If governments controlled disposable income of the .1 %, would poverty end?

If governments controlled disposable income of the .1 %, would poverty end?

The rich presently control our security of the person in our socio economic demographic position. They control the constitution and our social contracts.

Security of the person is everyone’s number one goal in life, and the rich control ours.

I think I would rather have my security of my person be in the hands of my government, than be in the hands of some rich person. They are strange and have forgotten their duty to those who are beneath them, demographically speaking.

I believe it to be a crime for a rich country to impose poverty onto its citizens. Gandhi ji and others voiced the same notion.

Our rich owners are abusing their power and I think that using a small % of their disposable income would solve many problems, --- that they have created, --- by poisoning our collective environments.

Thoughts?

Regards

DL

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The grotesquely filthy rich have a lot of money. But the planet has 7 billion people and is grossly overpopulated. As long as that condition remains, so too will poverty (a term created by economists). Of course if everyone had to live off the land, the population would shrink by a substantial sum, maybe 6 billion.

Unfortunately it is technology that has allowed us to flourish on this planet. Because of it we can grow food in deserts and large scale famine is basically a thing of the past. So too are a lot of the diseases that used to wipe out huge numbers of people. Which makes having more children seem like a good idea to most of humanity.

Another thing that sucks is that most of humanity doesn't give a flying crap about our environment. Even recycling is taking a major hit as people lose interest. Payouts for cans is declining as more bauxite discoveries are made.

As for the filthy rich, the resources they call their own (property/money/etc) are rarely sitting idle, stuffed in a mattress. Most of their wealth is being put to use by banks and investment firms. Few wealthy people can simply cash in and walk away with billions of dollars in a suitcase. It's not practical, or even safe.

 

The rich and the government are more often than not the self same people - or the government are simply acting as agents of the vested interest of the rich.That's certainly the case here in the UK and in America too.

It's a fucked up system. The corruption and yes, criminality is blatant. And IMO it's got worse and worse over a long period of time and the trend goes on unabated.

In the UK since 2010 we've had an explicit goverment policy of 'austerity' - just as you say, imposing poverty on citizens. Taking money away from disabled people, from schools, from hospitals, even from the police. We have the new phenomenon in this country of working families having to rely on charity food banks just to survive.In some schools, teachers are having to pay for books out of their own money. At the same time, no surprise that the richest have had big tax cuts.

Yet people in the tens of millions just accept this . Unless there were to be some big wake up event or something similar, I think we're stuck with the present system for now. My hope is that the new and upcoming generations see things differently than the majority of their elders and change things. If by then it isn't too late due to ecological meltdown.

 

Comes the revolution, will the new crew be better or worse? The Soviet and Maoist examples are not encouraging.

 

Not encouraging at all. But I'm not an advocate of revolution on that kind of level. I'm not necessarilly against capitalism if it is kept within reasonable limits, and there is a degree of fairness for all. What we have now though isn't anything I'd call reasonable , and certainly very far from fair for many.

I feel that it would be much better to reform the existing system rather than to seek to overthrow it. How that can be done other than through politcal action and change I don't know. I'm a member of the Green Party of England and Wales - I pretty much support the agenda the Greens represent. That includes using our collective rescources very differently than we do currently in many ways, and here in Britain reform of our broken and outmoded political system.

 

no.

 

sure, why not.

 

No. We'd just build more bombs to kill brown poor people.

 

No. The left NEEDS poverty to exist by any means necessary.

Without poverty, they don’t have a voting block to exploit. Be it the ones who they’ve domesticated with the LBJ programs, or the emotions of people who live above the poverty line.

Currently the poverty rate lies at 14% in America. If we were to drop it down to 1.4%, the politicians of the left would need to rethink their marketing strategy.

 

It freaks me out that people who complain about the current government also want to give that same government more money.

 

this ^

 

Lets just tackle that top 1% or top 0.1% own all the wealth bullshit

Its not like the richest people sit around with truckloads of cash in their basement Most of the time you here about someones estimated wealth, most of it is the value of the company/companies they own, which if you go by market cap is a whole bunch of inflated bullshit in the first place and its not like they can really cash in easily most of the time

Their own personal wealth, Its going to be tied up in

1. Property
2. Shares, Funds,Super etc

Any of them with half a brain arent going to leave to much in a savings account, even if they get 5% interest when the rest of us get 0.25%



Amazon CEO has a net worth listed at $150 billion, but pretty much all of that is tied to the Amazon Stocks he owns

Even if he goes and buys a couple yachts a year, his "disposable income" is still going to be a tiny percentage of that net worth 5 million / 150 billion is 0.0033%


So as to your question, if the government controlled the disposable income of the top .1%, would poverty end?.....If the Amazon CEO or others like him only actually spend 5 million a year, you are really asking....if the government controlled 0.0033% of the wealth of the top .1% would poverty end

 

The great masses of humans over the ages have always taken the crumbs the powerful /wealthy/greedy have deigned to offer, in the main. Why would this ever change when those with the wealth and power own/install those that make the laws commensurate with their needs? Or just have more goons and more guns? Or both. Occasionally those with good intentions end up at the helm of governments---but always--without fail--the greedy are lurking and more than ready to fulfill that which they consider their "rightful place at the top," by hook or by crook. By goon or by law.

 

Part One : How we got here.

There were some prominent right wing thinkers in the 1940’s that thought the world (western) was to dominated by left wing ideas, socialism yes but also the left liberal distributive ideas (such as Keynesianism) that said society should be organised to help everyone. They believed that society should not be organised to do so but be lead to the same place through market forces.

One of the things that come out of this was the Mont Pelerin Society

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

The founders (including Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler and Milton Friedman) wanted to change people’s minds and turn them against those left liberal distributive ideas they disliked so much and so the recommendation was to set up right leaning free market think tanks and lobbying groups (The Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation are just two amongst many that were set up by members of the society). And as said it did attached a lot of wealthy backers (Charles Koch was a member)

Well it worked and in a generation neoliberalism has become dominant, but it also become corrupted since it was dominated by wealth, the theory had been that unleashing the power of the ‘free market’ would bring about a system that was ‘better’ at distributing wealth than socialism or something like Keynesianism. That hope was always slightly nuts if you look these free market ideas (with their Social Darwinist foundations) but it definitely was not going to happen once wealth got control.

 

Part Two : The state we are in.

Wealth has gamed the system, it took the free market ideas and promoted everything that gave it advantages while giving lip service to everything else.

This became very clear in the last crash when so many of the champions of the free market turned to a bastard form of Keynes’s ideas to get them out of the fix neoliberalism had caused.

So the dreams of the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society turned into the walking nightmare of a bastard form of Keynesianism in down turns and neo-liberalism in the up turns.

Basically meaning that in the upturns most of the benefits go to a few and in a downturn most of the misfortune is suffered by the many.

If you read my posts you will see that neoliberals have always found it hard to defend their ideas but after 2008 it became a lot harder and many really don’t bother anymore.

Anyway most of the problems in the society that most fell for the neoliberal con game (US and UK) are all down to free market thinking.

In the US it created the conditions for Trump to get elected and in the UK it directly led to people go against their own self-interests and vote for Brexit.

 

Part three: Where are we going?

Well that is the question, neoliberalism should be killed off as it isn’t (and to me never was) fit for purpose. Keynesianism is better but it’s old and was made to fit into a different age although it could be adapted, but I think we need something new something that fits into a future that might have a lot less work in it.

 

Here is something I wrote after the crash in 2008 about wealth and consequences when they are so well cushioned.

Let us look at the case of James (Jimmy) Cayne, who seemed to prefer playing bridge and golf to running Bears Stearns although he got a salary of $200,000 dollars to supposedly do it along with huge bonuses.

Well on paper at one point he was worth in the region of 900 million.

But then Bears needed Fed help and JPMorgan Chase was paid to snap it up and Cayne cashed in his Bears stock at a rather low price and supposedly only made 60 million or so. But as the New York Times noted even with the ‘loss’ he wasn’t liable to go hungry, in fact “he has certainly accumulated enough to live out his retirement years in comfort”. There is the other investments such as the Plaza hotel apartments he brought for $28 million.

So lets see - According to US social security the average wage for Americans in 2006 was around 38,651, and remember there are a hell of a lot of people on lower, but lets round it up to 40,000 for convenience.

So if someone didn’t spend any of their wages and lived off air then it would take them a hundred years, 100 years, to make just 4,million, so it would take them just seven hundred years 700, to raise the 28 million Jimmy paid for his flats and only 1500 years to raise the 60 million he got for his shares.

So an average American would have had to have begun working in the reign of the dark age Frankish king Clovis, well over 1000 years before America was even discovered to reach the amount that Jimmy made in one day.

*

So let’s look at Amazon CEO’s net worth of 150 billion divided by 40,000 would be 3,750,000 years a average American worker would have to go back to the Pliocene era (and I think the oldest evidence of a walking hominid are some 3.2m years old).

 

Great series of posts Balbus.

One aspect of the corruption of neoliberalism is of course the inconvenient fact that often, far from being 'free' the markets are rigged. We saw this with the LIBOR and London Gold Fix scandals. God knows how much criminality goes on in the banks, and when it does come to light, the fines levied are derisory, and the pattern is that some low level bank employee usually takes the rap whilst those in higher positions who presumably benefit financially to a much greater degree get off scott free and go snort another line of coke.

Not only a deeply flawed and exploitative system, but a dishonest one to boot.

 

You gave many facts but no solutions.
Our population is not the problem. It is the equity between us that is the problem.

Regards
DL

 

You might get your wish far change. The young are brighter than their parents and do not seem to be afraid of the social aspect of some laws within democratic nations. Have you noted how social programs are automatically called socialist by the lying right?

Regards
DL