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The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

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Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#451

Post by VladStanimir »

wqaatwt wrote: post #192
hnfong wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any risk Elon's taking is peanuts compared with George Washington taking on the world's leading colonial power...

I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as directly comparing Musk and George Washington. But I suppose there are some parallels [if we take the more cynical] perspective. Both were willing to take on significant risk to upend the established socio-economic order primarily for the benefit of their respective social classes (wealthy landholders and tech-oligarchs). But yes, confiscation of all his property and even the gallo…

And its not like confiscating his property would do much. Like most billionaires his wealth is almost entirely stocks which while theoretically liquid would loose most of its value if you tried to sell it all at once.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#452

Post by thomasingalls »

marcyb5st wrote: post #232
thomasingalls wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could tax the wealthy

As long as there are countries that allow for tax avoidance it's not gonna work. If my income is in the 10s of millions I am better off paying a few millions to some firm to handle every single thing for me to hyper optimize my life. They make you change residence on paper and buy fictitious tickets to prove you have been in country x at least y days during the fiscal year, and much more. You still end up saving way…

I think the evidence shows this isn't exactly true.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#453

Post by IsTom »

jgilias wrote: post #274
ThinkBeat wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revolutions can happen if enough people show up. Massive amounts of people are difficult to deal with. Smaller groups you can outright kill in daylight, but better to get to them first to torture and kill them out of sight. Once you need to kill 500.000 who are protesting and if violence to quell the hoards wakes up more people who want to see the regime fail.

The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime. Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off. If the Britis…

Belarusian protests were doing well until putin brought his own riot police to help.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#454

Post by AnimalMuppet »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #433
serallak wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not doubting that Washington was very very rich. I'm doubting the different and very specific claim that "George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War" with just a third of his wealth. To me, the math simply does not add up. I suppose it can be chalked up to hyperbole ? I also don't see how a discussion of the Iraq war could be relevant to that claim ...

War financing is incredibly complex and even more so when your only source is some paper notes from several hundred years ago. Whether you believe that or not basically boils down to how you want to see it. Would you for example say that George Washington would have owned more than 30,000 slaves in today's world? A straightforward extrapolation of the population size might suggest so. But then again that is also gros…

> War financing is incredibly complex and even more so when your only source is some paper notes from several hundred years ago. Whether you believe that or not basically boils down to how you want to see it.

Perhaps so. But you're the one who made the initial claim so confidently and definitively. To now say "it's complex and based only on a few notes, and depends on how you want to see it" is basically the same as saying "my original claim was my spin on it, which I was asking everyone to take as accurate".

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#455

Post by fancyfredbot »

Apreche wrote: post #434
fancyfredbot wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoy Gary Stevenson - both his YouTube channel and his book - but his very convincing message that wealth inequality is a problem isn't really accompanied by any particularly good solutions. Tax the wealthy yes, but how do you do it exactly? How much does it raise? How should the revenue be spent?

You have to raise taxes on the wealthy so heavily that they begin to sell their assets. This brings asset prices down. Meanwhile, lower taxes on normal people, who will have more money and be able to buy those assets. This reverses the wealth transfer. It doesn’t matter how much tax you raise. It just matters that it is enough to reverse the transfer of wealth back to the working class. How specifically doesn’t matte…

Take your property tax idea, and assume you solve issues like the wealthy "selling" the property to companies who "lease" them right back to their wealthy owners (the wealthy will spend a lot of time and effort avoiding the tax)

But say you succeed. The wealthy sell their second homes with only a small impact on house pieces. Now your tax raises nothing (everyone sold) and the wealthy invest in something else. It's a marginal improvement in housing affordability but not a solution to societies problems.

Or maybe the housing market collapsed under all these forced sales and the wealth is gone, and a load of normal people are in negative equity and your tax still doesn't raise anything. You've made life better for non homeowners but you've also trapped a bunch of mortgage holders with expensive unsecured debt. That's not exactly perfect either.

It's not simple and I'm a bit tired of pretending it is.

This isn't me saying we shouldn't be trying to tax the wealthy, it's just that I'd really like to see a specific workable plan rather than hand waving.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#456

Post by ty6853 »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #241
ty6853 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we're paying 10x the fraction of our gdp as the early non war days. The feds are bleeding us dry to line they and their corrupt friends pockets and their public debt.

If we got rid of the federal government, and things didn’t break put into war or anything, would the issue be solved?

No nothing will 'solve' it, but it may attenuate it in some states. Although moving from size in early days to zero is your own strawman.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#458

Post by ty6853 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #376
ty6853 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we're paying 10x the fraction of our gdp as the early non war days. The feds are bleeding us dry to line they and their corrupt friends pockets and their public debt.

A quick Google search shows the median income tax as percentage of income is around 15%

Federal income tax was zero most of the time before 1913.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#459

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ben_w wrote: post #312
briandear wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How very Marxist. How have those Marxist governments fared in the past?

> How very Marxist. How have those Marxist governments fared in the past? One lasted about 70 years, turned a country from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities". The other big one went from "agrarian" to "makes most of your smartphones, e-readers, etc." But more than that, if your standard for "marxist" is "Laborer coordination and wor…

It went from from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities, and still couldn't provide toothpaste to its people".

Yeah, it was able to channel more of the output of the workers into achievements like nuclear weapons and space programs. It didn't put much into things that actually benefitted the workers, though.

So the USSR may not be making the point for you that you think it is...

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#460

Post by tim333 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #76
ookblah wrote: post #31

I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now. As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only s…

The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses o…

>they don't have the means to change it.

They could vote for lefties like Corbyn or Bernie but they don't because things aren't that bad.

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