471–480 of 606 posts
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Federal income tax was zero most of the time before 1913.
15% is a far cry from “bleeding us dry”.
Pre WW1 peacetime federal spending would be a godsend for working families.
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Money and power are the same thing.
only in a corrupt system.
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I think the importance of financial education is pretty underestimated. But just to illustrate, investing $10 a month into an index fund would mean something like $100K saved up for retirement. Even if you’re poor, it is usually possible to find that $10.
The calculation seems off by almost one order of magnitude. Even investing 10$ a month for 50 years (!), and managing to get a net return of 7% for such half a century, will build up only about 50K. Except that, by that time, even a modest inflation rate of 2.5% will make it worth less than 15K in real terms. Which makes sense, otherwise any childless person in the West with a decent job could save 1k a month and ret…
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…
It only becomes a problem if people are miserable, the palace stops being a beautiful landmark and becomes a symbol of oppression.
Back to stocks, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with the top 10% owning 87% of the stocks (in the US, because apparently, the rest of the world doesn't exist...). The stock market is risky, that's really a thing for those who have all their basic needs covered and can afford to lose big. Owning stock i.e. investing in companies is also among the most best things to society the rich can do, compared to, say, building palaces for themselves.
All that to say that if some causes are worth revolting against, I just don't think inequality in stock ownership is one of them.
Financial education - spending less, saving up, and investing - is common sense but maybe needs to be taught in school. Or maybe the new sovereign wealth fund will indirectly reduce this inequality without needing every individual to take action. Not sure what other options there are.
How can one “financially educate” himself out of the prices doubling in a matter of a few years? And that’s until we get to basic stuff like the cost of housing. Which is to say that neo-liberal patches like “you’re poor because you’re financially illiterate!” need to go, a real structural reform must be put in place in most of the Western world.
By investing. Even with inflation adjustment historical market return is 6%.
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> 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 maki…
> 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.
Yes, and? I don't feel a need to claim the USSR was in any sense "nice" or "wise" or anything else like that. They were awful in many, many ways.
If my point had been about niceness, I could of course also point out that at the same time, the USA was still in the middle of saying "well obviously black people need to have separate bus seats" and had yet to end redlining policies, while the UK had yet to fully internalise that perhaps the people in the colonies who kept shooting the troops might possibly not like what we had done and were continuing to do with their homes.
But such was never the point I made in the first place.
Think lower on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Famine is the default, that everyone used to suffer on a regular basis. The USSR, India, China, these are all countries had all been suffering from mass famines at the start of their industrialisation, and compare them to how Ireland was part of the UK when the potato famine happened: The Soviet famines were 1930–1933 (including Holodomor) and 1946–1947 (which was partly due to WW2 and a need to not look weak due to very legitimate fear of America at that point); the Chinese one was the Great Leap Forward in 1958-62 (the CPC only took power in December 1949); the last really severe Indian famine was 1943, just before the British were made to leave.
Then think of the housing stock. Of electricity. Of plumbing, even (even today, Russia's % of that is pretty low). Pre-industrial societies basically do not have mass plumbing — can't pump sewage away without power. Toothpaste is important, but it's way down the list compared the radical improvements to quality of life that these governments brought their people (which is not to say they therefore are above criticism, they're absolutely fair game for criticism!). Even good nations aren't above criticism, and the USSR wasn't even good. The USSR in particular had huge avoidable problems caused by their own censorship preventing themselves from fully understanding how badly wrong their own policies were.
Even despite all the stuff the USSR did wrong, they still made things a lot better than what came before. (Unlike, say Pol Pot, who was an unmitigated disaster for Cambodia).
That the USSR was, and China now is, able to reach the point of challenging the USA for hegemony, is nevertheless a national success story. Despite both being flawed. Likewise India now having a GDP higher than the UK, even if they're still a long way behind on the per-capita front.
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90th percentile 21-year-old has nothing. With college debt their assets are net negative. 90th percentile 65 year old has perhaps $1M+ in accumulated property wealth and retirement savings. There is some generational inequality at work, but that 65 year old also had ~zero at 21. The 90th percentile 21 year old will likely be doing very well by the time they're 65, hard to say whether better or worse than today's coho…
Some of those 90th percentile 21 year olds genuinely have nothing while others are in line to receive a bumper payday when their parents die.
But in any case, with longer lifespans, many/most won't see inheritance until their 50s, 60s, even 70s, long past what are arguably the most expensive years (buying a home, raising kids and so on). Maybe in time to pay college fees, depending on when they have kids. Even for the relatively wealthy, it's the luck of the draw - healthcare and senior care costs many hundreds of thousands for some, and virtually nothing for others.
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Hope for what? Who would benefit?
The American people, the Constitution, Ukraine, Europe, the whole world probably. The US is about to drag the world into a recession or a War Economy.
In the US you need to earn only $178,611 as a HOUSEHOLD to be in the top 10%. That's less than $90K per person. Comparatively, you need to earn $663,164 to be in the top 1%, and more than $3M to be in the top 0.1%. I just want to highlight this to remind that the top 10% is by far not made up exclusively of ultra-rich individuals like people on internet like to believe.
Protip: if you ever want to downplay inequality, gloss over wealth inequality and focus on income inequality to the exclusion of all else. It's VERY effective.
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You'd rather the poor were poorer given the rich were less rich?
I don't understand your question.