I came here to say this exact thing… many people I know who vote Republican truly believe that if they just keep working hard, they too will be mega-rich one day. The other part of this is that anyone who isn’t working and is getting government support to, you know, feed their kids, is just lazy and not trying hard enough…
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For example, if a lender wants to sell my debt for less than its worth they must first offer to sell it to me. If i refuse to buy it they can then sell it to anyone.
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The great thing about “trickle down” is that the very phrase conjures an image of someone on their knees hoping for scraps to fall off the table.
Or, you know . . . an image of someone getting urinated on.
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Oldie but goodie:
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Speaking as a small business owner, fuck you right back. Can we all agree that big businesses like Amazon and Walmart treat their employees relatively poorly? And they employ hundreds of thousands of people. In your scenario, some unknown percentage of small businesses are shitty, leaving some percentage NOT shitty. Wouldn’t small businesses then be better, on the whole, than big businesses?
But all that aside, here’s a reason to prefer small businesses over large: Walmart and similar companies have gutted the US economy through “value engineering.” While small businesses might tend toward this, we lack the economic might to actually make it happen. My company can’t force a supplier to use cheaper components or to offshore his production, but Walmart does so explicitly. Then all that supplier’s former staff is unemployed, and Walmart’s prices force me out of business as well. Now all us unemployed people will probably be forced into lower-paying jobs (or remain unemployed), reducing our purchasing power, forcing the Walmarts of the world to further value engineer. It’s a death spiral. You’re welcome to hate small businesses, but we’re simply not capable of the destruction that those big companies are.
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In most states, there’s no reason to register with any political party. You can vote for whomever you damned well please, and can even write people’s names in if nothing on the ballot strikes your fancy.
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I think the way to look at it is the way Warren Buffet has spoken about:
- good public schools and universities gave him his start;
- extensive, maintained roads, sound bridges, etc. enables him and his employees to do their work safely;
- public utilities infrastructure make everything better, at home and work;
- a functioning government at every level makes communities stable and proactive to the needs of their constituents.
Basically, the neo-Republicans want to be cheats: they want to benefit from goods and services without paying appropriately for them. And it’s a very short-sighted fraud, since a poorly educated and trained populace unable to get to work or the store will not be good workers OR good consumers.
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Hey, to be fair, guillotines worked out pretty well for France.
Just sayin’… 
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It’s nearly a tautology that things that continue to exist are self-reinforcing. Power adds to itself almost every time, and money is power. Basically, money is the right to assign value to things in the market. If the wealthy get to decide what wealth is, we shouldn’t be surprised that they get more wealthy.
At some point there is a reality check, but in history it has often come in the form of a revolution. If the wealthy don’t want to be violently stripped of their wealth, they should support large taxes on themselves. But frankly, they are mostly stupid.
This is how I think. How much longer? Revolutions have happened in the past, and they will happen in the future, and people who don’t want to be their victims should govern themselves (and the rest of us, since that’s who we are talking about) accordingly.
Easily, because self interest was never the driver of technology progress, and the only evidence that it was is disproven pseudo-science. Non-market forces have created more important technologies than market forces. This has been true always. “Self interest” as a motivation for humans is a nonsense tautology. It explains why two different people act in totally opposite ways under the same circumstances (one of them was interested in getting more money, the other was interested in having more time). When you use the term “self interest” in common conversational sense, it is one of many factors that motivate people to do things. It is not at all the primary factor that motivates artists who starve while painting, musicians who play in secret clubs in countries that have outlawed their music at risk of imprisonment or death, or inventors, who are creative people just like painters and musicians.
Which, of course, we all know at this point is the entire human race. All experiments on apes of every type show that apes take care of apes. Dolphins save drowning humans because they can “see” our lungs filling with water with echolocation, and having lungs is enough for them to see us as the same. All evidence points to cooperation and helpfulness being more natural than competition and selfishness. All life forms that can think or feel anything are cooperative enterprises of huge numbers of individual cells that often don’t work on any principle of self-interest. You can’t point to DNA to explain selfishness - the “Selfish Gene” is a stupid and inaccurate idea.
That is nonsense. First of all, the greatest period of American wealth expansion took place when the top marginal tax rate was 70%, so if you are looking for a number, there’s one. But also, the rich own what they own by the consent of everyone else. The laws that say how we allocate wealth in society, who gets to own what and for what reason, are laws written by human beings. The philosophical basis of contemporary ideas of wealth - that mixing labour with the commons entitles a person to own that part of the commons - from Locke, who lived in the 1600s, not from some natural principle, or natural law, or the universe. And Locke said that his idea of wealth was only valid if a person left “as much and as good” for everyone else. Our contemporary idea of ownership itself is morally bankrupt, and don’t start telling me it has been successful at making America rich or great, because it hasn’t. 70% income tax on the wealthy made America rich and great. The New Deal made America rich and great. Taxation-as-theft has turned America into a plutocracy.
And big businesses do not want there to be any more big businesses. Hence the mantra of “fuck small business.”
It is the tragedy of the commons, but in this case the “commons” are the people. The American wealthy are ruining the people of America the same way they used to ruin the rivers before there were environmental regulations.
Yeah, violent revolutions turn out badly more often than they turn out well, but so does everything else. If one violent revolution doesn’t work, it means you just have another later one. Or maybe people running things have an interest in avoiding that? In every nation at every time in history the rulers have governed with the consent of the people. Contemporary democracy is just a system that allows the leaders to leave power with their heads attached to their shoulders, I wish our leaders would realize that.
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Well the “canned” human response would be something along the lines of “ALL THE MONIES!” But I see the ever increasing wealth gap simply as a by product of our economic system. Our economy works on percentages and being able to create money from nothing (or at least nothing of real value).
It should be fairly obvious that a person who has a million dollars to invest is going to earn money at a faster rate (even when invested the same) as someone who only has 10k to invest. That’s real world economics at work, forget tax loop holes, and every other things the 1% pay accountants to hide. Yes the rich may be able to hide/hoard their money easier than poor me, but they can also make it far faster than I can. At the same time we have created economic quagmires like the stock market. In theory it allows a company to earn capital they need, and at the same time I can earn a small profit for letting them use my money. In reality though money becomes fluid in the market and can easily be put in and taken back out in a short time span and still gain “wealth”… Things like day trading and high speed trading do little to add value to companies, but are able to extract value via the create of money from nothing. Imagine a minimum invest time for the market, 30 days, maybe a year and imagine the stability that alone could bring.
To answer your question, I don’t want the rich man’s pie. I would just like his pie to grow in a proportional way to mine. Like you said, I’m all for taxing the rich but do it in a way where their best avenues for economic growth come from the investment/creation of businesses or jobs. However I think as you normalized the bottom to a financially comfortable position that ultimately your would see a shift toward a more communistic society where the needs are obtained for free and only the wants are paid for.
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I don’t think the rich stay rich by hording their money in a mattress…or even in a bank. They’re rich because they make their money work for them. Maybe it’s stocks, or venture funds, or a media empire. Whatever the case, their money is pumped into the economy.
Ha, another deluded Kool-aid drinker. Your profile pic is…ironic, at best.
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I’m not convinced a few Napoleons were good for anybody. I don’t doubt there was plenty of schadenfreude to be had in France when the first successful revolution was over, though. Or were you more referring to the revolutions eventually paving the way for more democratic forms of governance in Europe and elsewhere?
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See also Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1948) and F Block & M Somers book on Polanyi, The Power of Market Fundamentalism (2014) which describe an economy embedded in social structures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddedness.
The beauty of Polanyi’s thinking is that it is grounded in the reality of 1920s Europe, when Socialism was not yet a term of abuse but a positive reality for many working poor. There are still physical manifestations of this reality in Central European cities: e.g. high quality (and highly desirable) housing, educational facilities, parks…
It is one of the painfully cruel twists of history how National SOCIALISM hijacked the Socialism bit, and in close collaboration with big capital destroyed that emergent movement…
However, it is worth remembering that the Socialism bit was a major part of the attraction, and even more important to remember that the first group the Nazi’s attacked and annihilated were the Communists (then the Socialists).
Thus ensuring that there was no Socialism without Nationalism… In spite Socialism originally and explicitly being an Internationalist movement.
Well and Stalin … and Russian Politics, that is just depressing but has very little to do with what is commonly defined as Socialism… A Totalitarian Dictatorship is a Totalitarian Dictatorship independent of what the underlying ideology is called.
EDIT: bcs style.
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Personal attack aside, please explain which part of what I said was wrong, and how.
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Arguable the current financial system is detached from the (producing) economy. “Whatever the case, their money is pumped into the economy.” can be seen as incorrect as the funds are quite often moved from one imaginary financial product to another, without ever used in the economy outside of the financial casino.
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You don’t read around much, do you?
40% of the assets of the wealthy are sitting in deposits: the rich person’s equivalent of stuffing money into a mattress. Money sitting in deposits in Swiss and Cayman Islands accounts is essentially wasted wealth. It does as little good for the world economy as gold hoarded by a dragon in Middle Earth. It essentially sits there uselessly as an economic security blanket for the very people who need it least. By contrast, putting more money into the hands of the poor and middle class pays off immediately for the economy, as most people living paycheck to paycheck spend the money immediately or at least create a small backstop against bankruptcy and delinquency–thus creating immediate economic and social benefits. So not only does giving the rich more money not pay off when they do invest, it doesn’t even have the opportunity to pay off at all since almost half of the money isn’t even being invested.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-reasons-rich-are-ruining-economy-hoarding-their-money
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One need not register as a Democrat to vote for Bernie, or anybody else.
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You mean they make other people work for them for little enough to ensure that their pile grows exponentially.
Last time I looked stocks / venture funds / media empires in themselves made no money, it is the people who work and produce who make money for the rich. And by being proportionally paid too little for their efforts the rich make more money.
Welcome to the rigged carnival…
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