311–320 of 961 posts
The 1% allocate capital that are best at allocating capital. If they aren’t good at it, they rapidly lose capital
Is that why farms need subsidies to survive? Because the farm owners are really good at allocating capital?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. The fed is an engine, whose purpose is to move wealth silently from the masses to the powerful monied few, via time-asymmetric inflation. (Mostly Inflation of assets presently) The resulting data looks like corporations have used their power to directly disenfranchise/disempower workers, and so the mass clamber for protective laws. More laws will be enacted by those in power. The time is certainly right for it.…
The Fed is stabilizing the price of the USD because of the coronavirus pandemic. If it were not printing money, then there would likely be a deflationary spiral that would cause a depression. That's one of the reasons why the Great Depression was so bad: the US was on the gold standard at the beginning. The US can't create gold out of thin air, so the USD started deflating, people stopped spending, and capital stoppe…
I think an MMO designer would suggest two options:
A. Nerf the Fed, which would have the problems you note.
B. A balancing mechanic -- Some more universally-accessable way to inject income at the base of the economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. The fed is an engine, whose purpose is to move wealth silently from the masses to the powerful monied few, via time-asymmetric inflation. (Mostly Inflation of assets presently) The resulting data looks like corporations have used their power to directly disenfranchise/disempower workers, and so the mass clamber for protective laws. More laws will be enacted by those in power. The time is certainly right for it.…
The Fed is stabilizing the price of the USD because of the coronavirus pandemic. If it were not printing money, then there would likely be a deflationary spiral that would cause a depression. That's one of the reasons why the Great Depression was so bad: the US was on the gold standard at the beginning. The US can't create gold out of thin air, so the USD started deflating, people stopped spending, and capital stoppe…
The pandemic is a case of exactly when the gov. should step in. Unfortunately the gov. is slow and takes so much time to do anything.
> That's a distributional issue, and the main solution is tax policy.
Exactly. I think a better argument could have been made by looking at the tax cuts a couple of years ago. Companies didn't go on hiring sprees or even keep any money in the bank. They did stock buy backs, paid bonuses, etc...so that when the pandemic did hit they had nothing to fall back on (see the airlines).
Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…
Especially when coupled with the excessive fiscal stimulus. We should absolutely help those most impacted by the pandemic, but the amount of money being injected amounts to gross negligence. Why were people who made 6 figures and still employed being given checks, for example? The stock market is on fire, and many businesses are smashing earnings expectations, yet we inject another $2 trillion? I've got a sizable por…
edit: the stock market is on fire while small businesses collapse. The market isn’t attached to reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mostly a myth that there was a 90% marginal tax rate. It's technically true, but when the top tax rate was removed they also removed all the loopholes and deductions that were being used to reduce the effect tax rate on top earners to below 45%. All the while the proportion of tax receipts as a percentage of GDP has remained constant. Meanwhile, the proportion of taxes paid by the top quintile earners has increa…
Did the effective tax rate change on the top quantile from 1980 to 2013, or did they just earn a lot larger fraction of income?
In 2019 it was 52% of the income.
In my lifetime some sort of switch has flipped, where the people advocating for more taxes no longer do so with an explicit intention to pay for something greater or something new, but simply on the assumption that the act of taxing people will inherently make them more equal. Is there a coherent philosophical basis for this train of thought? Is there any historical precedent that increased taxes is what we need to b…
"...people advocating for more taxes no longer do so with an explicit intention to pay for something..." You should perhaps listen more closely. There are a wide array of programs proposed by people who are advocating for greater taxes on the wealthy. Universal healthcare, free education, a larger social safety net and investments in green energy are a few of the big line items being constantly and loudly discussed.…
If tomorrow everyone was given all of those programs, but the income distribution stayed the same as it were today, would everyone go home satisfied or would they discover new things that needed providing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "But poor people have iphones now" What makes that especially awesome is that Apple and the telecoms have gotten into the business of supplying credit to consumers who would otherwise have no business (literally and figuratively) owning a $1,500 phone when a $250 phone would do.
Given that the thread is about how $50T has been appropriated from the poor it seems odd to say that the poor should use $250 phones, and they have no business owning anything which costs more.
The framing in the article is ahistorical. The post-WW2 period was a period of exceptionally _low_ inequality. If you look back to just the 1800s there were swings in inequality comparable to the present day. We're now moving back to the historical baseline. There are some contributing factors to the shift in inequality, a major one being that labor is now oversupplied compared to the post-war period, and the competi…
Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…
> When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Or, you know, the Fed is not authorized to deal directly with individuals via the Federal Reserve Act. The Fed's job is monetary and financial stability through credit markets. That's the tools that it has, and it uses them when n…
Is this really true anymore? At least the past year, the Fed has taken an unprecedented powers to counter the effects of the pandemic. We've all heard of quantitative easing but there's a handful of programs such as SMCCF that allows the Fed to buy debt directly from large corporations.
Corporations aren't people but they're owned by shareholders and controlled largely by the 1%. The amount of money the Fed has directly or indirectly injected into global economy is absurd and surely, if there's a reckoning, the blunt will be taken on by the bottom 90%.
I thought this was a good overview of all the Fed's programs and initiatives since last year. https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/timeline-the-fed...
The problem of inequality in general needs to be framed as one of power asymmetry. There are a handful of people that have managed to garner, through their wealth, similar power to states with millions of people. The solutions to this involve either making money less able to purchase power, or taking some of this money away. I suspect the latter is more likely to happen but I'll happily support either method.
As it turns out it's the Decentralized that's the important part. You need many people making decisions for productivity to flourish. Rich and powerful making few large decisions simply loses every time.