unpro wrote:yea, hes had money his entire life. doesnt mean he hasnt worked very hard to keep and grow his business to the level it is.
Sorry, but the distribution of wealth is deadly to the system. The fact you sit here and defend a system with a couple hundred thousand people amalgamating most of the wealth calls system failure. A couple million people in a system of 300+ million cannot drive GDP, what ultimately increases their own wealth.
Fleecing the middle class has long term consequences and indicates complete system failure.
More to the point, there is a massive distortion that the guy who sits on the Board of Directors and is the Chief Executive Officer does millions of more in dollars of work to his company than anyone else is getting fucking tiresome.
The greatest single indicator of wealth is nepotism. Not hard work or coming up with something novel.
You think the fact Goldman Sachs has set aside $10 billion for executive compensation and bonuses when they lost $428 million in the 3rd quarter doesn't strike me in line with normalcy (
here). That's stripping operating capital from the company you manage.
the main point he makes though is these bailouts shouldnt have happened, he admits to paying around 50% tax on his income, and can you blame him for thinking a higher tax is a little obscene?
Except his true income is from capital gains, which he pays almost a negligible amount of money on. The fact you have the two wealthiest people in the U.S., Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, telling us to increase taxes on the wealthy flies in the face of the illogical argument you're throwing around. Steve Jobs, Howard Schultz, etc. all have $1 annual salaries with their companies. It is a tax write off. The benefits are staggering, you know, the stuff the middle class doesn't have access to.
Yea, he might pay $50% of his tax on his income, which is fine. He's paying nothing on capital gains, which is his real income. It is stripping wealth out of the system.
sure the base tax is 35% on the wealthiest, but the marginal tax is what really gets them. people seem to forget about that, and completely disregard the situation of the country when looking at tax history and GDP or job growth during periods in the past 60 years.
Uh, no. Just no.
the highest growth occurred during the period during/after ww2 and the height of the cold war when we where pushing out massive amounts of resources to other countries rebuilding from devastating war and increasing our own production and manufacturing base to compensate for the need and to compete with the soviets in development of new technologies. we spent massive amounts of money developing new technologies and enhancing science and its propped us up for years
No, this isn't true at all. What pushed GDP and demand was the post-war salaries of the American soldier and individual that had pushed during the war-making effort. The war was bleak and offered no genuine growth. When the soldiers came home, they had salaries and pushed demand. The explosion in home sales, cars, and heavy manufactured goods. Americans suddenly had the money to demand nice things and the war had pushed technology.
The war definitely increased GDP, but it didn't increase it like you think. The post-war years up through the end of the 60s were phenomenal years. People were paid a real wage and in turn could continue to demand nice things. Do you understand this concept? Rationed goods preclude serious demand, and almost anything produced went to the govenrment first.
The marginal propensity to consume and spend money accumulated is so much higher in the middle and lower classes. The wealthy don't spend their wealth in any meaningful way. It is why the argument we should cut their taxes and let the money trickle down is false (and probably criminally stupid at this point). A single individual can only demand so much. Stripping the money out of the system through executive compensation through high risk CDOs and MBSs that were designed to fail ultimately is stupid and ignorant of any rational Adam Smith-type response.
after that was the late 80s and 90s. a period when the dotcom bubble started to appear and computers and the related technologies really started to come into effect. we have been in a downward spiral manufacturing wise for years, and once we start spending money to support 2 wars as well as endure a massive recession, suddenly it looks bad. bail out companies that should have failed, and suddenly they have the liquid assets to sit on the funds and manage to balloon themselves back up. nothings changed, we just enabled people who made terrible decisions to benefit from the decisions. its like giving a guy who killed a person while driving drunk a new car and a lifetime supply of budweiser with no repercussions. it wont change the behavior and it puts it in his mind that its acceptable.
Nothing wrong with bailing out companies. There is something wrong with bailing out the companies in the way we did without any stipulations. You cannot just let businesses fail anymore. It is going to wreck the economy. Like, it is easy to get sanctimonious and say "yeah, that's how it works, fuck those companies!" Except they're capital investors. When they die, so does the finance for companies who do actually produce stuff and provide real jobs. This causes them to fail. More people out of work, etc.
So, what then? Well, since the Libertarian agenda has to been to castrate education and social services, the system keeps getting worse. People aren't smart enough to turn around and fix the system and it is the same pieces of shit in charge who put it all there in the first place.
There is nothing wrong with expecting someone to contribute their fair share to society to make it work. Greed and Ayn Rand think there is something wrong with it, but Ayn Rand is a hypocritical cunt that lived off social security benefits under a false name.
