The 99 percent • Hacker News Board

Re: The 99 percent

#91

Post by tsunamifury » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 6:20 AM UTC

bravura wrote: post #36

noahc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone with more experience and knowledge explain the effects of #3. I've read that HFT is actually a good thing because it basically acts as a market maker. This is just a back of the napkin opinion, but it seems that #3 would reduce liquidity in the markets. We know that markets aren't perfect or else Buffet and other value investors couldn't survive. Does HFT make markets more or less perfect at pricing? Does…

Why does a market need millisecond-resolution liquidity?

To allow for volume.

Re: The 99 percent

#92

Post by artsrc » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 6:39 AM UTC

harryh wrote: post #21

mynameishere wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

end loopholes that allow companies like exxon to pay no federal taxes Corporate taxes are idiotic. They should tax them at zero and replace the lost revenue with a new upper-margin tax. Reasons: 1. Corporate taxes are effectively a sales tax. 2. Corporations, unlike individuals, can hire armies of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to get around the taxes. 3. Those same professionals are more often deployed by large…

Dear god yes. The army of people out there that seem to think that more corporate taxes will somehow mean that people won't have to pay taxes amazes me. Like Romney said “Corporations are people, my friend."

Corporations are not 100% owned by American people. And they are certainly not mostly owned by the bottom quintile.

Re: The 99 percent

#93

Post by wazoox » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 7:17 AM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #68

colanderman wrote: post #67

Here's why the rich get richer: because the 99% produce too damn much. Consumerism worked for a while to keep things even, but we've reached a plateau. People can only buy so much crap. But we're more productive now than ever [1]. So where does all that extra money go? The people at the top take it. CEOs don't give their employees raises, and pocket the rest. Bankers play games with your excess money you've dumped in…

Empirical evidence suggest a reduction of work hours will NOT increase employment. See when France went from 39 hour workweeks to 35. http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/9/973/papers/estevao_sa.pdf As a founder, this seems intuitively obvious. I have problems finding the correct people. There simply aren't enough skilled people who can do work (that is where the overhead of managing them + their cost I also completely dis…

> Empirical evidence suggest a reduction of work hours will NOT increase employment. See when France went from 39 hour workweeks to 35.

There is much to be said about the legal work week in France. It has been badly misrepresented again and again.

In most industries, the reduction of work hours was more than compensated by "annualization". That means that you must do 35 hours a week, not every week but as a mean value along the whole year. What's the result? Where people used to work 39 hours all year long, even when the activity was in a low cycle, an work paid overtime when activity was high, they now work 30 hours a week at times and up to 48 hours a week at other times, always paid the standard wage all year long.

Furthermore, even the definition of "work hour" changed. For instance, in some industries people are now allowed to take a piss only 2 times a day instead of 4. In "sales" (actually, supermarket cashiers mostly), people are now "working" only while they're actually on duty (they used to be "working" while present on the premises); so they may be given "free time" for up to two or three hours during the day (there aren't many customers in shops for hours during the week), though they often have no other choice but wait at the workplace or the immediate vicinity because they haven't got time or resource to do anything else.

So actually for a large part of the economy, going from 39 to 35 hours was quite a big improvement of productivity. What is usually represented abroad as a scandalous, quasi communist change was actually a boon for the "great capital". Further "adjustments" made to the system in the past 12 years by right wing governments have achieved the picture; though they still love to bad mouth "the 35 hours" (lazy leftists! profiteering socialists!), getting rid of the many "progresses" induced by this system is absolutely out of the question.

This is, by the way, perfectly in line with the habit to ditch French (now dead) retirement law: "Lazy French retire at 60! Courageous Germans retire at 67!", while the truth is that French retire at 62.5 years, and German 62.7...

> But 77% of the US economy is services.

Many of these services don't always make sense economically. Is it for the best that so many Americans eat out almost every day? Sure, that creates demand for a lot of low wage jobs, then what?

This sort of short-sighted insistence on GDP growth (more business! more jobs!) is toxic in the long term. Some of the basics tenets seriously need to be revised.

Re: The 99 percent

#94

Post by Jach » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 7:25 AM UTC

brc wrote: post #88

alastairpat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're exactly right - by killing productivity and massively increasing employment without reason, you're going to have massive increases in exogenous consumption. Fantastic, except where are all of these consumed goods going to come from? You'll see huge inflationary pressure which means tighter monetary policy; higher interest rates and reduced borrowing and lending. Yes, there will be economic growth and increased…

Unfortunately history tells us that the person who promises something for nothing to the people who want more will always get traction. It is very difficult for people to accept the reality of the world and many people spend hours creating fantasies about how, if they were in control, they could 'fix things' which is just code for controlling everyone else and arranging things the way they like it, and phooey to what…

I mostly agree with your point, but I want to ask a question: if you had the power to kill about 50,000 people of your choice, at the times you wanted, without any repercussions on you personally, do you think you could use this power to effect a much better world than we currently live in? Major choices that have huge consequences are increasingly being made by individuals, major choices that affect a lot of people for the better or worse. Remember Petrov Day.

Re: The 99 percent

#95

Post by Jach » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 7:38 AM UTC

njharman wrote: post #39

majika wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good case. However, I think it's important to acknowledge that corporate taxes are useful for providing an incentive for corporations to do something a certain way. That is, they can avoid the tax if they change their behaviour. (see: equal-opportunities employment, regional commercialisation incentives, emissions control, recycling, etc)

Greed is the most powerful force in the world. If you tie regulation to money, it will be exploited and corrupted. It also shifts accountability from the individual violators to "the corporation". Instead enforce criminal laws against people. Doing the "right thing" doesn't deserve reward. Doing the "wrong thing" does deserve punishment.

"There is no heaven, but if you do bad you are going to hell."

Re: The 99 percent

#96

Post by othermaciej » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 7:45 AM UTC

guimarin wrote: post #2

Five points for the OWS guys. 1. Transparency. We need to see where every dollar of the US federal gov't is spent. It needs to be on the internet, and it needs to be easily accessable. An exception can be made for classified spending in specific, but not so categorically (IE we spend X on classified stuff). Additionally, just like there is a Surgeon's General Warning on cigarette packages, there needs to be a link on…

A financial transaction tax is not that great in the first place, but making it $.10 per share instead of a percentage of the price paid is a bad idea. Let's do some math:

  Activision-Blizzard Share Price (ATVI): 13.50
  Tax on a $100,000 trade: ~$7407.40
  Google share price (GOOG): $586.31
  Tax on a $100,000 trade: ~$170.55
  Berkshire Hathaway Class A share price (BRK.A): 117,100.000
  Tax on a $100,000 trade: ~$.10

Creating this massive disparity in the tax payable based on share price would cause massive market distortions in the short term. It would also lead institutional investors to pressure corporations to do massive reverse splits to drive up the per-unit share price to minimize the tax per transaction, which would lock small-scale retail investors out of the market in addition to being a huge waste of resources.

This idea is clearly half-baked. I think a number of your other ideas are as well. You need to think through what actual benefits you expect from your proposed changes, as well as what the unintended consequences would be. Your post does not explain this very well at all.

To cite another example: forcing a split between retail and investment banking is a common talking point from people who want "more regulation". But most folks advocating for this do not have a coherent explanation for why this would actually be helpful. It's often claimed that deregulation contributed to the crisis, therefore we need to bring back this regulation. But the institutions that precipitated the crisis were all pure investment banks, so this regulation would have done absolutely nothing to prevent the financial crisis. This post does a great job of explaining why this particular policy proposal is poorly thought out, as well as covering the general issue of advocating policies without actually understanding what they would do or why they might be worthwhile: " rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/if-you-f....

Re: The 99 percent

#97

Post by tkahn6 » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 7:46 AM UTC

Jach wrote: post #94

brc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately history tells us that the person who promises something for nothing to the people who want more will always get traction. It is very difficult for people to accept the reality of the world and many people spend hours creating fantasies about how, if they were in control, they could 'fix things' which is just code for controlling everyone else and arranging things the way they like it, and phooey to what…

I mostly agree with your point, but I want to ask a question: if you had the power to kill about 50,000 people of your choice, at the times you wanted, without any repercussions on you personally, do you think you could use this power to effect a much better world than we currently live in? Major choices that have huge consequences are increasingly being made by individuals, major choices that affect a lot of people…

Sounds like the plot of Death Note.

Re: The 99 percent

#98

Post by SkyMarshal » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 8:10 AM UTC

majika wrote: post #26

mynameishere wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

end loopholes that allow companies like exxon to pay no federal taxes Corporate taxes are idiotic. They should tax them at zero and replace the lost revenue with a new upper-margin tax. Reasons: 1. Corporate taxes are effectively a sales tax. 2. Corporations, unlike individuals, can hire armies of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to get around the taxes. 3. Those same professionals are more often deployed by large…

You make a good case. However, I think it's important to acknowledge that corporate taxes are useful for providing an incentive for corporations to do something a certain way. That is, they can avoid the tax if they change their behaviour. (see: equal-opportunities employment, regional commercialisation incentives, emissions control, recycling, etc)

Corporate taxes also incentivize corporations to outsource or relocate operations overseas, and disincentivize them from repatriating profits made overseas.

I would be willing to consider giving up the ability of the government to micromanage corporate behavior in return for recapitalization of the US manufacturing base and repatriation of profits.

Re: The 99 percent

#99

Post by SkyMarshal » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 8:26 AM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #67

Here's why the rich get richer: because the 99% produce too damn much. Consumerism worked for a while to keep things even, but we've reached a plateau. People can only buy so much crap. But we're more productive now than ever [1]. So where does all that extra money go? The people at the top take it. CEOs don't give their employees raises, and pocket the rest. Bankers play games with your excess money you've dumped in…

It's not that complicated. The rich get richer because they own. Specifically, they own two things - the means of production of wealth, and the debt of the 99%.

Outsourcing wealth production to low-wage countries increased profit margins and enabled the meteoric rise in CEO and executive compensation relative to labor, whose wages were stagnant at best, or who were being outsourced and laid off at worst (eg, labor wasn't benefitting from the increased profit margins, only executives and shareholders/owners).

Cheap money and debt bubbles enabled labor to continue consuming on credit beyond their means, sustaining the increased profit margins longer than should have been possible, while simultaneously paying interest on their consumption.

Hence, the 99% (or whatever the % is) has been transferring wealth to the 1% from both ends. The solution is, stay out of debt as much as possible, and find ways to incentivize repatriation of production operations to the US (ostensibly by reducing the cost-basis of manufacturing here). Certain legal proposals, like financial transaction taxes and the like, may help as well.

Re: The 99 percent

#100

Post by jholman » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 8:26 AM UTC

othermaciej wrote: post #96

guimarin wrote: post #2

Five points for the OWS guys. 1. Transparency. We need to see where every dollar of the US federal gov't is spent. It needs to be on the internet, and it needs to be easily accessable. An exception can be made for classified spending in specific, but not so categorically (IE we spend X on classified stuff). Additionally, just like there is a Surgeon's General Warning on cigarette packages, there needs to be a link on…

A financial transaction tax is not that great in the first place, but making it $.10 per share instead of a percentage of the price paid is a bad idea. Let's do some math: Activision-Blizzard Share Price (ATVI): 13.50 Tax on a $100,000 trade: ~$7407.40 Google share price (GOOG): $586.31 Tax on a $100,000 trade: ~$170.55 Berkshire Hathaway Class A share price (BRK.A): 117,100.000 Tax on a $100,000 trade: ~$.10 Creatin…

Excellent link.

Regarding splitting retail/investment banking, the following is a completely ignorant question, phrased in the form of a rambling incoherent hypothesis. I don't understand why it was a good idea for the U.S. to bail out the banks, but I can see how retail banking is essential to the month-to-month life of Main St, and so I can see why the government might be willing to spend taxpayer money to save it (to save taxpayers). It seems like maybe if retail banks weren't all playing the investment-bank game, maybe the suicidal investment banks could have been allowed to fail?