When do you consider someone "wealthy" or "rich"?

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by Seattle, Aug 8, 2019.

  1. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    But it isn't wealth - the topic you don't want to know the truth about.
     
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  3. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    No everyone needs "wealth" apparently. You get what you want unless what you want is to have equal outcomes to billionaires.

    Quit worrying about cigar smoking, snooker playing kids and spend less than you make and you're on your way.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That's not a fact. It's false.
    Actual corporate taxes are fairly low, in the US - many of the largest and most valuable (i.e. profitable, according to you, since that is your claimed source of value) corporations pay no such taxes at all.

    And it's almost irrelevant. The bureaucratic details of mechanism matter less than the net effect, which is that rich people are very lightly taxed compared with the rest of the population in the US. That's how they managed to gather into their own wealth the entire gain in productivity of the US since about 1980, leaving the rest of the population to face rising costs with stagnant incomes and falling stores of wealth. We have rapidly growing wealth inequality in the US, reaching levels higher than those other countries, despite losing much or our manufacturing base and other sources of wealth production - how did you imagine that was happening?
    ? You don't know? You apparently don't read even your own posts.

    As you have posted and acknowledged, consistently, for a long time now: Dozens of ways - they have a stable place to live and reliable transportation, they can pay for child care, they are not in immediate debt trouble (so they can shop around, accept unpaid internships and low paid apprenticeships, cover emergency expenses without interrupting their schedule, etc), they have better educations, they have made personal connections with other wealth inheritors (good sources of good jobs, remember - that was one of your points, although you didn't seem to understand the consequences), they have no criminal records or chronic health problems (such as bad teeth, cumulative toxin exposures, sleep disorders, etc), etc etc etc.

    They have inherited scoring position, to borrow a baseball metaphor. They were born on base. And that is something you have repeatedly affirmed here, in your posts: in your complaints about affirmative action, for example, you speak of the advantages of such position - you complain about such advantages being handed to people you regard as less deserving of them.

    Try thinking of government enforced inherited wealth as a government affirmative action program for the children of the rich. That may be easier for you than trying to reason from the theoretical basis of free market capitalism.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That is false.
    (Are my corrections accurate? If the poster meant to say what they actually posted in the first clause - which is that Reagan just lowered taxes for the wealthy, rather than also doing them other substantial favors - it would be false in a different way than I assumed.)

    And not only because of the severe reduction of SS and related benefits, or the increased reliance on borrowed money (borrowed from the rich, reducing their net taxes and adding some of the difference to the net tax on the poor), or the immediate increase of State and local taxes (bound by law to balance their books without the Federal contribution) which operates as a net tax increase - his boosting of the payroll taxes was among the largest direct or absolute tax increases the working poor in the US have ever seen.

    The amnesiac fog which surrounds every Republican Federal administration the US has ever had is not an accident, btw (including the recent "Lincoln Project" smokescreen - a brilliant feed to the US media by this disaster's lifeboat building crew). It's the effect of a con job - a long term and lavishly funded propaganda campaign launched after the runup to WWII had been safely mothballed (boosted to its current levels over the decades) by US fascists, to roll back the New Deal. Its victims have been conned, played, fooled, repeatedly, in public, by the best marketers and most sophisticated propagandists the world has ever seen. They have been led to take the wooden nickel instead of the silver dime because it was bigger and the right color, over and over and over, on national television in broad daylight, with loud celebration of their choices and a while throwing a great deal of name-calling, insult, slander, threat, and other garbage at everyone who tried to get them to reconsider.

    And that is my guess for why they are such otherwise inexplicably loyal Republican patsies in public - their alternative to swallowing the Reaganshit yet again is public humiliation, a sudden surge of memory in themselves as well as their acquaintances.

    But there is a way out - quiet, passive, noncooperation.

    There is no way in hell that a grown-ass American man watched Brett Kavanaugh talk on TV and said to themselves "That's my idea of a Supreme Court Justice - that's the right guy for the job". But one can't nevertrump a way out of that one - that appointment had almost nothing to do with Trump; it was the rest of the Republican Party's doing, and it was essentially unanimous, a Party's nomination of a Partisan judge, with no regard for competence or demeanor or accomplishment or even the appearance of such things. But nothing needs to be said out loud. Guys, the ballot is secret. Next time, this time, you can do the right thing, and nobody will know.
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2020
  8. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    Rich is full of Character, Charm and Charisma
    Wealth is full of money

    it is extremely rare that both reside in the same person
     
  9. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Not true. Money doesn't rob anyone of character, charm or charisma.
     
  10. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    your post event application of subtractive logic is interesting

    who said anyone was getting anything taken away from them ?
     
  11. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,857
    People, subjectively speaking, either have those things or they don't. Money has nothing to do with it.

    A "post event" is generally just referred to as a post.
     
  12. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    subtractive illogical logic for logics argument

    ...
    why does wealth care ?
    ... or are you obsessing like stuck record on Ego issues ?
    i thought the idea was to "discuss it"
    rather than "own it"
     
  13. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,857
    I see that discussing is not possible in this case. Carry on.
     
  14. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    you need to always be the owner or the victim and never the equal

    now you are playing the victim

    ...
    because your scared of discussing the subject because you have attached and hung your entire ego on the principal that your personal wealth does not make you out of touch with common peoples feelings and the feelings of social empathy
    so you game your illogical logic game of reverse subtractive logic

    i think im done with your choice of topics(your need to own the value of wealth not having anything to do with being a nice person & a peoples person, in varying degrees and alternate mannerisms of conversation)
    you had to parade out your hurt ego at my semi profound saying i made up, trying to own it ...

    what ever 'that' is
    you need to let it go
     
    Last edited: Aug 20, 2020
  15. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    I think this is the best potential sentence I've read all week.
     
  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Oh, there are quite a few. Consider the American men who have committed some form of sexual violence during their lives (5-10% of the US male population, going by available statistics) and consider that almost all of them to consider themselves wrongly accused. To such a man, Brett Kavanaugh is a very sympathetic figure. "He went through the same hell I went through! He really understands me."
     
  17. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    No one said it did.

    Wealth is rare. Charisma is relatively rare. So is character, especially lately. The odds of all of those things existing in one person is low.
     
  18. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Mark Cuban?
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    It does, quite often.
    It has at least two ways of doing that: insulating the moneyed person from the circumstances of life necessary for character development (and contributory toward charm and charisma), which stunts their growth; granting the moneyed person power over other people who lack money, which eventually causes brain damage in most people.

    That second one, btw, is a research established, peer reviewed and published, intersubjectively verified, observation of apparent fact. An article overview: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/
    - - - -
    Hence the qualifier: "grown ass" - which I see was a mistake. I own its misleading implications - the wrong word, in this context.
    Read "adult".
     
  20. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,857
    When you see an article that starts with something like "The top 1% have more than the bottom 99%" do you expect to find an honest, impartial article that follows or do you expect to read a political article that is anything but impartial?
     
  21. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    "Adult" does not equal "people whose opinions I do not despise."
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Depends on who wrote it, and what it's about.
    Try posting a link, maybe someone here can clarify matters for you. (In the FAQ spirit: one common source of confusion is the currently circulating meme of bothsides; people who have been taken in by that one often define "impartiality" as the granting of equivalent respect and consideration and benefit of doubt to conflicting political arguments and claims, regardless of physical reality.
    Nor does it equal "people who behave like Brett Kavanaugh at job interviews" - which would be a considerably more useful criterion, no? Less mindreading and uninformed speculation involved, better odds of being rightward on the scale of right and wrong.

    Otherwise, you are setting up a fact-free reality-divergent opinion conflict in which honesty and impartiality are mutually exclusive.

    That is: Were you trying to say something?
    (The line for the privilege-chit, permitting a science forum career of single sentence attempts at playground insult via innuendo without accountability is set up on the slope to your right. Fair warning: the curve in it appears to be unavoidable - so far it appears to end in the posting of gibberish, complete with spittle flecks and posts on the level of birtherism via Baghdad Bob.)
     
  23. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    I expect the article to make the case, fact by fact, statistic by statistic. They usually do, because that is a true statement. Though I personally prefer a more finely tuned exposition of how the top 0.01 % control 99% of the wealth through the 1% of catspaws, bagmen, hatchetmen and useful idiots. (The unaccounted-for 0.09% are opportunists who neither help nor hinder, just wait for the byproduct to fall into their laps; e.g. derivatives traders.)
     
    Last edited: Aug 24, 2020

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