Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 99 percent

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 162 posts

Re: The 99 percent

#101

Post by peteretep »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #8
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…

I'm really torn on #5. My pragmatic side says "hell yes", due to the very human nature law of those that most want to govern are the ones we least want doing it. But... my rights side says all that is doing is taking away my right to vote for whom I want.

Also: we happily assume most professions get more experienced and more effective the longer they've been doing their job. Do we really want to kick out national leadership just as they're getting in to the swing of it? Perhaps, but it's far from clear cut

Re: The 99 percent

#102

Post by adrianN »

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…

A while ago there was an interesting article in the Orion magazine [1] that talks about this. It claims that people would become happier, even with less pay, when they work less and have more time to spend on family and friends. Apparently Kellog's tried a reduced work week for a while and the workers didn't want to change things back.

[1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962...

Re: The 99 percent

#103

Post by benmmurphy »

wiredfool wrote: post #90
brc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stamp duty or taxes are a horrible idea. I live in a stamp duty regime, and if I want to sell my house and buy another one, then I have to pay about $30,000 to the government. First home buyers are exempt, but after that, you're in. The reason it is so high is that it was set a long time ago on a sliding scale, and bracket creep of house prices means that every house traded is on the old 'high' value. As a result, ho…

Sounds about like the US -- in King Co, WA anyway (a few years back), it cost about 9.1% to sell a house. There was 6% for the agents, and some handful of taxes and stuff for the other 3%. It's not that bad for the buyers though, as the seller pays most of the big stuff.

just because the seller is writing the check doesn't mean they actually pay for it :) you could imagine a situation where taxes were dropped and instead of the sellers pocketing the extra money they are forced by competition to drop prices by the full amount of the tax saving.

Re: The 99 percent

#104

Post by nhaehnle »

brc wrote: post #69
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…

Hoo boy are you wrong. You are so, so wrong. I was hoping you were being ironic, but apparently you're serious. Raising minimum wage and cutting working hours will drop productivity like a stone. You're effectively saying that all workers are equal, and interchangeable. You want to forcibly stop the more productive ones from working, so that their tasks and livelihoods can be given to others. In the case of a softwar…

> Hoo boy are you wrong.

> You are so, so wrong.

...

> You've effectively described a blend of National Socialism and Stalinism.

Hyperbole much? It saddens me to see this kind of nonsense on HN.

Also, let me point out that your disagreement is not on the highest level of the disagreement scale. In particular, your parent brings up the very reasonable point that mankind introduced the two-day-weekend at some point during the industrial revolution. It's likely difficult to find anybody who says that that's a bad thing. So what's wrong with drawing an analogy here between the introduction of the two-day-weekend and reducing the maximum length of the regular work week?

I'm not saying that all your points are without merit, but you have not addressed the parent's point, and your comment is so full of rhetorical bullshit, it's disgusting.

By the way: too many people are paying back too much debt, and that equates to negative savings.

This is factually incorrect (or perhaps you misstated). The savings rate is the ratio of disposable income that people do not spend. Since paying back debt means that you use some of your disposable income to pay back the debt instead of spending it, it actually equates positive savings.

You can see that the savings rate had a huge spike upwards in the US after the mortgage bubble burst, for precisely that reason: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PSAVERT

And - as you say - that's largely responsible for the economic mess we're in right now, because larger savings have translated to lower aggregate demand, which has lead to net layoffs. It's the paradox of thrift at work.

Re: The 99 percent

#105

Post by nazgulnarsil »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #81

Spending years and tens of thousands of dollars studying things no one is interested in isn't normal, but in the American middle class it is. the top 1% of earners pay 38% of all income tax while earning 27% of all income. The top 50% pay 97% of all income tax. Broken windows fallacy, broken window fallacy and zero-sum thinking everywhere in this whole debate.

if you downvote me enough maybe it won't be true!

Re: The 99 percent

#106

Post by nhaehnle »

noahc wrote: post #9
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…

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…

My totally abstract reasoning is like this: For markets to function well, the barriers of entry must be as low as possible.

The possibility of HFT raises the barriers of entry. Therefore it causes at least some bad.

Personally, I think the markets should just operate at, say, 15 minute heartbeats. Anybody is open to place orders at any point in time in secret. Then, at a predetermined heartbeat time, all orders are revealed and some standard auctioning mechanism is used to match them up against each other.

Sure, spreads would be larger than they are now, but at the same time there would also be less volatility by definition. More importantly, barriers of entry would be much lower, which will cause the market to function closer to a "perfect market" over time.

Re: The 99 percent

#107

Post by ctl »

brc wrote: post #69
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…

Hoo boy are you wrong. You are so, so wrong. I was hoping you were being ironic, but apparently you're serious. Raising minimum wage and cutting working hours will drop productivity like a stone. You're effectively saying that all workers are equal, and interchangeable. You want to forcibly stop the more productive ones from working, so that their tasks and livelihoods can be given to others. In the case of a softwar…

This is a pretty strong reaction to a pretty mild proposal. You know that the US already has a minimum wage and a standard workweek, right? The parent is advocating increasing the minimum wage 20% and decreasing the standard workweek 12.5%. That's not Stalinism.

Now, it's reasonable to point out that skilled laborers are basically fully employed right now, so the proposal would marginally reduce the supply of skilled labor hours -- and could thereby reduce skilled output.

But FWIW I don't think that's a very good point. Skilled labor is not really hour-limited in the same way that unskilled labor is -- that is, the output of a salaried full-time knowledge-worker employee is unlikely to change much (certainly not by 12.5%) if the standard workweek drops from 40 hours to 35. That's not how knowledge jobs work and that's not how salaried positions work. Whereas productivity in unskilled positions really would drop by somewhere close to 12.5% under the proposal. (Which is good; it opens up more of these "job" things that are so crucial to wealth distribution in the modern world.)

At any rate, if shorter work weeks for skilled workers bothers you that much, there's an easy solution: just say that you can only pay the minimum wage for the first 35 hours of the week, after which you have to pay at least 1.5 * minimum wage. Leave everything else the same. (Well, I like the parent's minimum wage hike too.) Now we're only cutting the output of near-minimum-wage workers.

I'm not at all sure that this idea wouldn't be disastrous, but I can't think of any good reasons that it might be. I feel like it's the most obvious way out of the current economic situation.

Re: The 99 percent

#108

Post by CJefferson »

brc wrote: post #86
ppereira wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely enough, because of the way the EITC is tied with wages and already distorting the economics at the bottom, raising the minimum wage could result in net transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor and therefore reduce inequality. I had more relevant comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120123

Not all people are the same. Not all people are as equally productive, equally talented or equally motivated. Not all people want the same things. You seem to subscribe to the aim of total income equality as a goal. To do this you would force the productive to hand over most of the product of their work to those who are less productive. Obviously, to do this, you need to force them using the apparatus of the state to…

This is not a black and white decision.

There is a big gap between wanting "total income quality", and wanting to close the huge, and increasing, income equality gap in the US, and to increase the minimum wage (or undertake other means) to reach a point where people can reasonably buy a house and send their children to university without requiring crippling loans.

Re: The 99 percent

#109

Post by forza »

macov wrote: post #71
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…

You are so wrong. Less work? There is no cure for cancer, no clean energy, no cheap housing, no good education. There are so many things to do.

Has nothing to do with the amount of work you do, but what goals or values you have.

Re: The 99 percent

#110

Post by othermaciej »

jholman wrote: post #100
othermaciej wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I personally would have preferred to see banks allowed to fail, and get wound down by the FDIC, to bailouts.

I think the reason for the bailouts was not combination retail/investment banks. The biggest recipients of bailouts were pure play investment banks. The theory is that failing to bail them out would have led to contagion across wide swaths of the financial system, but the main vector would not have been retail banks; it would have been the counter-parties to the many transactions that the investment banks had, including such examples as pension funds holding CDOs.

I think the root cause of the bailout was the revolving door among the biggest investment bank players (especially Goldman Sachs) and financial regulators, including the Fed, the SEC and the Treasury Department. It's a classic case of regulatory capture " rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture>. I don't think this is so much outright corruption, as the fact that the top finance people in government have gradually come to have the same worldview as the top finance people on Wall Street. So it was easy for them to think that a rash of bank failures was the worst possible thing imaginable, and must be avoided at any cost. At the same time, they could not imagine imposing severe consequences on the management and investors of those banks.

If there's any regulation that is truly critical, it's preventing this revolving door. But I am not sure how we can sanely do that.

Post reply on HN