Tell me one reason why, as a young person, social security should be counted as wealth when you are being promised it will not be their for you. Unfunded pensions are the same. They are a promise based on a hope that the money will be there. They are not wealth for certain, they are a speculation.
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And at what point will the 99% take it back, by force if needed?
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Alternative Medicine is now called Integrative Healthcare. Homeopathy is still homeopathy: total BS, except for residual placebo effects. Integrative Healthcare is a better term because Alternative Medicine is derogatory. Anything that heals is medicine. It might not be allopathic, but if it works, it’s still medicine.
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Absolute nonsense. And you should be ashamed of telling lies like that. Homeopathy was invented by English crackpot Samuel Hahnemann in the 18th century. It isn’t about “microdosing with natural substances”. It is, and the “theory” hasn’t changed since he crap-puked it up, almost exactly the opposite. It’s based on the idea that incredibly small doses of a substance which causes the same symptoms that the disease causes will magically cure the underlying condition. The smaller the better, and it works bigly good if you shake it exactly six times in six directions.
That is homeopathy. That is literally all there is to it. It was shite then. It’s shite now. To be fair, it probably killed slightly fewer patients than some of the therapies in vogue at the time. This was the era of bleeding for reasons other than vascular congestion, medicines using high doses of mercury and antimony, and no concept of hygiene in surgery.
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Medicaid (anything at all really) in the context of a for profit health system make the poor more poor, can we agree on that?
Or should we go back to pensions? Which derail are we on?
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I’m certainly going to continue to fight wealth inequality with my vote for lots of reasons, many enumerated here.
But I’ll hold off on the righteous indignation about those “greedy pigs” because I’m one of them.
This article in the Chicago Tribune points out that the 1% wealth marker is about $760K and the average American family has about $535K.
If you’re lucky enough to have a defined benefits pension, you’re pretty much instantly part of the 1% (take a gander at what an annuity would cost to provide your pension - you’re usually talking million+).
An ethical position is probably confiscating 90% of my wealth, and while that’s beginning to enter truly ethical policy territory, I’m not going to vote for it. So I’ll stick with fighting for somewhat lower inequality while mostly preserving my massive privilege of living in North America.
“I want to live in a more equal society (for many of the reasons above) without sacrificing 90% of my wealth” is all the justification I need to fight for my preferred policies.
Which means that I’m not going to pretend moral superiority over those who disagree with me and are fine with higher inequality. I (strongly) disagree with their preferred policies, but I’ve got some pride, and calling them bad people would be a little more hypocrisy on my part than I’m comfortable with.
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Housing is an investment. It just isn’t particularly liquid.
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people are conflating wealth with income. doubtless they know the difference, they just want to muddy the waters.
you can use surplus income to build wealth. social security and medicade are subsistence ( if even that these days. ) there is no one who can use them to build wealth.
pensions are different. if you could rely on them, they were supposed to generate enough income after your retirement that you could use your money now - primarily to avoid living hand to mouth, and giving you breathing room to and raise a family, but perhaps also to build (some) wealth.
real wealth is not having to worry about income. the difference between the 1 or the 10 percent and everybody else is the difference between worrying what to do with your free time, and worrying how the hell you can live.
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I get it that we are in trouble, but it’s not clear to me that the 1% owning 2/3rds the world’s wealth, is structurally any different, any worse, than the 1% owning half the worlds wealth.
We can argue endlessly whether it’s acceptable for the 1% to own any more than 1% of the world’s wealth, and if so, where that threshold should be…
To my mind, it’s not the intrinsic unfairness of it all that makes it unacceptable, it’s the bad design that comes out of such an arraignment. Giving the rich enough power to expand their wealth at the expense SE of others seems to be crossing the Rubicon kind of boundary, and not some arbitrary fraction of the financial sector.
If the rich could be trusted with half the world’s wealth, then would giving them another sixth be a bad thing? I don’t think that’s a productive way to think about it at all.
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text book example of begging the question.
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I think that people would be a lot happier IF the richest 1% already controlled 2/3rds of the world’s wealth BUT were on a trend to control 50% by 2040 and still less in the years thereafter, rather than the current situation wherein they ‘only’ control 50% now, but are on trend to control 64% in 25 year’s time and an increasing proportion in the outer years.
Absolute numbers matter, and so do trends.
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The rishe already own 2/3 of everything. Probably more like 80 to 90%. That’s because: how do we measure money? What is it? What is an asset? This should help is understand…
It’s not the definitive answer. But it raises the issue of derivatives, which account for an untold mass of wealth. Curious to hear people’s reactions.
Goddammit you guys are killing me!
Not sure if I am hearing you correctly, so tell me if I’m wrong… No rich people I can think of, will say out loud, “the bottom 99% have too much wealth, those of us in the enlightenment 1% really need to go out there and take it away from them, and make it our own”. What I do hear them say, constantly is, "gosh, we (our company, our family, our consortium) did really well last year, what would it take to do even better next year? And it’s an unplanned coincidence that all the other companies, families, consortia out there have interests that happen to overlap…
From their point of view, it’s still a viscously competitive world out there, and no quarter shall be given or asked for. It’s only from down here we notice that the competition is purely among the 1%, and they’re arguing over how to carve up the wealth embodied in the rest of us. The only thing that gives them power, is our accepting their money.
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So, we meet again… It’s been some time since The Register.
Welcome to Boing Boing, comrade!
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EAT THE RICH.
Body seems unclear. Is it a complete sentence?
Yes. Yes it is. Grammar check seems idiotic. Is it capable of handling VS sentence structures?
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Goddam! You really nailed that… that is a fabulous dose of perspective on my own sitch. I love it when people rekid-scratch my brain. 
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Better start eating the rich now or else you’ll have your work cut out for ya.
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Pensions are deferred compensation. They’re not wealth- they’ve possible future income.
Assets are wealth. If you fill out a PNW form or financial statement- no one considers income an asset. Nor can you use it as collateral.
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