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

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

  1. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    What do you think?

    People seem to want to bring the system down on anyone who is "wealthly" or "rich" and in my observation that tends to be anyone who is better off, no matter the degree.

    A good case in point is wanting capital gains favorable tax treatment to go away and to have all gains taxed at regular income rates. People with houses don't argue for that and most people with a house will pay no tax on their gains. Should that be taxed a regular income rates? No one seems to be arguing for that.

    Most people have a 401k of some kind or own some stocks outright or easily could. Arguing against that because "the rich" have stocks is silly. The "rich" have a lot of things.

    Day traders do pay regular income rates. The whole purpose of capital gains rates being low is to encourage investment. Would these same people be happy if "the rich" just kept their assets in a bank savings account?

    How would that help the economy? That's why I said that it must be envy. Not of the person but of the money because otherwise it's just a counterproductive argument (for their own circumstance). Shrinking the economy doesn't help those who are calling everyone else "rich".

    I think you know this and just feel like eating popcorn today.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    Or perhaps you favor the anarcho/socialist model?
     
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  3. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    By funding government programs that help the economy. The most forward looking of those, of course, are education and research. However, more immediate programs (roads, public transportation, infrastructure) also help the economy.
     
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  5. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Not personally. There are thousands of co-ops and communes around the world, operating below the radar of capitalist societies; There are still probably a few villages and tribes tucked away where civilization hasn't been able to destroy them utterly; some First Nations are making a valiant effort to restore their communities. But none of those are examples of what needs to happen to the big modern nations: this is a new situation. If we had any collective sense, each country would look to remodel its own house by the least destructive methods available to it - and a good many viable ideas have already been published, some even tried in pilot projects.
    That's what would happen if the smart people were in charge. They're not, so it can't.
    Our survivors will have to find their own way, in whatever kind of wreckage we leave them.
     
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  7. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, we understand that taxes can fund forward looking projects. The question is will more taxes do that and will increases taxes on capital gains result in more total revenues?

    I think not.
     
  8. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    OK, so you imagine that there is a problem that's greater than what would result in your scenario yet there is no example historically of a better system and I'm guessing you aren't personally going back to a hunter/gatherer or farming subsistence form of living.

    No internet, no government safety net, just pretty much what you could find in the worst run countries on the African continent?
     
  9. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Oh no! There is a problem! I'm a very long way from alone in noticing that there is a problem.
    Eh? I don't have a 'scenario'. I can see very, very bad shit coming down the track, very, very fast, and you asked what my solution would be. I offered a suggestion. I don't have any hope of it actually taking place.
    Of course there is. Pretty much all the previous economic systems were better in some ways, at least until they were corrupted beyond redemption. But, it's true, no monetary system is sustainable for very long. Most of them never got a chance to measure their natural life-span, because some war of conquest chopped them off in mid-flourish. However, some version of anarcho-socialism has existed, before and during and in spite of the monetarized civilizations for about 30,000 years, give or take a few millennia.
    But then, what use is historical example for an unprecedented catastrophe?
    Of course not. I am personally going to become extinct in the near future - hopefully, before the freight-train with the load of bad shit arrives.
    You still don't understand, do you? All the nets are being ripped and tattered. I'm not bringing them down; I'm not advocating bringing them down. Things fall apart...
     
    Last edited: Aug 6, 2020
  10. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634
    Well, see - that's your approach. Use up everything as fast as we can. Keep our debt-based economy which requires ever increasing amounts of debt to grow the money supply - which only works if expansion in everything (labor, resources, energy, food) goes on forever. Lift everyone to the high consumption level of Americans.

    Then when it can't expand any more you have an unrecoverable crash - because this time there really isn't any more oil, or any more land, and the land that we have can only support the population when we have the fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and transport of a modern oil-based economy.

    "Just get more oil!" you say. But after the next big crash there's no energy to run the very energy intensive tight oil wells. That cheap, easy to get oil you once used to start the energy economy just isn't there.

    "Deny the Africans/Indians/Chinese the good life!" you say. History has shown that that really doesn't work without genocide.

    Perhaps there's a better method that doesn't require endless growth in population, resources, land and energy usage. Perhaps instead of going back to a "hunter/gatherer or farming subsistence form of living" we could go back to, say, a 1940's standard of living. No really rich people - but no one starving either. No flying across the globe on a whim - but also no mass refugee movements. No private jets - but no one dying because they can't get clean water. Seems like a better option.
     
    Last edited: Aug 6, 2020
  11. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    I re-watched Christopher Nolan's Interstellar recently, and Seattle's attitude reminds me a bit of some ideas explored within the film--specifically the notion that getting people to make great sacrifices for the known,i.e., their children, their grandchildren... especially to their own personal detriment, is one thing, and it's entirely plausible; OTOH, getting people to make great sacrifices for the unknown, the presently non-existent great-great grandchildren or the people slaving away their lives for us on the other side of the planet, is nigh to impossible.
     
  12. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    That, too. But, like any religion or psychotropic drug, Capitalism also affects brain function. Or something. They can't think in any other terms, any other frames of reference.
     
  13. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Are you saying that the poor in the 1940's were better off than the poor today? Are you just worrying about the poor in the U.S.? The global poor are better off today and the poor in the U.S. are also better off today.

    The scapegoat in your head of the greedy rich is just that, a scapegoat. Private jets isn't a global problem. There have always been rich people. Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, etc.

    Whatever standards/stats you want to use, we're better off now. I suspect you're better off than your parents and grandparents too.
     
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634
    They were about the same. Bottom quintile has seen almost zero movement over the past 80 years. Take a look: (this only goes back about 60 years though)

    https://www.advisorperspectives.com...6/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective
    Nope. Worldwide.
    Right. And they, as individuals, are not the problem.
    Not if you're poor in the US.
     
  15. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    That is not true.
    The US system between 1935 and 1982.
    That link is to a seriously deceptive article, which is so cleverly and carefully worded it almost has to be deliberately dishonest. Beginning with his ostensible comparison of 1950, when the US was still digging out of WWII, with current circumstances still riding on the residue of the enormous gains of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, he is concealing the downturn and erosion under the structural changes of the early 1980s, as well as the source and nature and timeline of the prosperity gains the US enjoyed under the New Deal.
    For example:
    The people who stormed the beaches at Normandy did not grow up in the 1950s, as the author initially claimed to be comparing. They were born into the Great Depression, of mothers who had grown up in a boom&bust American economy strongly resembling the one Reagan imposed on the US in the early 80s and we are still living under today - with consequences (such as that Americans are no longer the wealthiest, tallest, longest lived, and healthiest people on the planet) increasingly visible to the most casual of observers.
    Another:
    Notice that he has without warning or notice switched from talking about the poor (those under the poverty line) to the lower middle class (those "at" the poverty line). Notice that he is not dealing with significant material wealth and its benefits, such as houses and savings and education and medical care and leisure time. Notice that he ignores such major afflictions of poverty as a household requiring more than one job to maintain - his comparison is therefore between the toys one can buy with 80 hours of paid labor per week and the toys one could buy with 40 hours of paid labor in 1950.

    In my opinion the author arranged those and several other similar rhetorical deceptions intentionally, that he knew what he was doing.
    I am saying that the poor in 1979 were better off than the poor today - most dramatically in terms of their future, if the current trends continue and the current system is not reformed.
    You are no good at mindreading. Those childish stereotypes of the wingnut Republican media feed are in your head, not other people's.
     
  17. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634
    From that article:

    " . . .economists believe that poverty should be measured relative to the wealth of a society (PDF), not in terms of absolute deprivation . . .This isn’t some bleeding-heart liberal view. Adam Smith made the same point in The Wealth of Nations: “A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.”

    Some economists argue that the Internet, mobile phones, and air conditioning are the linen shirts of the 21st century. Even manual labor jobs now sometimes require a candidate to access the Internet to either find a listing or apply. Less than 30 percent of families living in poverty have Internet service in the home."

    So in terms of income they haven't moved in much in 60 years. And in many ways they are even worse off today, because most do not even have the tools to apply for jobs.
     
  18. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    These kinds of discussions always bring to mind the myth of the "welfare queen." The dismissive sorts will allege that she prefers to stay at home and collect welfare; those living in reality will acknowledge that, often enough, for a single mother, being on welfare makes more financial sense--and may well be the only realistic option, in that whatever jobs may be available to her simply do not pay enough to cover both the usual living expenses as well as childcare.
     
  19. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    That's some cherry picking. Don't include the good times of the 20's or the bad times of the 30's. Ignore WWII but enjoy the post war boom.

    Reagan was elected for a reason. Inflation was in the double digits, unemployment was high, gas tripled in price in a year or two and Carter was a disaster.

    Those are the policies that you presumably "like".

    The "system" that we have now is the same "system" that we had in your cherry picked years. Is Slate a right wing wingnut publication?

    You guys are just looking for reasons to complain rather than having people take more personal responsibility for their lives/outcomes.
     
  20. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    If her earning potential is that low, don't have kids. The "welfare queen" isn't the single mother with a single child who's husband died at a young age.

    It's entire generations of women with larger families from several different fathers who choose to continue this lifestyle. Otherwise there would be the inner city poverty that currently exists in many places.
     
  21. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    9,253
    What are your thoughts on socialist economies, Seattle?
     
  22. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Nope. It's an average. All the stuff in between is averaged in.
    Yep. And there a reason Obama was elected in a landslide. The mismanagement of the economy that resulted in the Great Depression was not something anyone wanted to see repeated. And the White House's alienation of racial minorities, young voters and more educated voters guaranteed that they wouldn't vote for a repeat, either.

    Neither one has much to do with poverty over time, though. So I'm not sure why you brought it up.
    Once again your strawman fails.

    Instead of making up a position to argue against, why not discuss what has been stated here?

    Which "you guys" would that be?

    In general I note that democrats tend to hold poor people blameless and funnel money to them. Republicans tend to hold rich people blameless and funnel money to them. Exactly the same goal (garner their support) - just different targeted audiences.
     
  23. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Nor is she a black woman living high on the hog, having as many children as she can so she can profit from their birth. That's a racist myth that is used by conservatives who want to cut aid from the real recipients.
    Since there in fact is that poverty - your argument doesn't really work.
     

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