Comments appreciated beyond saying I must be a socialist imbecille just for posting.
- Thread starter Swan Noir
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excerpt Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs (GS) estimates that alternative capital funding could top $100 billion per year in a blink. All it would take is pension funds shifting less than 1% of the $20 trillion in assets they have under management into reinsurance........ from this article http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2013/09/25/collateralized-investments/#read 20 trill in pension funds at just one firm
Just like the former Soviet Union before its collapse.
We're headed down the same path.
Exactly right, which proves that socialism, not modern day capitalism is more profitable for the elites in the long run.
Capitalism, as it's supposed to work, would be illustrated by the first, or even the second graph that was shown. It's a great system for the general population and the overall economy, but not as profitable as what our current day robber barons would like for themselves. Hence, you destroy the society sucking up as much money as you can along the way. You invest in nothing. You build nothing. You push paper and make money for yourself and only yourself. You do this through buying political hacks to pass favorable laws which facilitate the theft, and you own the media minions to spew the b.s., pitting one political party against the other, while the elites play both sides, profiting no matter who is king for a day. Once the society has been bled dry, you move on to your next victim. Shanghai ain't a bad place to live if you're worth billions.
I was surprised to learn that the majority of citizens are not aware of the real distribution. Probably the awareness among those on ET is much higher. The actual distribution has been the subject of numerous threads here.
It is ironic that we have some colleagues concerned that the government might try to rectify this dangerous wealth distribution by, in their words, "redistributing" wealth (or income). What's ironic is that they don't recognize that "redistribution" is how we got to the present state! So the kind of redistribution being talked about by some in the political arena may be better characterized as a reversal of the redistribution that has already occurred. A redistribution of the redistribution, in other words.
It is more complicated than it at first might seem to sort out and order all of the factors that caused our present top heavy wealth distribution; one that more or less mimics that of the 1920's. Certainly the near elimination of the progressive character of the income tax during the 1980's played some part, and an uneven distribution of inflation's impact since the "Nixon shock" played a part too. Off-shoring of jobs was still another factor.
Secondary factors might include deregulation and rampant privatization, even into places where it clearly did not belong, such as prisons and passport issuance. Unintended consequences of the "Great Society" and Welfare programs on education, motivation and initiative may have also contributed, as has possibly our excessive shift of capital into defense and medical sectors that has left too little to maintain and build infrastructure -- we are for example the only one of our 13 sister industrialized nations that does not have a modern nationwide mass transit system. We have instead relied on energy inefficient transport by air; that's inaccessible to the poor.
One may draw a line between those who have essentially no discretionary income to invest, and those who do. This is, to a quite rough approximation, the same line that separates what we call "labor" and what we call "capital". All of the aforementioned factors are possible contributors to the population to the left of that line growing and that to the right shrinking.
If we don't want to court a serious breakdown in public order, we had better start looking at ways to create a natural, spontaneous, and fair reversal of the wealth redistribution occurring since the late 1970's. Our democratic republic can't survive and flourish unless we do something about the slow decimation of the lower middle class and the growth of our poor ranks.
Well said.
It's all a big game of the ultra rich eating the poor. The only times that it had tilted a little more towards the even keel is when there is a good deal of civil unrest.
I feel like we are nearing a turning point, it's going to go one way or the other, this time does the nation take a trip down a dark road where we end up in a similar situation to Mexico? I use mexico as an example because I presently spend part of the year there.
It happens when large publicly traded corporations control the majority of the media, the public (mis)education system, and become the government. Our government is a plutocracy, not a democracy.
If the plutocracy had painful consequences for its detrimental behavior, the behavior would diminish. They have no skin in the game, nothing to lose. They're the ultimate "welfare queens".
Do you think there'd be any risk whatsoever of a government shutdown if Congress were the first to go? :eek: