Continuing to trot this misleading stat out doesn't help your position. You need to control for company size--what you're actually looking at is the merger mania that has happened in that time.
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"It’s Time for Major Wealth Redistribution — Yes, I Mean It."
- Thread starter ZiprHead
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Continuing to trot this misleading stat out doesn't help your position. You need to control for company size--what you're actually looking at is the merger mania that has happened in that time.
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Why should a mergered company reward the ceo and not the workers that made the company worth buying in the first place?
There probably is some truth. There's a huge load of bullshit in it, though.
1) A very large percentage of that "wealth" is stock ownership. You can't eat a stock certificate. Moving the stock certificates around doesn't produce one bit of food. We have a similar situation to refer to, though: Post-communist Russia. That's basically what they did with a lot of assets--handed them out to the people. The outcome was entirely predictable--the oligarchs ended up owning those assets on the cheap.
Basically, we would be burning $6T on the bonfire of inflation. Also, note that all that stock appearing on the market would crash it's value. It would take wealth away from anyone who owns stock, period, even those who own it indirectly. Every pension plan in the country collapses.
2) His numbers on stopping global warming are obvious garbage--we simply can't do it. The only non-carbon approaches are nuke, hydro and renewables. Hydro is basically fixed--rivers worth damming are already dammed. Renewables don't play nice with nuke, thus it would have to be nearly 100% nuke. We don't have the capacity to build that many nuke plants that fast, especially since we also need to build enough synfuel plants to run the things that can't run off electricity (ships, aircraft, some vehicles.) Not to mention a complete turnover of the world's vehicle fleets.
DBT
Contributor
Stocks are wealth. Produce growth in value and income in dividends. Readily bought or sold. Your argument has little merit.
Elixir
Made in America
DBT
Contributor
An extremely sad state of affairs:
''A society that allows a few to capture most of the wealth is neither fair nor efficient. No one can claim that the U.S. economy is performing better now than it did when the wealthy 1% only had half as much.
It might be different if the rich really were letting their wealth trickle down by investing in the future economy. But they aren’t; at least, not enough. Not in this new Gilded Age, and this gulf between a tiny pampered elite and the grumbling masses is driving populist protests all over the globe.''
''While the working class and the impoverished families of America — half of our country! — have less real wealth than they had 20 years ago, the super rich top 1% have doubled theirs in a generation, according to a new data set recently released by the Federal Reserve.''
The top 1% of U.S. households — about 1.2 million families — had aggregate net worth of $35 trillion as of the end of June. That’s 32% of the total, up from 27% at the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the Fed reports.
The top 10% had $74 trillion — 69% of all wealth.
Meanwhile, the poorest half — about 60 million households — owned just 2% of national wealth, around $2 trillion, down from the inflation-adjusted $2.4 trillion they owned in 1999.''
''A society that allows a few to capture most of the wealth is neither fair nor efficient. No one can claim that the U.S. economy is performing better now than it did when the wealthy 1% only had half as much.
It might be different if the rich really were letting their wealth trickle down by investing in the future economy. But they aren’t; at least, not enough. Not in this new Gilded Age, and this gulf between a tiny pampered elite and the grumbling masses is driving populist protests all over the globe.''
''While the working class and the impoverished families of America — half of our country! — have less real wealth than they had 20 years ago, the super rich top 1% have doubled theirs in a generation, according to a new data set recently released by the Federal Reserve.''
The top 1% of U.S. households — about 1.2 million families — had aggregate net worth of $35 trillion as of the end of June. That’s 32% of the total, up from 27% at the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the Fed reports.
The top 10% had $74 trillion — 69% of all wealth.
Meanwhile, the poorest half — about 60 million households — owned just 2% of national wealth, around $2 trillion, down from the inflation-adjusted $2.4 trillion they owned in 1999.''
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
Wrong. No need to dump all that stock on the market; the public could just live off the dividends. Instead of spending the dividends on caviar and super-yachts, they could be spent on child nutrition, improved insulated housing, education, etc. It might be convenient to sell some of the stock and re-invest the proceeds in bonds or stocks with higher yields, but the wonderful free market should be able to handle that with little trouble.
Oh: And by the way, rather than "similar situation", that's exactly the OPPOSITE of what happened when the Soviet Union broke up. Just for starters, in Russia property owned by the state was distributed to people (much of it ending up in the hands of billionaires), while ZiprHead's JPG speaks of taking from the billionaires and putting the wealth in the hands of the state. There were progressives who wanted to ensure that common people would best benefit from this redistribution in Russia. Instead, with the encouragement of "neoliberal" advisers from the U.S. Republiotards, much of the wealth ended up in the hands of criminals, and Russia now has severe wealth inequality.
As for "burning $6T on the bonfire of inflation", this nonsense doesn't even deserve a punch-line.
Harry Bosch
Contributor
The problem is that I don't think that the solutions that you prefer (knock the wealth down) is going to help workers. I actually have an idea: what if we encouraged entrepreneurs to move to eastern Europe or other countries (Greece, Ireland, Denmark) that are hungry for jobs. Sure, tax their hard assets in the US as they leave. But they would have their stocks and ability. They could take their horrible jobs with them. Then the US wealth gap would shrink. And then maybe we could focus on how to really help workers up.
DBT
Contributor
Keep in mind that the gulf between the extremely rich and the average worker was not so great that long ago, yet the economy did not fall apart, our society did not collapse....the rich just kept acting in their own favour, acting in their own interest, using their considerable power and positio...and have gotten ever richer.
So here we are, living in a world of obscene disparity between the extremely rich and the rest of us.
It would be 100% eaten up by inflation. That's what happens when you dump money into the economy suddenly.
See what happened to Spain after all the gold came in from the New World. Disaster.
laughing dog
Contributor
Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality of income, not a lack of production.
You have an unrealistic impression of how much money this would produce. It's a few percent of annual income tax receipts.
It's what happens when you dump a bunch of extra money into the economy. Prices rise to soak it up. See the stagflation of the 70s.
DBT
Contributor
The opposite is true. I have provided evidence to support what I say, stats, examples of exploitation, power structures, tax breaks, etc, while you do nothing more than object.
The rich commonly find ways of avoiding their financial, social and moral obligations. After all, they hold the cards, they have wealth, connections and other resources. Not only to pay their workers as little as possible but reduce their own taxes to the point where some pay a smaller percentage than workers on a fraction of their incomes.
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
I expressed no opinion on how much "money" that would produce. My post was intended solely to point out the gross misconceptions in YOUR post.You either didn't read, or didn't understand my response to your confusion. Do you know what dividends are? Were there other words in my post that caused confusion?
And if you're going to continue in this "debate" you might want to decide whether the dividends on $6T are so TINY that they are only "a few percent of annual tax receipts" or so HUGE that they will cause a "bonfire of inflation"! (Do you see the contradiction in your own account?) LOL.
Harry Bosch
Contributor
Where is your evidence that the "rich" pay their workers as little as possible? Please support. Actually, I think that it would be pretty easy to demonstrate that very successful companies outside of retail pay their workers far more than average. I'd also bet that most of these companies pay out substantially more in profit sharing.
Elixir
Made in America
No, not 100%. We are not on a gold standard, you know. It depends exactly WHERE all that money went. Giving billionaires money barely impacts inflation at all since they just hoard it or invest it (which would drive down the value of others' investments if they were to suddenly cash out). On the other end of the spectrum, giving it to homeless people would have an inflationary effect EVENTUALLY but not until it "trickled up" to the pockets of those paying payrolls...
bilby
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Giving money to homeless people would increase economic growth, rather than inflation, in most cases.
And the inflationary effect of government spending can (as now) be completely countered by the deflationary effect of taxation. That doesn't change when the names and personal wealth levels of the recipients of that spending changes.
DBT
Contributor
Paying more than they need to increases running cost of a business.
The basic idea of business is to keep running cost down in order to increase profit. Do you think a burger joint is going to pay double the minimum wage out of the goodness of their heart?
Exploitation of workers, lousy pay and work conditions, is very reason why unions were formed in the first place.
Now we have stagnating incomes while the high end of town enjoys ever increasing wealth.