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

time.com

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

#71

Post by JumpCrisscross »

koboll wrote: post #64
_qulr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

From 1960 to 1985 the top marginal tax rate crashed from 90% to 30%. And then of course there's the demise of private sector unions, the effects of computerization, etc. Arguably, it was always a natural law, but the 1970s were an inflection point after which capital was allowed to accrue advantages at a much faster rate.

> From 1960 to 1985 the top marginal tax rate crashed from 90% to 30%

Nobody paid 90%. The tax rate reduction was countered with the closing of loopholes. (There are still a lot.)

Evidence for this is the nearly constant fraction of GDP collected in taxes. The other points are correct. Also, real incomes have both increased at the top end and shifted up for the population.

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

#72

Post by throwawaysea »

"Taken" is a misleading and false. They aren't taking wealth. Others are giving them money in return for something they value. If I am selling a product, or my services, or a share of stock, I'm not "taking" anything from anyone. It's incredible to me that these casual editorialized titles are acceptable so broadly in the journalism industry, and yet labels like "fake news" are reserved for only right-leaning news media.

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

#74

Post by Pfhreak »

md_ wrote: post #61
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…

Your intuition here is basically what's formalized by Piketty in "Capital in the 21st Century": that the rate of growth of capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. What's interesting is that while intuitively this makes sense (for the reasons you gave), the implication (that the rich get richer and inequality grows) is the opposite of what was hypothized by Kuznets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve);…

I'm halfway through reading Piketty right now, amusingly.

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

#75

Post by ryanmercer »

raiyu wrote: post #54
ryanmercer wrote: post #32

Around the same time this was shared to HN I Tweeted/FB/LinkedIn variations of the following >If I earned $10,000 a day it would take me 273.97 years to have earned 1 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Elon was worth about 20 billion a year ago, last month he was worth an estimated $185bn. Oof. In reality, I make a little over $17 an hour His net worth increased an estimated 4.66 million times my annual gross income in the…

By the same token, Elon Musk is someone who succeeded, while thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs fail, end up with debt, and don't have much to show for their work. So using survivorship bias to compare yourself to Elon Musk which is an atypical result when it comes to business formation doesn't make sense. You should probably compare yourself to the average business creator and see how you fare compared to the…

No, not remotely.

It's like pointing out the absurdity of 1 man, over the past year, having his net worth increase 2.32 million times the annual median household income (of the U.S.) of $68,703 (2019, per census.gov).

While something like 20% of the planet doesn't even have access to reliably safe drinking water and something like 800 million lack the amount of food require for an active life.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

tryptophan wrote: post #7
h3rsko wrote: post #2

Inequality seems to be a completely pointless buzzword to me. The only thing that matters is if there are more or less poor people, and how poor are those people compared to similar percentiles in the past. It shouldn't matter how rich the richest people on earth are. I really love seeing people on the Internet try to convince themselves that because Bezos or Musk are worth $100B, they must be stealing it from poor p…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

md_ wrote: post #61
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…

Your intuition here is basically what's formalized by Piketty in "Capital in the 21st Century": that the rate of growth of capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. What's interesting is that while intuitively this makes sense (for the reasons you gave), the implication (that the rich get richer and inequality grows) is the opposite of what was hypothized by Kuznets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve);…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by bequanna »

ryanmercer wrote: post #32

Around the same time this was shared to HN I Tweeted/FB/LinkedIn variations of the following >If I earned $10,000 a day it would take me 273.97 years to have earned 1 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Elon was worth about 20 billion a year ago, last month he was worth an estimated $185bn. Oof. In reality, I make a little over $17 an hour His net worth increased an estimated 4.66 million times my annual gross income in the…

> If someone gave me 100,000 USD...

The language you use here is concerning and not empowering. Why would someone 'give' you $100k? Despite some arguable edge cases (hft, etc.) money is only earned by creating value.

> Some days I just "can't even". With my faith, my wife, my friends, I try to be upbeat and positive when it comes to the future but when I see people like Musk, Bezos, even Gates ...

Comparison is the thief of joy. My (unsolicited) advise is to narrow your focus to doing whatever you can to make you and your family's life better.

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

#80

Post by natenthe »

silexia wrote: post #68
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…

The bailouts are tragic as it undermines the natural garbage collection in democracy - bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is an incredible positive because it allows for the safe and sane dismantling of bad organizations. The question is - how do we apply a mechanism like bankruptcy to government organizations?

Exactly. Bankruptcy and insolvency is an immune response to financial illness in markets. However, instead of removing cancerous growths, we bail them out and thus they metastasize and become much larger and more lethal. This inevitably leads to the death of the host.
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