower, being directly supported by one's children/grandchildren is no longer feasible. 2. No socialized retirement system. As a result, each individual must accumulate a small fortune in order to r…

IMO, you’ll never get a social retirement system funded to pay for a median household replacement income in retirement. The average social security payout for recipients is around $1500/mo. The max is around $3100/mo. Median household income in my state is ~$6800/mo. You would need to double social security to pay every 2 average recipient household 88% of the median income. You would need to quadruple it to pay a single recipient 88% of median.

Plus, not everyone wants to work to 67 (full retirement age for SS for most workers today). Then, not everyone wants to drop their spending down to that of a median income household.

Combine those factors and social retirement systems aren’t going to be the solution to stop people from saving and investing privately to supplement.

I can’t see social retirement ever being funded to the level of a middle-class retirement; I think it’s a useful safety net to ensure people who worked their whole lives but didn’t save privately don’t starve, but dramatically expanding it is mathematically difficult to fund.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#407
post #303

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>how does that cause it to appreciate? Seems like you missed a step. The thing that appreciates is the financial product that this money buys. >I'm curious as to what you even mean by "money goes offshore" Buying stock in an IPO in a multinational corporation based in Taxhavenlandia would be one example.

A financial product is ultimately a claim on real assets. That is their essence. Buying stock in an IPO in a multinational corporation based in Taxhavenlandia is capitalizing a presumably enterprise which will generate a positive return. I can understand that you might be concerned about capital leaving the country rather than being invested domestically, but I'm not sure you've been advocating capital controls.

>A financial product is ultimately a claim on real assets. That is their essence.

Laughs in pump and dump schemes

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#408

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>how does that cause it to appreciate? Seems like you missed a step. The thing that appreciates is the financial product that this money buys. >I'm curious as to what you even mean by "money goes offshore" Buying stock in an IPO in a multinational corporation based in Taxhavenlandia would be one example.

So you're just talking about buying stock/assets then? I don't know what other financial products you mean. >Buying stock in an IPO in a multinational corporation based in Taxhavenlandia would be one example. Even if this were the case, the only bad part would be evading taxes. To generate a profit, it still has to be an investment in a profitable venture, which increases overall economic productivity. (I also don't…

>Even if this were the case, the only bad part would be evading taxes.

Ah, the little things.

>To generate a profit, it still has to be an investment in a profitable venture

Like Twitter? Which got a tax break recently, BTW

>I also don't think there's any indication that this happens on a large scale

Did you try looking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#409
post #288

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Whats wrong is that this money was generated domestically, and people who generated it are screwed by lack of healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure, transportation, etc.

Can you name the country, please?

I'll name quite a few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billionaire wont be "impoverished" by that. I'll play my tiniest violin to their loss.

The issue is that there’s an amazing amount of overlap between the people who pay and the people who receive, making the exercise quite pointless. Even if you took all the wealth of billionaires and found a way of liquidating that at that price (you can’t, but let’s assume you can), then divide by all US citizens , you’ll see a pretty insignificant number.

>Even if you took all the wealth of billionaires and found a way of liquidating that at that price (you can’t, but let’s assume you can), then divide by all US citizens , you’ll see a pretty insignificant number.

The hell you are talking about?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i...

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