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The 99 percent

economist.com

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Re: The 99 percent

#121

Post by rmc »

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…

1. Transparency. We need to see where every dollar of the US federal gov't is spent. It needs to be on the internet

Every item bought, even if it costs $1.50 should be recorded? That will cause a massive increase in paperwork (how much will that cost? Will it be in paper? Or an online service that employees fill in when they buy something? What happens when their internet/computer in their office goes down? Should they not buy the thing or buy the thing and fill it in later? Do you want to turn up to your office, find no paper there and hear 'Sorry we can't go across the street to get paper cause we have to wait for the person from $FAR_AWAY to come here and fix our computer's browser?')

Re: The 99 percent

#122

Post by rmc »

mhartl wrote: post #51

Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill. I have no idea what The Economist could possibly mean by "pick up the bill" in this context. They know as well as anyone that wealth isn't conserved. If my company makes twice as much money next year as this one, I've added to the world's wealth, not subtracted from it.

A lot people think there is only a fixed amount of wealth around.

Re: The 99 percent

#123

Post by epscylonb »

rmc wrote: post #121
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…

1. Transparency. We need to see where every dollar of the US federal gov't is spent. It needs to be on the internet Every item bought, even if it costs $1.50 should be recorded? That will cause a massive increase in paperwork (how much will that cost? Will it be in paper? Or an online service that employees fill in when they buy something? What happens when their internet/computer in their office goes down? Should th…

In the UK the government bought in a system where all purchases over £25,000 are recorded and publicly available on the internet.

I was pleased about this but I would say it is not a perfect solution, payments could be split up to go under the limit for example.

Ideally we would have a system where this is all automated, every invoice goes through a system and the results are collected. I admit this is a very tricky one though.

Re: The 99 percent

#124

Post by alastairpat »

cpeterso wrote: post #87
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…

I saw a poster (in San Francisco) today that proposed solving the unemployment problem with "30 hours work for 40 hours pay"...

My lecturer would explode if he saw this.

Re: The 99 percent

#125

Post by yummyfajitas »

guimarin wrote: post #61
yummyfajitas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 3, why do you want to raise the bid/ask spread to $0.10? Regarding 4, specifically "to realize losses in the US and gains in a foreign country", how do you propose companies avoid this situation? Should they deliberately lose money overseas as well? What would this accomplish?

to answer 3. I don't want to raise the bid/ask spread. Only that there is a tally of the number of instruments you traded and the number of times. and you pay $.10 for trades*times. to answer 4. The point of this is to stop companies from making subsidiaries in another country to realize gains, and then wait for a tax holiday for repatriation.

Regarding 4 (see other's reply to 3), I still don't understand why companies should be required to deliberately lose money in overseas subsidiaries.

Why not just not give out tax holidays, and allow foreign companies owned by US companies to leave profits overseas forever? Granted, this will reduce investment in the US, but we don't care about unintended consequences.

Re: The 99 percent

#126

Post by CJefferson »

brc wrote: post #113
CJefferson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't force the minimum wage up any more than you can push on a piece of string. While you can certainly change legislation to make the minimum wage a set value, there will be offsetting measures felt elsewhere, usually an increase in unemployment and a general drop in living standards for all. You can't force someone to employ you anymore than you can force someone to be your friend. Once houses have finished co…

So do you believe removing the current minimum wage altogether would be beneficial to those people currently around that level of pay? Given the current high levels of unemployment I would expect to see a fairly substantial drop in wages, where it is already almost impossible to live on minimum wage.

Also, once Detroit is removed from all Federal programs, how does it pay to feed all the currently unemployed people there?

Re: The 99 percent

#127

Post by yummyfajitas »

guelo wrote: post #112
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…

On the Glass-Steagal reinstatement, even though you did not offer any argument against it except to repeat McCardle's claim that people don't know what they're talking about, I'll offer an argument for it even though I admit I'm not some financial expert. Glass-Steagall meant that investment banks had to entice investors to put their money into the system. The repeal allowed investment banks to raid and leverage depo…

and we've coincidentally had 2 major bubbles since. First the dotcoms...

Dotcom bubble: 1995-2000.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley: Nov 1999.

Further, if you measure the housing bubble in the usual way (movement in the price/rent ratio), the housing bubble also started in 1998.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=31w

Re: The 99 percent

#128

Post by paganel »

rmc wrote: post #122
mhartl wrote: post #51

Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill. I have no idea what The Economist could possibly mean by "pick up the bill" in this context. They know as well as anyone that wealth isn't conserved. If my company makes twice as much money next year as this one, I've added to the world's wealth, not subtracted from it.

A lot people think there is only a fixed amount of wealth around.

> A lot people think there is only a fixed amount of wealth around.

A lot of people also think that the economy/creation of wealth can only go up, by only focusing on the last 200 years or so of economic history. I call it "blind faith in economic progress", which was fine to believe in around the 1880s or so, but anymore.

Re: The 99 percent

#129

Post by CJefferson »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #105
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!

Your comment is a commonly claimed statement, which hides many points.

How much of the income does the top 50% get? Without that, your figures are useless.

Just concentrating on income tax hides the fact lower earners tend to spend a higher proportion of their income on other taxes (such as sales tax).

ycombinator is not the place to repeat poorly researched, often quoted and misleading statistics, without a proper discussion of how they effect the current discussion. Sorry.

Re: The 99 percent

#130

Post by smithian »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #99
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 wa…

Or you could stop all government subsidies to corporations and set up a business tax structure that is heavily favorable to worker-owned cooperatives at the expense of shareholder-owned corporations. Corporations are just machines for extracting productivity from large numbers of people and concentrating the wealth produced by that productivity in the hands of a few. Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design flaw. They also have little to no motivation to outsource.
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