Captain Red Eye
Active member
"We don't want a foreign oligarch to boss us around"!
"We want tyranny of the majority to elect a domestic born oligarch backed scum bag to boss us around"
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Who's watching the President Musk inauguration January 20?
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"We don't want a foreign oligarch to boss us around"!
"We want tyranny of the majority to elect a domestic born oligarch backed scum bag to boss us around"
Captain Red Eye
Active member
eastcoastjoe
Well-known member
is it moving the goalposts?
with the billionaire class and their stranglehold on gubment?
eastcoastjoe
Well-known member
It is when you think your owed something because someone theoretically “stole your wallet”
@Captain Red Eye
i still think you're looking at it upside- down...
popular sovereignty
de jure, by right, we run those mofos... even if the reality of the situation doesn't play out like that.
this isn't an indictment against the system of representstive democracy we have, it's an indictment against how it's been bastardized and coopted by the lowest among us (rich people)
i still think you're looking at it upside- down...
popular sovereignty
de jure, by right, we run those mofos... even if the reality of the situation doesn't play out like that.
this isn't an indictment against the system of representstive democracy we have, it's an indictment against how it's been bastardized and coopted by the lowest among us (rich people)
@eastcoastjoe
yes, sucking wealth out of the working class and funneling it to the welfare queens at the top of the economic rung DOES constitute stealing.
yes, sucking wealth out of the working class and funneling it to the welfare queens at the top of the economic rung DOES constitute stealing.
eastcoastjoe
Well-known member
No one stole anything from you. Nothing is stopping you from prospering but yourself
eastcoastjoe
Well-known member
No one is standing in your way of being successful. Hating on others that do better than you is weak.
The wealthiest 1% has taken $50 trillion from working Americans and redistributed it, a new study finds. Here's what that means.
If it feels like you're working harder for less money than your parents' and grandparents' generations, that's because you are.
www.businessinsider.com
Better Capitalism
The wealthiest 1% has taken $50 trillion from working Americans and redistributed it, a new study finds. Here's what that means.
Opinion by Paul ConstantSep 18, 2020, 9:05 AM EDT
REUTERS/Noah Berger
- Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast with Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein.
- In the latest episode of "Pitchfork Economics," Carter Price, a senior mathematician at Rand Corp., discusses a new report from Rand's researchers.
- The report found that $2.5 trillion is redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the wealthiest 1% of Americans every year.
- The median college-educated American worker would have seen their annual pay double without this theft.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
That's why a new report from the nonpartisan Rand Corp. is so important. Rand's researchers analyzed American incomes between 1975 and 2018 to determine who is earning less money, who's earning more money, and where the money has gone. The results are jaw-dropping.
The true cost of income inequality: $2.5 trillion every year
Each year, $2.5 trillion — yes, trillion with a "T" — has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the wealthiest 1 % of all Americans.That's roughly $50 trillion —again, with a "T"— that used to go to middle-class and working-class Americans that has instead been rerouted to the pockets of the top 1%. When viewed through the data in this report, that huge gap in income inequality doesn't look so much like a law of nature as it does a massive heist.
Thanks to the proliferation of trickle-down policies like tax cuts, wage suppression, and stock-market deregulation, 90% of all Americans are demonstrably worse off financially than they were 45 years ago.
Even those Americans who are lucky enough to be in the upper class — from the 90th to the 99th percentile — have basically been treading water these past few decades. People of color, women, and white men have all lost massive sums of money over the past few decades. It's only the top 1% that has benefited from this $50 trillion transfer of wealth.
Of course, unless we're talking about astronomy or counting grains of sand on a beach, it's difficult for humans to comprehend figures with 12 or 13 zeros. So let's bring those numbers down to a personal level. Let's say you're a median American college-educated worker. Most people would call you comfortable — you likely have a house and a car and a family and all the other trappings of the American dream.
If the ultrarich hadn't rigged the system in their favor, your annual pay would be doubled — somewhere between $48,000 and $63,000 higher per year.
That's about $1,000 or more per weekly paycheck that you could have spent in your community, invested in home improvements, or saved for a rainy day, but which instead went to the wealthiest Americans.
So if it feels like you're working harder for less money than your parents' and grandparents' generations, that's because you are.
Think about what you could do with an extra thousand dollars a week. We've all heard the statistic that nearly half of all Americans are only one $400 emergency away from catastrophe. This is why Americans don't have that $400 — that money, and much more, has gone to some rich guy's offshore bank account."To be clear, this is not some fantasy," and those numbers aren't hypothetical, David Goldstein said in the latest episode of "Pitchfork Economics."
"That is what you would have been earning had income distributions remained constant, and had incomes broadly continued to grow at the same rate as the GDP, as they had done in the three decades prior to 1975," he said.
"If we just kept things the same" as they were in the early '70s, Goldstein added, "the median worker would be earning twice what they are now."
Even someone in the very-well-to-do 90th percentile of all workers making $133,000 per year in 2018 would instead be earning $168,000 a year if more equal pre-1975 economic conditions had persisted.
The episode features an interview with Carter Price, a senior mathematician at Rand who coauthored the report, about his team's findings.
"If you look at income from 1947 to 1975, it more or less grew with per-capita GDP across the board," Price said.
The incomes of the poorest Americans and the wealthiest Americans were all growing at roughly the same rate. "If you look after 1975, we see a big difference between what those at the bottom of the income spectrum were making and those at the top," he added.
Was Price surprised by the final $2.5 trillion-per-year total?
"A little bit," he said. "Had someone just asked me to work it out on a napkin, I probably would've come up with about a trillion — that would have been my guess. Obviously this is two and a half times that, and so I was surprised. We definitely checked those numbers a lot of different ways because it was such a large number."
This kind of wealth concentration isn't just wage theft on a massive scale — it's terrible for the economy.
"There have certainly been a lot of studies that indicate that lower inequality supports faster economic growth," Price said. "It's not a clear-cut case, but there is very strong evidence that that's the case."Or as Nick Hanauer, the host of "Pitchfork Economics," wrote: "I already earn about 1,000 times more per hour than the average American, but I couldn't possibly buy 1,000 times more stuff. I only own so many pairs of pants. My family and I can only eat three meals a day."
The possibilities of what America's workers might have done with the 2018 equivalent of an extra $2.5 trillion in every one of the past 45 years is staggering. It's not hard to imagine the streets of our COVID-19-ravaged communities filled with bustling shops and service providers, and the generations of young low-income Americans who might have been able to transform their parents' extra cushion of savings into greater possibilities.
Instead, that exact same money now sits, basically unnoticed, hoarded in the untapped capital of the wealthiest humans in history.
Ultimately, Price said, the paper's findings showed that "a rising tide has not been lifting all boats, and that's understandable and observable. We're hoping that this helps people better quantify that and better understand."
Now that we understand the real price of income inequality, it will be easier to press our leaders into getting our money back. Hanauer urges everyone to share the Rand report with political candidates and everyone else in power.
"Our elected leaders must reckon with this data and grapple with this problem at the scale of the problem," he said.
"If they understand this as a $50 trillion problem," Goldstein said, "we have a better shot at getting a $50 trillion solution."
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eastcoastjoe
Well-known member
You keep speaking theory. Most people k see complaint about the rich are doing better than most.
What do you do for a living?
i load your groceries onto a trailer with forks, among other things... i survive but i'm well below the povery line.
isn't it telling that some people NOT struggling (youtubers that live in 6 br homes) want to help the working class by aiming to set up an actually unrigged form of capitalism?
isn't it telling that some people NOT struggling (youtubers that live in 6 br homes) want to help the working class by aiming to set up an actually unrigged form of capitalism?
eastcoastjoe
Well-known member
That doesn’t mean you have to continue to live below the poverty line. Just over 20 years ago I stepped out of jail with nothing but the bag i was carrying. I was homeless.
I didn’t even graduate high school. Fast forward, I have been the sole breadwinner for my family for years. I own a nice home, my wife stayed home and raised our children. We live a very good life.
I have a full time job and run a small business. Anyone can do what I did if they want it bad enough.
Captain Red Eye
Active member
They shouldn't run you. That much is true.
The corollary is you shouldn't use the system to run other people either, if those people aren't trying to run you and your mofos.
Equality. Co-exist. Don't you believe what those words really mean?
it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with how things are and how we need them to be.
my family survives. we get by. we have what we need and we live a good life.
this is about us, not me.
eastcoastjoe
Well-known member
Not about you but you were just saying your wallet was stolen ? My point is, there is plenty of opportunity out here for the go getters who want it. A lot of people lack the drive to go get it
??? who am i runnin? murder is illegel because it's bad and because there are weak minded people out there that need laws of man or some magic sky mama to tell them not to do it.
can't co- exist if we don't have some system of protecting us, stateless or not.
i understand that this would come in the form of voluntary action, but i'm just saying... you act like a stateless society is THE ONLY way to "co- exist".
i'm willing to believe we could make it work, but again... you aren't making any good arguments for a stateless society.
i was speaking in rhetoric, i've been this whole time talking about american working class in general.
the billionaires like we've just elected want to continue to rig it in the favor.
you're the guy that hangs out at the rigged carnival game stand mocking those that can't win. 'they don't have enough drive to reaaallllly practice and beat the hustle.'
better yet, it's like being a 3 card monte shill... pro- billionaire- propaganda to lead us marks to the slaughter.
