71–80 of 90 posts
Meanwhile The Economist is inviting Arthur Laffer (the guy famous for the Laffer curve, which was the basis for Reaganomics) to publish pieces praising Reaganomics / trickle down. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/06/02/reaganomi... Just wild how much the media has become a system for self-congratulations for the global elite barbarian class.
Can somebody explain how this graph makes sense? It seems to imply the top 2 people own 30% of the wealth, which is not what the data states.
Sure. Hedge fund owners, VC firm owners, cosmetic surgeons, the Walton heirs, and Zuck/Jensen/Jeff/Elon own 97.5% of all wealth in the United States. The former three, while each representing cohorts, are very small cohorts. The latter are billionaire individuals. If you're an American and not among those specific groups, your share of the remaining 2.5% is split with the rest of the US population in that slice (i.e.…
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Part of the reason we're fat as fuck is that giant parcels of land make driving everywhere mandatory.
Better then living in a crowded city where they let rabid hobos attack you on the bus with effectively no consequences.
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In what way is any of this wealth distribution harmful to free enterprise? The things actually harmful to free enterprise are not even on this chart.
The wealth concentration is a symptom of a dysfunctional economy based around rent-seeking monopolies. If you address that, the wealth equality comes as a result thanks to the non-zero sum nature of the economy, as more people are able to operate businesses in a fair way. This is almost exactly the situation that resulted during the first gilded age with standard oil. Antitrust legislation works wonders if it has tee…
What part of this seeks rent?
It is exceptionally easy for Americans to fund and start businesses at this point
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In what way is any of this wealth distribution harmful to free enterprise? The things actually harmful to free enterprise are not even on this chart.
I would recommend you to just just read up on antitrust legislation and why we have it generally.
If you liquidate Elon or Bezos' wealth and distribute it to every US citizen, you're looking at a one time payment of $1-2K per US citizen, and that's only if the value of the assents holds as you attempt to liquidate everything. If you sell it off slowly, you'll get more, but a few years of payments of $50/mo from the Bezos estate is hardly a UBI utopia. I can do far better for myself than that if I'm simply allowed…
What comments like this does not realize is that moving 1-2k usd into the hands of the people is democratizing the expenditure. Suddenly musk, bezos and friends do not decide what people work on - people do.
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Better then living in a crowded city where they let rabid hobos attack you on the bus with effectively no consequences.
Nobody ever gets assaulted or murdered in the country, eh?
I live in the countryside. In 2018 our small neighboring town of about 13k residents had their first murder since 1965, and none since. That works out to about 0.12 homicides per 100,000 residents annually. By comparison, Baltimore has 22 per 100,000 annually.
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A handful of super-rich families got together in the 90s, hired some people to put together a campaign to re-label the estate tax as the death tax and convince everyone it was causing families to lose their small farms, and we haven’t talked seriously about it since.
Larger scale family farms that would go over the estate tax minimums make up around 4% of all farms in the US, from what I can find. Disrupting about 4% of farms upon the death of the farmer does in fact seem like a bad idea to me. But thst didn't stop Stalin from liquidating the kulaks.