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America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

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Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#421

Post by Apocryphon »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #412
Apocryphon wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Language and symbolic thought are not opinions or value judgments. They are according to John Zerzan. > But this is fine, I’m an anarchist because I oppose coercion and you’re a criminal for supporting it. Anarchism, fwiw, is not meant to be a pejorative, but a reference to an actual ideological framework, albeit a radical one. One that has both left and right variants, including the aforementioned ancaps. > And so…

> No, it's moral to provide people with food and shelter Then it must be immoral to take food and shelter from people. How do you then justify taxation? > funded by surplus wealth generated by a society, in a manner deemed agreeable by societal consensus, so as to create a stable social order. And in order to maintain consensus, and order, anyone who doesn’t agree is subject to violence. No, thats not moral. > But by…

> How do you then justify taxation?

Presumably society comes with concepts of fairness, and that it is more fair to take someone's surplus means to share with those who are running a deficit. This need not be coercive either, as there are always incentives such as tax credits and deductions so forth to spur voluntary giving. I'm sure there are moral philosophers better suited to explain it than me.

> And in order to maintain consensus, and order, anyone who doesn’t agree is subject to violence. No, thats not moral.

We live in a society, as they say.

> the ideas exist independently of labels and must be dealt with on their own merits

But pattern recognition is a form of optimization, and labels are but filters created from reoccurring ideological patterns.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#422

Post by jandrese »

potshot wrote: post #361
NittLion78 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found this graph enlightening, but strictly on its face: https://fee.org/media/17509/prices2-1.png?width=645&height=6... I don't agree with the argument FEE is trying to make: "Consider each product or service shown. College is heavily subsidized, regulated, and exclusionary, and the costs are soaring. The textbook industry is hobbled by extreme copyright regulation, and can depend on captive buyers. Childca…

This is explored in detail in "Why Are the Prices So Damn High?" [1] "Education and healthcare are notable examples of sectors seemingly stricken by constantly rising prices ... At the same time, home appliances and telecommunications have become much cheaper. Why?" [1] https://www.mercatus.org/publications/healthcare/why-are-pri...

Heathcare costs for workers spiraling out of control makes them expensive, so fields where you can't outsource the labor become disproportionately expensive.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#423

Post by brobdingnagians »

subsubzero wrote: post #395
tobmlt wrote: post #150

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.…

housing is in a gigantic bubble now, I have owned my house for a few months, I had to go 15% over asking just to get it(against 15 other bidders), and I checked its value recently and it jumped another 8% in the few months I have owned it. (socal location). Another house in my neighborhood sold for a similar amount as the new value so its spot on. With '08 you had housing in a bubble, this time I feel like cars, hous…

It feels like the several times that I have been going very quickly on my bike, then crashed. It feels amazing and thrilling for a few seconds while you are soaring, then there is a moment when you realize that there is only pavement underneath you and there's no way to avoid the pain, but in the moment you are just magically floating.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#424

Post by icedchai »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #274
tylerhou wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ...increase the tax on capital gains... How about proportionally? Stock trading apps now make it easy enough for Joe 6 pack to invest in the market at any income level. I could see a x% higher tax if you're buying 10,000 shares of Amazon, but it seems to me like putting < $1,000 in the market a month should be somewhat painless.

It became easy over 25 years ago when the first brokerages went online. Is it easier now? Yes. But it's been simple and painless for years.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#425

Post by tylerhou »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #414
tylerhou wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/08/tesla-to-raise-up-to-5-billi... https://www.ft.com/content/a59c2a9d-5e0b-4cbc-b69e-a138de76a... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-21/u-s-stock... Stock and bond issuances are at all time highs. Housing is an investment in the CPI because most people don’t buy houses as consumption. The CPI aims to create a basket of consumption for normal people. Rich people do consume ho…

> highest-profile recent example of borrowing for buybacks: > Apple (ticker: AAPL). The tech giant sold $14 billion in bonds this month, and said it would use at least part of the proceeds on buybacks and dividends.[0] Kinda problematic when one large company doing buybacks dominates over thousands doing issuing reversing your entire narrative. Taking out bonds to give to shareholders is not something that helps main…

You're right: even though $2 trillion of bonds have been issued by US companies, one $14 billion ($0.014 trillion) issue to buyback stocks completely reverses my entire narrative.

The pandemic has not hit Apple as hard as other industries, and they're taking advantage of low interest rates by issuing debt.

And there's nothing wrong with buying back stock. It's bad when managers use it to boost their personal compensation. That's not happening in Apple's case; they are just returning capital to investors because Apple is doing well and is sitting on a huge balance sheet.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#426

Post by Weebs »

machello13 wrote: post #26
bmmayer1 wrote: post #3

Ah yes, the famous cabal of 1 percenters sitting around and committing grand larceny as they raid the bank accounts of poor people. At least that's what this headline would have you believe. The reality is much more boring. Thanks to "math," they've determined that if the ratio of incomes from 1945-1974 held steady , the bottom 90% would have "more" than they do now. Of course the bottom 90% itself is a fantasy and y…

> and many other things that 1 percenters have made for us? Jesus christ, this has to be satire. The people "making" these things are not in the 1 percent. We don't have to look up to the elites in gratitude because they deigned to give us their magical gifts.

A professional trains nearly 20 years under the guidance of other dedicated professionals to develop the potential to advance technology. The can't get the capital on their own to create technology, and instead sell their labor to ownership class

They go on to develop revolutionary technology. The owner class claims the IP, massively profits, and maybe gives the professional a bonus if they're lucky before being told to get back to work

The rest of us are told to be thankful for the gracious gifts of the owner class, which we buy with undervalued labor we sold to them in the first place

How marvelous

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#427

Post by josho »

tylerhou wrote: post #283
Seanambers wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some nice graphs to go along; https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

A bunch of these graphs are misleading, especially the ones from the EPI. /r/badecon can explain better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/produc... TL;DR: 1. The pay line is for the bottom ~80% of workers, while the productivity line is for all workers. If you graph all workers wages vs all workers productivity, then the gap shrinks quite a bit. (Of course, maybe we should redistribute…

> Average hourly wages doesn't take into account workers' increase in benefits.

I can't help but feel /r/badecon's rebuttal is dishonest. For many people benefits haven't increased, so the fact that it is excluded is a non-issue. E.g. The growing number of workers who are kept below full time hours to avoid being given fulltime benefits as one of many examples I could list.

Regardless, if it is accurate I'm very curious what the growing employer benefits has been.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#428

Post by jandrese »

_qulr wrote: post #43
Pfhreak wrote: post #23

This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest, leverage it into getting loans to build more capital, etc. If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more…

> This is almost a natural law of wealth. The article is about how the post-1975 period differs from the pre-1975 period. So it's demonstrably not a natural law. Natural laws don't change over time.

The natural law is there, but there was counterbalance from the government taxation and unions. That balance has been lost so the natural law is taking over.

You wouldn't say that gravity doesn't exist because someone is holding up a ball and that it suddenly appears when the person lets go of the ball. This is what happened to monetary policy in the 20th century. The government abdicated its role in the name of unfettered corporate growth and now we have billionaires.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#429

Post by musicale »

natenthe wrote: post #57

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…

> 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

Presumably debtors benefit from inflation since they can pay off their debts with inflated dollars.

Presumably people with cash savings are harmed by inflation since cash loses value.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#430

Post by dataflow »

natenthe wrote: post #57

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 [...] pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich.

Weren't these repaid (with interest, I heard)? Or are you referring to some that weren't?

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