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Just Be Rich

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Re: Just Be Rich

#881

Post by jfengel »

eevilspock wrote: post #871
atq2119 wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Isn't it? Even when taken to extremes? Wealth inequality is in direct conflict with a core value of democracy: one person one vote is reduced to a bit of a joke when there are people who can easily afford to pay an army of hundreds of political operatives to flood public discourse with their opinion. A little inequality doesn't hurt, but the existence of billionaires (even 1…

Exactly. 90% millionaires and 10% billionaires means the billionaires have 99.1% of the monetary power.

Very astute.

Even if you have 99% millionaires and 1% billionaires, the billionaires still have 91% of the wealth.

Re: Just Be Rich

#882

Post by solipsism »

atq2119 wrote: post #579
baron816 wrote: post #58

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to ceme…

> Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Isn't it? Even when taken to extremes? Wealth inequality is in direct conflict with a core value of democracy: one person one vote is reduced to a bit of a joke when there are people who can easily afford to pay an army of hundreds of political operatives to flood public discourse with their opinion. A little inequality doesn't hurt, but the existence of billionaires (even 1…

The problem of money purchasing political power can probably be solved without eliminating the concept of a yacht.

Re: Just Be Rich

#883

Post by jfengel »

cloverich wrote: post #848
jb775 wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any data to support anything you said here? The middle class has been getting decimated the past 20 years. They used to live comfortably on a single income, now both parents slave the week away and have even less purchasing power. Also, housing prices aren't "out of control" at all. Inflation is reducing the value of the dollar, and it's showing up in the real estate market. Inflation hurts anyone on a sa…

> and have even less purchasing power How does that account for items we have today which were unavailable 20-30 years ago? E.g. even if I were rich in 1990 I wouldn't have a super computer in my pocket with access to infinite knowledge and entertainment. > Inflation hurts anyone on a salary And anyone with savings. > They are reaping the benefits of the production processes and leaving everyone else with the polluti…

> And anyone with savings.

Anyone with savings that they keep in a mattress, or keep long-term in a checking account designed for short-term savings.

Re: Just Be Rich

#884

Post by solipsism »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #877
nindalf wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Bill Gates - terrible guy. Spending money trying to eradicate diseases that kill poor people. What's worse, here's him in 2015 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI ) wasting money and faffing on about some pandemic. As if that's going to happen, and even if it does the pandemic won't affect rich countries in any way.

You're falling for his scheme hook line and sinker. He spends a minor portion of his extreme wealth on good causes and charitywashes his bad reputation into being a "good guy." We then don't talk about the fact that we could go remarkably further on the same course if we took a much larger bulk of his wealth and put it toward similar objectives of reducing poverty, disease etc. This is of course nothing new. Robber b…

We then don't talk about the fact that we could go remarkably further on the same course if we took a much larger bulk of his wealth and put it toward similar objectives of reducing poverty, disease etc.

Who could? You and I could? The government could? Honestly asking, I don't really know what you're saying. If that money went to the government a very small percentage of it would be used to reduce poverty and disease. A much higher percentage of it would be used to fund the military.

Re: Just Be Rich

#885

Post by deepGem »

jes wrote: post #471
deepGem wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt. Things out of your control are not excuses.

What things are truly within your control?

For one poverty. I believe it is in your control to crawl yourself out of poverty, may be not in childhood but in your high school or once you turn 18. Am not saying everyone should become rich but you don't have to be poor.

Your mind is in your control. Keeping your body and brain healthy is in your control but for medical conditions though.

Re: Just Be Rich

#886

Post by WalterBright »

ironman1478 wrote: post #730
WalterBright wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 63% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck That doesn't mean they're poor. I've known many, many people with zero savings living paycheck to paycheck. They had new cars, nice houses, good furniture, expensive clothes, took vacations, and ate regularly at restaurants. They simply spent it all.

You are truly out of touch with people who are in poverty or near it. My parents each work 60-70+ hour manual labor jobs not including brutal commutes. We were paycheck to paycheck for over a decade until my mom became a nurse (being able to pay for it was complete luck). My father didn't take a day off for over a decade include the weekends it felt like (obviously slight exaggeration) and injured himself multiple ti…

I didn't deny the existence of poverty. I do not deny your personal experience. There's a lot of poverty. I said that living paycheck to paycheck does not necessarily mean poverty.

According to google, the percentage of Americans in poverty is 9.2% for 2020, not 63%.

Re: Just Be Rich

#887

Post by nec4b »

Joker_vD wrote: post #861
nec4b wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not everyone can be good looking, a great singer or a professional basketball player. But you are right communism solves all equality problems by making everybody (except a few select and their families) miserly poor, prevents people (again except a select few) with talent to stand out and kills everyone else who is too unhappy with how things are.

The most hilarious thing about "a few select and their families" being rich is that it's not even true. Having a roomish (1 room per person + a living ropm) flat, a car with the personal driver, a small villa, and access to "closed for others" food and clothing stores was pretty much the most one could achieve -- and non of those things could be bought by money. Heck, that car and the villa? State-owned and attached…

Of course they were richer, way richer than common folk. You forgot to write access to western goods, skipping the lines for healthcare (some had privilege to use foreign healthcare), best schools, best food,... Compare that to hungry peasant dying by millions.

Re: Just Be Rich

#888

Post by omikun »

mdorazio wrote: post #766
jimbokun wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't contradict Roberts. The chart at the top of your linked article shows that even for Gen X, poor people generally out earn their parents, and rich people are far less likely to out earn their parents. Roberts just elides the fact that historically, an even higher percentage of poor and middle class people would out earn their parents. So his statistics are not wrong, he just presents them in a certain lig…

That’s fair. To me the context of dropping mobility is more important than the absolute percentages.

I'm concerned about the drop in mobility too. But stepping back for a bit, imagine mobility stayed the same, what would that mean? Would that mean everyone earns roughly the same after a few generations? Or would it mean the income inequality pyramid gets flipped upside down? Is that even feasible?

Re: Just Be Rich

#889

Post by tjs8rj »

o_p wrote: post #101
seibelj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be rich, invest, and still work. You don’t magically putter around all day once you make money. Or at least all the self-made wealthy I know are still actively productive.

That completly misses the point, first, rich people earnings come mostly from their investments, not their work. Second, the money earned through investment necesarily comes from the work produced by other people and thats completly independent if the rich person works or not. The person who "earns by investing and working in both nearly equal proportion" doesnt really exist beyond outliers, this is empirical, the 1%…

I get the sense that you’ve read a lot of theory without any observational facts.

The vast majority of the 1% and 0.1% get most of their income from labor nowadays. This is a phenomenon called “The Rise of the Working Rich”. This looks like CEO compensation, top athletes, too musicians, business owners, and so on. On average, the 0.1% gets about 20% of their income from investments and 60%+ from their actual labor.

70% of the Forbes 400 are self-made, the vast majority of millionaires receive $10k or less in total inheritance, 11% of Americans will be in the 1% for at least 1 year in their lifetime, and the majority of Americans will be in the top 20% for at least 1 year in their lifetime. If you chop off the top 1% in developed countries, their Gini coefficients are very similar, implying that the US doesn’t have exceptional levels of suffering from inequality, it just produces a lot of rich people.

Re: Just Be Rich

#890

Post by hit8run »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #782
hit8run wrote: post #217

That's actually what I do the whole day. I give people good advice. I call myself a generous problem fixer. Yesterday a poor man was complaining that the steel company he worked for closed a few years ago and since then he did not get any job. I saved his life by telling him the following: "The solution to your problem is easy. Stop being poor and start being rich. You made a mistake by choosing to be poor so my seco…

Wow! Are you planning maybe a Clubhouse session where we can learn more about this?

I have a pretty busy agenda nowadays because the world is in a bad state and in order to fix it I am consulting a lot. Convince me why my time is best spent with you when so many people need me.
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