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posted by
martyb
on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:43PM
from the I-got-mine!-And-Yours.-And-Yours.-Annnnnd-yours,-too. dept.
from the I-got-mine!-And-Yours.-And-Yours.-Annnnnd-yours,-too. dept.
The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017
More than $8 of every $10 of wealth created last year went to the richest 1%.
That's according to a new report from Oxfam International, which estimates that the bottom 50% of the world's population saw no increase in wealth.
Oxfam says the trend shows that the global economy is skewed in favor of the rich, rewarding wealth instead of work.
"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system," said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.
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Only 1% of World's Population Grabbed 82% of all 2017 Wealth
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @03:10PM (21 children)
Taxes put a much greater financial burden on those that make little money. Paying 40 percent of your income is much more difficult than paying 4 percent. Government has a role, despite what some people claim. I don't want corporations making decisions on what defines clean air/food/water when it impacts their profits. Businesses would decide how many deaths are financially acceptable. Those are the true "death panels".
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @03:15PM (20 children)
See above re: Because They Can Afford It. This is not a valid reason.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:29PM (5 children)
So then why would someone need 3 houses and 4 cars? Because they can aford it?
Disclaimer: I am an engineer and I completely agree to pay 5 times more taxes than someone who earns 4 times less then me. This to simplify the progressive tax concept which you seem so passionately against.
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:57PM (4 children)
Irrelevant. They earned their money. They can use it for toilet paper and be utterly morally sound.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @06:56PM (3 children)
You can not say irrelevant. The wealth disparity is a serious problem and history abounds with examples of what happens when humans finally get fed up with a crooked system. Stop waving off valid arguments, you are not a king and you have no autonomy. Pay your taxes, support a better tax bracket, make society better.
"They can use it for toilet paper and be utterly morally sound"
The more I see your discussions the more it seems likely that you are a true sociopath. Morality is some set of rules you follow because society says so, you lack a functional conscience. It could also be a result of the libertarian mindset you work so hard at, working hard to separate "logic" from "feelings". Hell, libertarianism is practically THE sociopath ideology anyway. As long as you don't harm others you can do whatever you want. Much simpler rules to follow.
Example: as long as you get someone to voluntarily sign a document allowing you to kill them as long as you pay off their family that is OK. Who is the gov to say a voluntary contract is morally wrong?
A bit excessive, but that is how such arguments go. You highlight the extreme end to show where an ideology can lead to. In this case some dystopian hunger games type shit where rich folks are legally able to do whatever they want to poor suckers needing a small break.
It is all irrelevant anyway, everyone knows TMB is a marooon so anything he says is definitely stupid.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:39PM (2 children)
Shouldn't there be evidence to support this assertion?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:45PM (1 child)
Every violent revolution in the history of humanity?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:51PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:34PM (10 children)
Well, the system did work better before Reagan shifted the tax burden from capital to labor. How common is the single income family now?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @05:07PM (9 children)
The reason there are so few single income families now is because women decided to essentially double the available workforce over the past four or five decades. Double supply means half demand and pay scales to account for that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @07:41PM (1 child)
Oh the irony.. What happened to all your talk about wealth being generated? If more people are employed then there should be more overall wealth. Yet again you are a hypocrite and moron. I should start up a SN bingo game, the responses here are predictable enough to make it work.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday January 27 2018, @08:22PM
He's saying that if you have 100 jobs for 100 people, then suddenly there are 200 people for those 100 jobs, the wage offering will go down due to there being more people applying for the job,
NOT,
more people are working so the family income should go up.
More people looking for the same jobs makes wage go down. (50 people looking for 100 jobs means wage will go up: supply and demand). Logical.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 27 2018, @11:04PM (6 children)
The women had to go work to compensate for higher taxes on their husband's stagnant wages. Wages weren't driven down for that. They were driven down by tax incentives to off shore the jobs. You know, for a "libertarian", you really do send mixed messages. You sound more like a regular neo-liberal.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 28 2018, @09:53PM (5 children)
Not so. Wages didn't stagnate until some years after women entered the labor market in force. Actually, it's hard to point to a time when women weren't in the labor market. They were always there, and they've just grown more and more numerous through out the years. But, wages increased right up until the 80's, then the stagnation began. The rust belt and coal country were the first victims, and it has spread from there. Even so, we saw growth through the 90's. Not a lot, but there was growth.
Women get some "blame", I guess, for doubling the available workforce. But, illegal aliens, outsourcing, and offshoring have all been greater contributors to wage stagnation than our women wanting jobs. Without those latter forces at work, how much would my wages have fallen, just because my sister, my wife, and my daughters in law want jobs? Not much. In fact, my wages would likely have continued to go up, because all of those women now have money to spend on the things that I produce.
America's wives aren't staying at home, cooking meals? Oh - where are they, then? A bunch of them are downtown, cooking meals for money? Ohhh-kay - I need to charge more for my products, so that I can afford the meals they are cooking downtown! WIN-WIN!
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday January 29 2018, @02:30AM (4 children)
Wages didn't stagnate until some years after women entered the labor market in force.
Hmm, maybe you aren't aware of Nixon's wage/price controls, and he debased the the dollar. The stagnation started way before the 80s. More like 71-73.. Your storyline is entirely false.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 29 2018, @02:47AM (3 children)
I guess someone should define "stagnation" then. I made increasing amounts of money, year after year, right up until the middle of the '90's. Unions were successfully negotiating wage and benefits increases for their members, up until about '83 or '84, when the steel and iron industry very publicly moved some of it's operations out of the country. Bill Clinton took credit for "improving the economy" in the 90's. It wasn't until about '97 or so that the crap really started hitting the fan. I realize that various segments of the economy were hit sooner, and others later, but overall, I think that things stayed pretty good until the housing bubble burst. The combination of the housing bubble, and illegal alien immigration is what hit me, personally. Others may have very different perspectives. The dotcom bubble, for instance, had zero effect on me - that was just something that I read about. It put no one out of work, that I knew.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday January 29 2018, @08:08PM (2 children)
Sorry, didn't mean "false". More correctly it's personal. I was comfortable with lots of perks during that time too.
illegal alien immigration is what hit me, personally.
I'm interested in how specifically that happened.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 29 2018, @11:12PM (1 child)
I worked construction for much of my life. I'm a multicraft guy - a full fledged journeyman carpenter, who can do concrete, rodbusting, some limited welding, pipefitting, and field engineer work. Around '97 or '98, I was in need of a job, and did some semiserious job hunting. One of my leads took me to Dallas. I walked out on the jobsite, surrounded by mostly Mexicans. Found the super's trailer, went in, and introduced myself.
I was told bluntly, that they weren't hiring any white boys. The super told me flat out that he can hire two, or even three Mexicans for the wages that I expected to get. I suppose that I gave him a strange look, because he got defensive, and told me that was pretty much the same story all around Dallas. I wasn't going to find a journeyman's wages when there was so much cheap labor flooding the market.
That wasn't the end of my construction work, but, wages did stagnate. There were no more raises, I no longer got phone calls asking me if I was a available.
People in the north east US, and the east coast, can make claims forever that the Mexicans are just doing the work that Americans are to lazy to do. But, I know better, because it affected me directly. They don't just pick vegetables, and mow lawns. Mexicans aren't mules, after all - they are working men and women, like myself. They can learn any skill that I can learn. They can learn any skill that any member of this forum can learn. They would be serious competition on a level playing field. With the unfair pricing of labor - we can't compete.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:46AM
Illegal aliens, illegal drugs... the market demands it all. Capitalism doesn't respect the border any more than migrating animals do.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @04:55PM (2 children)
Because I like living in a civilized country and so prefer to keep paying to maintain civilization even when the poor can't afford to.
I'm perfectly fine with my taxes going to defend the poor from starvation, shelter and educate them. What I object to is my taxes going to "defence" where defence means killing people thousands of miles away just to make some filthy rich people even richer.
It's cheaper and more efficient to pay to deliver education, food, shelter and healthcare to poor people than pay to deliver healthcare, food or shelter in far more expensive ways (e.g. ER, crime, prison) or to suffer the results of their poor education (remember many of them can vote too).
So if I prefer not to live in a country where many are suffering or dying in the streets then I might as well pay for it in more efficient ways.
One potential issue is if the poor breed indiscriminately till the system can't feed all of them but there are ways to deal with that if it actually looks like becoming a significant problem. But it doesn't appear to be happening significantly in the Scandinavian countries.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)
I have no problem with you redistributing a portion of your wealth if you so choose. I do to some degree myself. What I have a problem with is you demanding others do the same under threat of imprisonment or death.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday January 27 2018, @08:29PM
Whereas, i look at it as, if they have the money to bribe politicians to make laws favour the rich, they have money to pay more in taxes.
Individuals bribing: they pay more (and go to jail, lol).
Corporations bribing: it pays more. Way more.
It's the money in politics that, IMHO, has begun the real spiral down (as well as CEO's getting salary/stock options/benefits WAAAY beyond their worth, but as you say, that is a hiring problem). Take the big money out, make the politicians speak to EVERY individual for money (not just big corp) and you will get a politician more interested in making the country a place for "We the people" instead of just "We the rich".
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---