Likes: http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-...ct-2?g=2&c=bl3
Pretty disturbing.
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Active Member
http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-...ct-2?g=2&c=bl3
Pretty disturbing.
The Enhancer
I wouldn't exactly call this a news article.
Active Member
Thanks for the feedback.
Administrator
I think what Fixer is trying to say is there needs to be more contribution to kickstarting a thread than just posting a link to another web site. Why do you find it disturbing, what do you think are the factors of wealth distribution, etc.
Active Member
Well, the video speaks for itself. The distribution of wealth isn't fair in the country. It's an informative video that I thought might generate a discussion. Most, or a lot of the first posts in this section of the forum begin with just a link and a sentence.
Last edited by GulDukat; 10-26-2013 at 10:31 AM.
Melty Member
My prof showed me this in an econ class and it blew my mind. I knew income inequality was bad in the U.S but not THAT bad. There are sooooooo many negative effects of such massive inequality. I guess in the States it's harder to start a conversation about this because if you bring it up, you are instantly labeled a communist or socialist. It's that way in Canada too I guess, but not as much as it seems from the way American media portrays it.
Active Member
When you bring this up to a conservative--the response is always "Class Warfare!" and that ends the discussion. I'm not saying that capitalism can be abolished or anything, but at the least the wealthy should higher taxes.
Melty Member
You need some income redistribution for capitalism to be healthy. People need to keep the money flowing in the economy for it to function properly. When most of it is held in the top 1/20% of the population, it's just being hoarded away, not being circulated. Of course, taking all the money and redistributing it evenly to everyone isn't the best option either. It never should have gotten this bad in the first place. Recently, the wealth inequality has gotten to the worst it has ever been in the States. Reaganomics and the trickle down effect, seems to be working right?
Hairy Member
We need to start asking about how to fix this, instead of just complaining about it. All of the viable solutions so far have been a fiasco, and I honestly think at this point the populace is at a loss about the best solution.
Last edited by nin5in; 10-26-2013 at 04:24 PM.
Real Hippie Asshole
The November issue of Playboy has an interview with Bernie Sanders that I think everyone interested in these issues should read.
http://www.playboy.com/playground/vi...yboy-interviewWe live in a hypercapitalist society, which means the function of every institution is not to perform a public service but to make as much money as possible.
Last edited by Wolfkiller; 10-27-2013 at 02:38 PM.
Bite me
Great interview, thanks for the link.Originally Posted by Wolfkiller
Active Member
holy blogspam. just link to the damn youtube!
The wealth inequality that is being pointed at is a symptom of a problem. It isn't the problem. Videos like this only serve to misrepresent the situation, further divide people, and create a giant straw-man for opponents to tear apart. We certainly have an issue with how wealth is distributed but this video is fundamentally flawed in many ways... For example:
#1 Whoever made this has no idea what socialism is. It doesn't produce a flat distribution like that.
#2 They are conflating wealth and income as they roll through the data. Those are not interchangeable!
#3 Why is 92% of public opinion somehow an accurate source for what defines a functional economy? After watching public discourse over the last decade, I would say at least 92% of the public has a horrible grasp of basic economics.
#4 Where is this "ideal" distribution coming from? Do people just like the shape? There is literally no tangible justification for "ideal" distribution in this video other than "eh.. seems about right"
#5 Do people actually think your income is related to how hard you work instead of what value you bring to a business? That's what the video implies.
Throbbing Member
Many do if you go by all the "dole bludgers this" and "lazy welfare cheats that" rhetoric. I utterly despise that shit.
Last edited by xmd 5a; 11-01-2013 at 08:30 PM.
Active Member
Those people are idiots. Bitching about entitlements and promoting "free market" while pulling out the lazy line is annoying. It's sad how few people call them out on that specific hypocrisy, as you did. I definitely think much of our entitlement programs are making the wealth gap even worse. We should have safety nets that catch people when they fall, they just shouldn't be something that so many become permanently dependent on.
Vertiginous Member
I think they're taxed just fine, the issue is the hiding of so much of that money in tax havens. Raising their taxes would just encourage more of that, what's needed is tighter legislation on what happens to that income and/or how it's accessed, or an overhaul of how the IRS works.
Active Member
See what tax rates for the rich used to be like. How about raising taxes and getting rid of loopholes? The wealthy will still do just fine.
Active Member
And all that tax money gets fed right back to the rich via bullshit like bailouts and crony capitalism. Ever wonder why so much money gets spent during election campaigns and where it comes from? Who do you think gets elected and is going to control all that tax money? You should probably fix that before you try and throw more money their way.
That tax money also gets fed into poorly designed welfare/income redistribution/entitlement/whateverYouWantToCallIt systems that basically lock people below middle-class while also reducing the incentive to move upward. Poof, no more middle class! You get to be poor or rich. Good luck moving out of poverty!
Bite me
We need a flat tax. 10% across the board, everyone, every entity, no write-offs, no not-for-profit, with the exception of the poor (determined by income threshold).
I totally disagree that a welfare state reduces the incentive to move upward. The poverty level that people live in while collecting welfare is not an incentive. But, free trade schools, day care, etc. IS an incentive. People so poor that they can't afford a car and car insurance or day care or public transportation, THAT'S what locks them in.
Social Security is NOT welfare, and I hate the new "entitlement" term for things like Social Security and Medicare.
Last edited by allegro; 11-02-2013 at 11:18 AM.
Active Member
Flat tax would be AWESOME. Most progressives hate that idea though.
Welfare reducing fiscal mobility is a small part, comparatively, of the current issue. Who controls tax money and ends up giving it back to themselves is much bigger. That said, there are many demonstrations of why welfare reduces your mobility.
Here is just one demonstration:
Bite me
I don't understand that chart at all. Welfare at $55,000? Welfare reform requires you to get to work within a few years, you can't sit on your ass and collect welfare your entire life, then your welfare checks stop at a certain point.
And all of this is, really, digression. It doesn't address that large gap between the upper and middle class. You can make $150,000 per year, now, but are you "rich?" Nope. Not relatively speaking.
I don't know one progressive who hates the idea of a flat tax. The only person / entity hurt by a flat tax = billionaires and billionaire corporations. Most everybody is currently paying MORE than 10% in income taxes, except for, like, G.E. or big oil or big corporations or bogus not-for-profits.
Last edited by allegro; 11-02-2013 at 01:02 PM.
Active Member
I don't like the idea of a flat tax at all. A progressive tax system seems a lot more fair. The Koch Brothers can afford to pay more than a 15% tax rate.
Bite me
PLAYBOY: You have said, “There are people working three jobs and four jobs, trying to cobble together an income in order to support their families.” Has the middle class died forever?
SANDERS: Well, I certainly hope it’s not forever, but one of the untold stories of our time is the collapse of the American middle class. From the end of World War II until 1973, we saw an expanding middle class, with people’s incomes going up. Since that point, and especially since the Wall Street–driven financial crisis, you’ve seen a real collapse. Since 1999 median family income has gone down $5,000. Real unemployment, counting people who have given up looking for work or who are working part-time when they want to work full-time, is more than 14 percent. More than 14 percent! You’re seeing millions of people working longer hours for lower wages. When I was growing up in a lower-middle-class family, the gold standard for blue-collar workers was union manufacturing in the automobile industry. As the big three have been rehiring, they’re hiring people at something like $14 an hour, half the wages. The U.S. has 46 million people living in poverty today. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.
PLAYBOY: How do you explain that?
SANDERS: We live in a hypercapitalist society, which means the function of every institution is not to perform a public service but to make as much money as possible. There’s an effort to privatize water, for God’s sake. I suppose somebody will figure out how to charge you for the oxygen you breathe. The function of health care, in a rational world, is to make sure every person, as a right, has access to the health care they need in the most cost-effective way possible. That is not the nature of our health care system at all. The function of this health care system is for people in the system—whether it’s insurance companies, drug companies, medical specialists—to make as much money out of it as possible. In five minutes one could come up with ways to make the system simpler and more cost effective.
PLAYBOY: Has this hypercapitalism accelerated lately?
SANDERS: People have lost sight of America as a society where everyone has at least a minimal standard of living and is entitled to certain basic rights, a nation in which every child has a good-quality education, has access to health care and lives in an environmentally clean community, not as an opportunity for billionaires to make even more money and avoid taxes by stashing their money in the Cayman Islands. Can you argue that the era of unfettered capitalism should be over? Absolutely. Does this system of hypercapitalism, this incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income, need fundamental reform? Absolutely it does. You have the entire scientific community saying we have to be very aggressive in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Yet you’re seeing the heads of coal companies and oil companies willing to sacrifice the well-being of the entire planet for their short-term profits. And these folks are funding phony organizations to try to create doubt about the reality of global warming.
PLAYBOY: Aren’t they just taking care of their shareholders?
SANDERS: Big business is willing to destroy the planet for short-term profits. I regard that as just incomprehensible. Incomprehensible. And because of their power over the political process, you hear a deafening silence in the U.S. Congress and in other bodies around the world about the severity of the problem. Global warming is a far more serious problem than Al Qaeda.
PLAYBOY: Today, people who don’t have a union, pensions or health care feel resentful of those who do have those benefits.
SANDERS: That’s part of the Republican plan. It has worked very well. This is not a new idea. Think back 50 years, to the 1950s and the 1960s. The lowest-paid white workers in America were where? They were in Mississippi, in Alabama. How did those companies get away with paying them such low wages? They played them off against black workers, who were even worse off. Then over the years you play immigrants against native-born people; you play straight people against gay people. Rather than say, “Firefighters have a halfway decent health care program, and we have to make sure you get one as good as theirs,” Republicans are pretty clever in playing one group against another. When you have a president of the United States who is talking about cuts in Social Security and veterans’ programs, who was willing earlier on to give continued tax breaks to billionaires and unwilling to go after huge corporate loopholes, people sit there and say, “Both parties are working for the big-money interests.”
PLAYBOY: Ten years ago jobs were going abroad to low-wage countries. Now jobs are coming back because we’re seen as an even lower-wage country.
SANDERS: There’s a quote I can dig up for you from some guy saying General Electric can expand in the United States because the wages are now competitive with the rest of the world. You can now hire workers in America for wages so low it becomes a good investment for American companies. That is pathetic. The goal of all those trade agreements was, in fact, to shut down plants in America. We have lost almost 60,000 manufacturing plants and millions of good-paying jobs in the past 10 years. Products go to China, Vietnam and elsewhere, are manufactured and brought back to the United States, not only causing unemployment in this country but pushing wages down. That’s what corporate America has wanted, and it has significantly succeeded.
PLAYBOY: You’ve said that today the wealthiest 400 individuals in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people.
SANDERS: One family, the Waltons, who own Walmart, has more wealth than the bottom 40 percent. The top one percent today owns 38 percent of all wealth. Take a wild and crazy guess as to what the bottom 60 percent own.
PLAYBOY: Probably five percent.
SANDERS: No, 2.3 percent. When we were growing up and read about oligarchic countries in Latin America and elsewhere, did you ever think that in the United States one percent would own 38 percent of the wealth and the bottom 60 percent only 2.3 percent? As part of the budget debate, I brought forth an amendment in committee. I looked at my Republican friends and said something like “I know you’ve been interested in welfare reform. So am I, and I want to give you the opportunity right now to take on the biggest welfare cheat in the United States of America.” In state after state, Walmart employees are on Medicaid, they’re on food stamps, they’re in publicly subsidized housing. I said, “If we can raise the minimum wage and get a living wage for these people, we’re going to save billions of dollars. The wealthiest family in this country, the Walton family, is getting welfare from the taxpayers of this country. Let’s end that.” You’ll be shocked to know I didn’t get any votes from the Republicans on that.
PLAYBOY: You make the U.S. sound like a banana republic in which a handful of families control all the economic and political power.
SANDERS: Yes, it is. In more technical economic terms I would call it an oligarchy. You have an economy where a very few people control a large part of the wealth. You have an economy where the top six financial institutions have assets equivalent to two thirds of the GDP of the United States, more than $9 trillion. That’s economic control. On top of that, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance, Citizens United, said to these folks, “Hey, so you own the economy. Fine. Now we’re giving you the opportunity to own the political process.” The other part of the story is what happens on the floors of the Senate and the House. If there’s a tough vote in the House or the Senate—for example, legislation to break up the large banks—people might come up and say, “Bernie, that’s a pretty good idea, but I can’t vote for that.” Why not? Because when you go home, what do you think is going to happen? Wall Street dumps a few million dollars into your opponent’s campaign.
PLAYBOY: You once said, “It is Robin Hood in reverse. We are taking from working families who are hurting and giving it to the wealthiest people.”
SANDERS: Welcome to America 2013. We are in the midst of intense class warfare, where the wealthiest people and the largest corporations are at war with the middle class and working families of this country, and it is obvious the big-money interests are winning that war. They are winning the war in terms of their lobbyists negotiating tax breaks for people who don’t need them and then fighting for cuts for working families. The Business Roundtable—CEOs of the largest companies in the U.S.—came to Washington earlier this year and proposed that we raise the Medicare and Social Security eligibility ages to 70. Can you imagine the chutzpah of guys who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases and have retirement packages the likes of which average Americans couldn’t even dream, proposing that? Can you imagine somebody who will get a golden parachute of perhaps tens of millions of dollars—who is not going to have a financial worry in his or her life—coming to Washington and saying, “I want you to raise Medicare eligibility to 70”?
PLAYBOY: Is the problem that wealthy CEOs are out of touch with the concerns of the common man?
SANDERS: Absolutely. These are people whose kids live in gated communities, people who get into their chauffeured cars when they travel, into their own jet planes, and go all over the world. They eat at the finest restaurants; they work out in the greatest gyms. They haven’t got a clue or a concern about what’s going on with ordinary Americans.
PLAYBOY: We saw one calculation that said if the productivity of workers was matched to the minimum wage, the minimum wage in America would be $22 an hour, three times what it is.
SANDERS: If I give you a new tool—for example, a computer as opposed to a yellow pad—we have a right to expect you to be more productive, right? If I give a guy in the woods a chain saw as opposed to an old-fashioned saw, that guy’s going to cut down more trees. Here is the irony: Our society has become far more productive—productivity has soared—and yet all the gains from that productivity have gone to the people at the top. While you have become more productive as a worker, your wages, income and benefits have gone down.
Last edited by allegro; 11-02-2013 at 01:11 PM.
Bite me
If the Koch brothers paid 10 or 15%, that's 10 or 15% more than what they're paying now, which is zero. They hide all their money in the Cayman Islands. And 10 or 15% of THEIR income (we first need to define income in a way that's taxable) is a LOT OF FUCKING MONEY.
Active Member
@allegro - Here is the source for that image: http://www.scribd.com/doc/114628958/welfare-failure There are lots of "welfare cliffs" like that. Welfare varies quite a bit from state to state (and even county sometimes), add in all the various family conditions and types and it makes it more complex. You can't just roll up a single national graph and point at the issue. It's much like every issue (crime, education, etc). You'll find a lot of examples and opinions on welfare cliffs. Some are poorly assembled using bad/incomplete data, so watch out.
Much of the 2012 republican primary candidates were proposing flat taxes and basically ever democrat source I could find was calling flat taxes "a tax cut for the rich and tax increase for the poor"
Active Member
The idea is that they would pay more than 15% and wouldn't hide it in the Cayman Islands.
Bite me
And with a flat tax and a revision of the tax code, they couldn't do that. Obviously, a flat tax would require a revision of the tax code. Bigtime.
Anyway, I think Sanders knows more about this than any of us, what he says is important ^^.
SANDERS: When we were growing up and read about oligarchic countries in Latin America and elsewhere, did you ever think that in the United States one percent would own 38 percent of the wealth and the bottom 60 percent only 2.3 percent? As part of the budget debate, I brought forth an amendment in committee. I looked at my Republican friends and said something like “I know you’ve been interested in welfare reform. So am I, and I want to give you the opportunity right now to take on the biggest welfare cheat in the United States of America.” In state after state, Walmart employees are on Medicaid, they’re on food stamps, they’re in publicly subsidized housing. I said, “If we can raise the minimum wage and get a living wage for these people, we’re going to save billions of dollars. The wealthiest family in this country, the Walton family, is getting welfare from the taxpayers of this country. Let’s end that.” You’ll be shocked to know I didn’t get any votes from the Republicans on that.
PLAYBOY: You make the U.S. sound like a banana republic in which a handful of families control all the economic and political power.
SANDERS: Yes, it is. In more technical economic terms I would call it an oligarchy. You have an economy where a very few people control a large part of the wealth. You have an economy where the top six financial institutions have assets equivalent to two thirds of the GDP of the United States, more than $9 trillion. That’s economic control. On top of that, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance, Citizens United, said to these folks, “Hey, so you own the economy. Fine. Now we’re giving you the opportunity to own the political process.” The other part of the story is what happens on the floors of the Senate and the House. If there’s a tough vote in the House or the Senate—for example, legislation to break up the large banks—people might come up and say, “Bernie, that’s a pretty good idea, but I can’t vote for that.” Why not? Because when you go home, what do you think is going to happen? Wall Street dumps a few million dollars into your opponent’s campaign.
Last edited by allegro; 11-02-2013 at 02:03 PM.
Active Member
Exactly why we need to fix that before anything else really can work. Giving more power and more money to the government is giving it all to the rich. It's near impossible to make other changes until this is done. Any small changes you manage to make will be quickly corroded. It's a losing game.
Bite me
SANDERS: Bank of America operated 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands. In 2010 it got a $1.9 billion rebate from the IRS. There’s a list of about 15 companies that paid nothing, or very little, in taxes. Many of these institutions—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase—were actually bailed out by the American people. They were wonderful, proud American companies when they came for their welfare checks from the American people. After the bailout, they suddenly love the Cayman Islands and are parking all their money there. The next time they go broke, they can go to the Cayman Islands for a bailout, not the American people. There’s an estimate out there that we’re losing about $100 billion a year because companies are taking advantage of the tax havens in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and so on—$100 billion a year!
SANDERS: Today one out of four major profitable corporations pays zero in federal income taxes. Got that? Today, what corporations are paying into the U.S. Treasury, as a percentage of GDP, is lower than in any other major country on earth. You would think that before you cut health care, education, nutrition or Social Security, you might want to take a hard look at that issue. I mean, am I missing something here?
SANDERS: Every speech I give, I get a question. “Bernie, I don’t understand. These CEOs and large financial institutions were clearly engaged in fraudulent behavior, but none of these guys is in jail. Why?” Attorney General Eric Holder said he had concerns about the Department of Justice prosecuting large financial institutions because if they became destabilized, it would have an impact on our economy and the world economy. In other words, these guys are not only too big to fail, they’re too big to jail.
Last edited by allegro; 11-02-2013 at 02:26 PM.
Active Member
The problem with Sanders is that his answer is "tax the rich more" instead of going after the root. I agree with his assessment of the problem, just not his solution. Why not get the rich out of government, make it harder for them to get in, or remove the incentive for them to get in? This would fix WAY more than just the growing wealth inequality.
tempus est umbra in mente
Or we could all just snap our fingers and wake up in a libertarian utopia.
Really though, how do you suggest de-incentifying government positions of power?
Last edited by Jinsai; 11-02-2013 at 09:00 PM.
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