What the 1% don’t want you to know

I did say wealth can bring influence.
Or agreed with that premise.
So can poor can people. Such as 'Megan's law' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan's_Law
- so yeah, rich people have power, and so do not so rich people.
The balance?
How many 'rich' laws are there out there compared to 'poor', and like I said: what is the detriment to me? really?
You know, on a day to day basis rather than some dry statistics.

Just add context. Not just: rich bad. poor good.

 

But odon I’ve given you plenty of context but you’ve told me you are not willing to read any of it.

Thing is that while wealths riches have grown tremendously the real term incomes of the middle and lower classes have on the whole stagnated or fallen.

What the hell has 'Megans Law' got to do within this economic discussion isn’t that about sex offenders?

 

I do not want to read snippets of old conversations or/and points taken from old threads. It is wildly boring. Maybe this thread was slap-dash. Poorly constructed. A mere whim. I do not think it realistic that people should be remembering points you made 3-4-5-6 years ago and trying to argue for or against them now.

Like I said: Rich people can influence so can poor people. An e.g being Megan's law. Unless you think that was due to rich influences.

 

Odon

As I’ve said you seem to be saying you think my argument is BS and I should prove it isn’t - BUT you are not going to read anything I post or suggest you look at.

Not exactly fair or reasonable is it?

Oh I see you think the influence is equal and comparable? Why has wealths riches grown tremendously while the real term incomes of the middle and lower classes have on the whole stagnated or fallen.

 

I will read what ever new (not reposted) things you post in this thread.

I said:
The balance?
How many 'rich' laws are there out there compared to 'poor', and like I said: what is the detriment to me? really?
You know, on a day to day basis rather than some dry statistics.

Your question above: I have no idea.

What does it matter to me?

 

So I have to retype the same stuff just so you’ll read it – come on that’s total BS – if you are refusing to read it now you’re not going to if I retype it.

Can you stop playing games.

You you you its not all about you. I don’t know you situation or the minutia of your life.

Why has wealths riches grown tremendously while the real term incomes of the middle and lower classes have on the whole stagnated or fallen.

 

If you are having to retype the same things you have to consider if it is worth it, and what is the point. If you are going to be saying the same things is there any point re-hashing your same arguments? Why not just necropost old threads?

It is about me. And you and everybody.

Obviously I am going to wonder what it has to do with me.

Average incomes have stagnated due to the world economic downturn.

 

odon

This is politics a lot of the same themes are going to come up over and over again, welfare, economic policy and in an American context gun control are going to be repeated.

A lot of my views and questions are the same, so I repost to indicate my position and queries and I live in expectation of counter arguments and answers that were often not forthcoming the first time I posted them.

Yes - but I can’t answer for you personally – that is why a lot of political discussion involves group data, that can give an overview of ‘everybody’ to note difference within the ‘everybody’ and so see how certain policies effect the ‘everybody’ and the groups within the ‘everybody’.

Then you would need to give me a hell of a lot more information about you self and circumstance that I would not recommend you producing on an open website.

First of all ‘average’ and ‘income’ are both problematic in this discussion.

The difficulty with mean (average) and median (50% above 50% below) is that it can give very different results. For example -
“In 2005, as in the 1920s, the top 10 per cent of earners once again net about 44 per cent of total income, and the top one per cent again take home about 17 per cent (p. 16). And although the average income in the US has increased substantially since 1973, the median income – the income of the person or family exactly in the middle of the income distribution – has on some measures actually declined and on others only modestly increased (pp. 125–8). In other words, the rise in average income in the US over the last three decades is largely due to a few people becoming much, much richer.”

As to income it can depend on the type of income and how they are taxed, wages are taxed at one level, non-employment income at another (lower) level and I believe in the US inheritance isn’t taxed as income.

One of the arguments in Capital in the 21st century is -

“the wealth-to-income ratio and the comparison of the rate of return on capital (r in his book) to the rate of nominal economic growth (g). A country's wealth:income ratio is simply the value of all the financial assets owned by its citizens against the country's gross domestic product. Piketty's big empirical achievement is constructing time series data about wealth:income ratios for different countries over the long term.
The rate of return on capital, r, is a more abstract idea. If you invest $100 in some enterprise and it returns you $7 a year in income then your rate of return is 7%. Piketty's r is the rate of return on all outstanding investments. A key contention of the book is that r is about 5 percent on average at all times. The growth rate (g) that matters is the overall rate of economic growth. That means that if g is less than 5 percent, the wealth of the already-wealthy will grow faster than the economy as a whole. In practice, g has been below 5 percent in recent decades and Piketty expects that trend to continue. Because r > g, the rich will get richer”

*

The thing is that the stagnation or reduction in the real term incomes of the middle and lower classes has been going on for some time in places like the US and UK, while at the same time the wealth of wealth has been steadily growing.

The broad facts of income inequality over the past six decades are easily summarized:

• The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity.
• • Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s.
  • The income gap between those high up the income ladder and those on the middle and lower rungs — while substantial — did not change much during this period.
• Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened.
  • Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.
  • The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen more than 80 years ago (during the “Roaring Twenties”).

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3629

 

For those who like video


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

 

Meagain

I'm not American, so I am not sure how relevant most of your post is to me, personally.
I also do not have any personal debt or a mortgage.
If Balbus is aiming this at middle-class top earners pitched against working-class low earners, then it is a rather bizarre argument to have.
I have a feeling it isn't.
Who are the '1%?

Balbus

Yet you are throwing around terms such as 'the 1%'?

 

Piketty's call for a "confiscatory" global tax on inherited wealth makes other supposedly radical economists look positively house-trained. He calls for an 80% tax on incomes above $500,000 a year in the US, assuring his readers there would be neither a flight of top execs to Canada nor a slowdown in growth, since the outcome would simply be to suppress such incomes. (source)

It's Impossible To Benefit The Worker By Taxing Capital (source)

2013: Latest figures from HM Revnue and Customs show those earning £160,000-a-year – putting them in the top one per cent

Squeezing the rich: How the top 1% of earners will pay almost a THIRD of all income tax this year.

(source)

Paul Krugman (person in the first post video) is Part of "The Rest of Us"? I Don't Think So

Let's get serious about wealth. Krugman is a millionaire, and I suspect that his mid-six-figure salary at Princeton perhaps may pay some of his taxes. This guy makes millions of dollars a year from his speeches (I don't know his fee, but it probably is close to $100K a pop), his NYT column, his textbooks, and his other books. (source)

Also, he claearly he has not watched 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

The Daughter:

'The character has been said to be the "moral center of the story" and described as being liberal, and to some extent passive.'



The Bill gates of this world are not 'the 1%'.
They are the 0.000000001% (probably not possible, but you get the point)...and what does this man do with his wealth? Gives it away.
Is he passing all of his wealth to his children?
As far as I am aware, no.

Bill said. “You’ve got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they’re going to go and do.”

“We want to strike a balance so they have the freedom to do anything but not sort of a lot of money showered on them so that they can go out and do nothing,” Bill explained (source)



I do not think it is necessarily true that wealth’s power and influence becomes dominant and society is manipulated to serve its interests to the detriment of all others.
Why?
See Bill for an e.g.

Tim. 6: 10 "For the love of money (and all it buys) placed before the love of God (in reality) is the root of all kinds of evil." (source - erm, the bible)

Balbus, there are about half a dozen strands here...
I guess I was asking for you to narrow it down...
An e.g might have helped.

 

Yikes, that's way too harsh. It's too much of a penalty. At that level, I think less than 40% is reasonable but certainly not 80. Even at 1 million, I think 80% would be too harsh. But 50% on 2 million seems reasonable. 80% on 5 million leaves a person with 1 million.

80% on 500K is absolute theft.

 

It will never happen. That 80% population reduction though, that will.

 

Don't be ridiculous.

 

Again, you're confusing plebe logic and rationalising with science, wealth and nature. I think I'll stick with the "actually might matter what they say" crowd on pinchbrick futures....

 

So, could you explain why you think the 80% population reduction will happen? Maybe you can convince us :2thumbsup:

 

At this point history seems to be repeating itself on a global scale owing to global thought and action. The world is already depopulating under many guises that all boil down to less people. The money is going up the pyramid but is not coming back down. Welfare is being cut back in many countries, laws are in place which promote that and protect wealth. Those that had resources keep gaining exponentially while those who barely had them are losing what they did have rapidly. Resistant diseases affecting large populations are past "on the rise" and becoming endemic and a fatal "barney's children" mentality has been so well programmed that the majority of people are dependent rather than independent. That doesn't even need any illuminati or hidden anything to be effective.

 

When you say history is repeating itself at this point, which periods in history are you referring to?