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Money and wealth

swombat.com

151–160 of 193 posts

Re: Money and wealth

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ” The People” don't want to own companies, they want enough money to feed their families. Actually, no. They want to feed their families, period. Dumping a lot of money on people's hand to buy food doesn't necessarily solve the issue because spending = inflation.

> spending = inflation. Spending does not equal inflation. Increased money available to the consumers who have non-zero demand for a set of goods can reasonably be expected, under most circumstances, to increase the market clearing unit price for the goods -- but with most reasonable sets of assumptions the relative increase in unit price will be less than the relative increase in available funds to consumers, and re…

> Spending does not equal inflation.

It does when it's a nanny state telling people to spend.

First, taxation is not redistribution of wealth. In practice, it's always a lot heavier on the middle class than on the elite, the later have better means to avoid taxation. Second, this money is never just handed over to the poor. Here in Brazil, for instance, it's used to back credit programs by state-owned banks, and interest rates are high.

If you want to see the result of this politic in practice instead of theory, just fly down here. The poor are buying more and drowning more in debt because wages still don't follow prices, and still have poor access to education and health. Heavy taxation and 7% "official" anual inflation rate (the real one is double that) erodes away the middle-class purchasing power. All that while banks break anual profit records.

Then the president makes an announcement claiming there aren't poor people in Brazil anymore. Mission accomplished right? They successfully moved the population from unskilled poor people to unskilled indebted people. Screw that.

Re: Money and wealth

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It seems noteworthy to point out in the GP in how he expresses class warfare . When this is invoked (here and elsewhere) it's always the poor who are committing "class warfare" against the rich. When in reality, with evidence abound throughout history it is the rich who actually commit class warfare on a continuous basis against everyone else. Even HN is not immune to this propaganda.

Historically this has been true, but nowadays it's not (at least in the US). To quote Paul Krugman on the topic, from way back when he still did economics: "...growth in inequality is not a simple picture. Old-line leftists, if there are any left, would like to make it a single story--the rich becoming richer by exploiting the poor. But that's just not a reasonable picture of America in the 1980s. For one thing, most…

"The poor have not started working."

There’s an implicit notion here that we’re waiting for the poor to start working. Perhaps it's coincidental, but I’d like to call out a possible conflation, because it's something I've seen expressed from time to time on Hacker News, and I think it perpetuates erroneous beliefs about poverty.

Krugman here is talking about the very poor; this is a relative statement, and it is almost a tautology to say that most of them don't work. (Rather, one should be quite scandalized that anyone who works could still be very poor.) Whatever the merit or relevance of his point may be, he’s not trying to characterize the conditions of poverty. He's trying to express the scale of the wealth disparity between rich and poor, and point out that a simple model of rent-seeking cannot account for it.

‘Poverty’ itself is a somewhat relative term, but only somewhat. People recognize hardship when they experience it, and a plateau in the relation between happiness and wealth has been identified. At some point down the sloping portion of that relation, we have to recognize poverty.

I do not think that any scholar has disputed that there are a significant number of Americans who work as much as they can, willingly, and yet live in poverty. One can argue whether most of the impoverished have work, but one cannot dismiss those that do. It is inhumane and does not honour their effort.

Maybe they are stupid people, with bad lives, who make bad decisions. Let’s allow every secret prejudice we have, just so long as we do not ignore that they work and go wanting for things we regard as essential. It is not by choice nor lack of action that they experience hardship. There is no more justice to their income than there is justice in the grades of a bell curve. They cannot work any harder or smarter than they are working already.

Re: Money and wealth

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spending = inflation. Spending does not equal inflation. Increased money available to the consumers who have non-zero demand for a set of goods can reasonably be expected, under most circumstances, to increase the market clearing unit price for the goods -- but with most reasonable sets of assumptions the relative increase in unit price will be less than the relative increase in available funds to consumers, and re…

> Spending does not equal inflation. It does when it's a nanny state telling people to spend. First, taxation is not redistribution of wealth. In practice, it's always a lot heavier on the middle class than on the elite, the later have better means to avoid taxation. Second, this money is never just handed over to the poor. Here in Brazil, for instance, it's used to back credit programs by state-owned banks, and inte…

> It does when it's a nanny state telling people to spend.

This seems to be an article of faith (and one using buzzwords with no objective meaning) for which neither evidence nor argument is offered.

> Second, this money is never just handed over to the poor.

Concrete proposals to do just that (e.g., Unconditional Basic Income) have been made.

> Here in Brazil, for instance, it's used to back credit programs by state-owned banks.

And there might be all kinds of valid critiques of that specific use of tax funds, but it would be fallacious to conclude from the validity of those critiques of that specific use that using tax as part of a policy to redistribute economic returns from the wealthy to the poor is universally improper.

Re: Money and wealth

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It seems noteworthy to point out in the GP in how he expresses class warfare . When this is invoked (here and elsewhere) it's always the poor who are committing "class warfare" against the rich. When in reality, with evidence abound throughout history it is the rich who actually commit class warfare on a continuous basis against everyone else. Even HN is not immune to this propaganda.

Historically this has been true, but nowadays it's not (at least in the US). To quote Paul Krugman on the topic, from way back when he still did economics: "...growth in inequality is not a simple picture. Old-line leftists, if there are any left, would like to make it a single story--the rich becoming richer by exploiting the poor. But that's just not a reasonable picture of America in the 1980s. For one thing, most…

I can't read your link. It's my impression that two-worker households are much more common now among the poor, in which case the poor are working more on the whole, and they're certainly being paid a smaller share of the value of their labour (see the worker productivity vs. income graph).

Re: Money and wealth

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It seems noteworthy to point out in the GP in how he expresses class warfare . When this is invoked (here and elsewhere) it's always the poor who are committing "class warfare" against the rich. When in reality, with evidence abound throughout history it is the rich who actually commit class warfare on a continuous basis against everyone else. Even HN is not immune to this propaganda.

Historically this has been true, but nowadays it's not (at least in the US). To quote Paul Krugman on the topic, from way back when he still did economics: "...growth in inequality is not a simple picture. Old-line leftists, if there are any left, would like to make it a single story--the rich becoming richer by exploiting the poor. But that's just not a reasonable picture of America in the 1980s. For one thing, most…

Krugman failed to notice that back then the exploitation was happening: it was the middle class being transformed into the working poor.

Re: Money and wealth

#156
post #52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman. Safety net programs aren't about "wealth redistribution", they're income redistribution. Further, there are social factors and goals beyond aggregate economic growth to consider.

Strawman; I was explicitly talking about wealth redistribution qua wealth redistribution. Politics ruins another mind.

Right. And you have not shown that anyone is talking about wealth redistribution rather than income redistribution.

Politics ruins another mind.

Re: Money and wealth

#157
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only the example, to make it easy to grasp. The same thing happens at scale in real life, too, it just isn't so obvious because it looks like merely the background state of the world, rather than something that is actively occurring. Again, people are going to have a hard time reading this as a morally neutral statement, but the fact that taxes exist depress the value of assets on the market. It's already pric…

> and yes, taxes can fund things of value that can bring wealth to the society at large, etc etc, but all of that adds to the truth, it does not somehow "undo" this fact. Isn't the net effect what people are interested in? If you impose taxes and then do nothing useful with the money, sure, that's an easy negative. And if you tax only unproductive private-sector assets and use them for public goods, that's an easy po…

Unfortunately, I think this concept is totally lost on inexperienced disciples of Rand. An understanding of the world and its historical development is a perfect cautionary tale as to why purely "meritocratic" systems will never produce anything of lasting value.

The industrial revolution was bankrolled by extreme government spending at draconian (compared to present) tax rates during the World Wars. Every technological and scientific breakthrough of the last hundred years was bankrolled by the state either directly or indirectly. This fact is lost on a generation that takes all of this for granted, because they naively believe that progress is the natural state of civilization.

Today, a president like Eisenhower would be called a hopeless bleeding heart liberal. Who cares that the USA became a dominant scientific, technological and economic powerhouse under administrations like his?

History is the best teacher. Personally, I will watch the disintegration of these naive "meritocratic" policies with great interest in the coming years. Who needs public investment in infrastructure, science or healthcare?

Re: Money and wealth

#158
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The LAST thing you really need to do is "invest" that money to generate income." > "You live off the bank interest" Where does the bank interest come from, if not investments?

Depositing your money in a bank...

Where is the bank getting money to pay you interest? By making investments. The fact that you're one level removed from the decision-making doesn't make it less of an investment.

Re: Money and wealth

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right; I've worked out the "accumulating savings" part reasonably well, but the "building wealth" is still eluding me. Stock market index funds seemed to be a good answer in the past. By owning them, you share in the economic growth and income of your country (or another country or set of countries) as a whole. Although, the spectre of Japanese-style stagflation for most of the West makes this less appealing…

I think a lot of people misunderstand what a pain in the ass buying and renting property can be. Unless one is wealthy enough to own multiple properties and have a full-time management company doing all of his work for him, he's going to be taking a fairly hands-on role. Most tennants are flaky. Our perceptions of such might be colored by the fact that -- I assume -- a lot of us here are white-collar professionals ma…

have you checked out BiggerPockets [1]? I'm just getting started in some small-time REI/landlording and that site's been a great inspiration. One great resource is podcast #37 [2] where they interview a guy who does real estate over there in CA pretty successfully. He talks a lot about wholesaling (which I don't care about) but he also explains how he built an automated system around his rentals; he doesn't use an external property manager, but he also almost never directly interacts with his tenants.

I imagine any of us here, being techie entrepreneurial-minded people, could build a system like that pretty easily. Create a website to market your rentals/show vacancies, post them to craigslist when necessary, find a general contractor to fill work orders and hire a V.A. to take calls and submit those work orders. I'm probably missing some things, but that's the basic framework for my plans.

[1] http://www.biggerpockets.com/

[2] http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/09/26/lifestyle...

Re: Money and wealth

#160
post #18
post #3

This makes sense but then what are some useful ways to use cash to build wealth if not buying stocks and other investments? I'm a young guy with plenty of money in the bank (in the tens of thousands; obviously not enough to retire but I could quit my job and do nothing for a while) and basically no debt. I find and I'm sure I'm not alone here with this feeling that, while I could spend a lot more money, I'm perfectly…

Until you've figured out what to do with it, just buy shares VTI. Vanguard Total Stock Market. Or get the admiral version if you're in the US. Essentially it's a tiny fraction of ownership of all publicly traded companies. As long as the economy doesn't go completely down the drain it's a very good place for your money. It's not the optimal place for your money, of course, but compared to sticking your money in a che…

Why isn't it optimal? Any other thoughts on what one should look at in order to find an optimal place to put their money?
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