How I long for the days when a bolt could fix my car. I hate those engine control modules.
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How much money does it take to buy a 2nd-hand food truck? If you are a great cook, you can use the profits to open a small restaurant, and later a large restaurant.
Or, become an electrician. You will have to start as an apprentice â not much money, but you will learn. Work hard at your job and learn as much as you can. Then, start working for yourself. Advertise. Get jobs and keep all the money for yourself instead of giving some to your boss. If you get busy enough, hire some people to work for you.
Similar arguments can be made for barbers and hairdressers, mechanics, and many other professionsâŚ
None of these are impossible. I am not saying that it is easy or that everybody can do it. I am saying that there is an opportunity there if you know where to look â no guarantees â just opportunity.
The lottery is also an âopportunityâ to get richâno guarantees.
I donât want a system in which opportunity technically exists, but in practice has the effect of making the rich richer and everyone else poorer. Income inequality has been growing for decades, and it isnât because the rich are working harder or the poor are growing lazier.
Take someone in your situation: a couple of generations ago a smart, hard-working person with a college degree could almost certainly count on being able to buy a decent house and comfortably support a family on a single income. Today, youâre facing a lifetime of debt even though your wife works too.
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Do I even have to explain the difference? If so, you clearly have no understanding. If not, then you are driving trollies.
A high-school friend of mine, growing up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood followed the "start your own electrician business. Not rich, but he does OK. Any reason that canât be done by anybody?
Yes, there is a LOT of income inequality. This is a problem. So, what is the solution? Line the rich up and shoot them? Tax them out of existence? Point our fingers and make fun of them? As long as the rich are paying approximately 30% or so income tax, what else do you propose?
As to my debt, as I said, it consider it an investment. The only thing that I would really like is for the law to allow me to re-finance my student load debt at todayâs interest rates. I can do this for my house, why not student loans?
This also brings up another discussion concerning the cost of a good education. A lot of my debt is from getting the masters degree instead of stopping at a bachelors. Still, leaving college with 70 grand in loans is pretty hardâŚ
I could live a quite comfortable lifestyle and rapidly pay off my debts faster if I has chosen to not adopt children. It is for that reason that money is tight. Guess what? It is a sacrifice that I am willing to make to make the world a better place for three girls who would have likely had horrible lives otherwise. I am glad that I did it, and I would do it again in a moment. In Haiti, there truly would have been no opportunity for these girls to make a good life for themselves.
Okay, what is happening here is that you are butting up against reality. A tiny minority of them retire with $10M and most of them probably make less money than you. If we should be so grateful to these people for driving the economy then why do we organize society such that the majority of people think youâd have to be insane to do that?
The comic, youâll recall, is about the very, very rich. The very, very rich earn wealth on their wealth, not on their risk or job creation. One of the first things I said in this exchange was that small and medium business are job creators and that giant corporations are where you make millions. They arenât related.
The stats Iâve found say that small business owners with 10-years on the job earn an average of $105k. Thatâs not retiring with $10M in the bank. But that average would include those who are making a mint along with many others who are making less to pull it back down. Plus, that average does not include the people who donât make it ten years, which are the majority. Creating your own small business is not a very financially rewarding activity, itâs pretty terrible. Having a ton of money sitting around, on the other hand, is a great way to make money.
Obviously what you donât mean is that we should give up studying history and that the country should have 10 million phlebotomists. What you mean is that there will always be winners and losers and that the correct way to determine winners from losers is that winners will have a trait you possess (âhardworkingâ) and the losers will not. Doesnât that make you stop and think, âGee, is this a cognitive bias?â
I also think you are very luck to have lived at the point in history you did. The admin assitants in my office all have masters degrees and are thrilled to make less than half what I do because at least that way they can live incredibly modest lifestyles while not sinking under their school debts. None of them will be buying houses or cars or having kids for a while now. Inequality is growing in case you hadnât heard.
I donât feel like Iâm saying anything new at this point, so last word over to you I guess.
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- Tax the rich the way we used to back when the U.S. had an actual middle class. You talk about 30% as if thatâs a high number. Tax rates for the highest income bracket back in the 1950s used to be roughly 90%.
- Stop treating poverty like itâs a self-inflicted problem that we canât help address through sensible social policy and investments in public education.
Thatâs great, but itâs a choice you wouldnât have had to make a couple generations ago. A college educated person could have easily made enough to comfortably support a spouse and three kids on one income back in the 1950s. My grandfather supported a wife and seven kids on one income and he didnât even have a college degree.
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The rich pay mostly capital gains rates. And use every loophole they can and hide money overseas. If you want to tax their income at 30% instead, thatâs a good start.
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More than a lot of people have. Not to mention all the things they would also need to turn that into any sort of income (like, a centralized urban area where taxes on the wealthier folks pay for infrastructure like roads). It takes more than cooking skill and a food truck to make any sort of profit from selling good food out of a truck.
Right, using that wish you got from that genie. That is not a hurdle that everyone can clear.
Youâre falling into the fundamental attribution error, here (among others, but thatâs a big one). Wealth or lack thereof has never really been about an individualâs skill, it is always about the context they are embedded in.
In other words, there is not opportunity for everyone.
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I am indeed the self-appointed grammar police, not that what you were describing is âgrammar.â The purpose of language is to communicate, which necessitates a certain degree of precision. Calling you out on its misuse is not me being a dick (although I do cop to that, Iâm a tremendous asshole about language and it does not serve me well,) itâs an attempt to make sure weâre speaking the same language and can thus communicate.
The other stuff you wrote, yeah, weâre on the same page.
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Perhaps youâve seen this one too.
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No, but itâs a good start.
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I like that in your opening bit you pretty much discredit everything else you have to say. Despite being enslaved by right wing/neoliberal ideology this country has both a low level of entrepreneurship and a low level of economic mobility compared to other âfirst worldâ countries. Everything else is just cut and paste ideologue noiseâŚ
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This is the balderdash an entire nation has been brainwashed with for generations⌠the American Dream is just that; a dream.
Several large studies of mobility in developed countries in recent years have found the US among the lowest in mobility.
This is pretty obvious to anyone not steeped in the bullshit that trickles down from on high over there.
But I do know that simply demonizing the rich is not the answer.
Pff, the US desperately needs to change its attitude to the parasite class, and thatâd be a vast improvement; at least then folks would realise theyâre in a war.
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Dude, just stop talking, please.
Yep - last I looked, the biggest engines of job creation were small business and the public sector.
But hey, the public sector is eebil socialism, and small business only ever deserves lip-service.
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I am not saying it is perfect. We DO need to close tax loopholes. Maybe increase inheritance tax on amounts over a few million. I wish that the economic situation here is this country were better. We have lost tons of jobs to China and India â is there a cure for that? Wait, letâs raise the minimum wage â that will certainly bring jobs back here, right?
Yup. You have no chance. Just lay around, because trying to improve your situation is futile, might as well not even bother trying. But, hey, at least you have somebody to blame. You can lay back, watch TV all day, and point your fingers at the evil rich.
The idea of working to improve yourself is so right-wing. The obvious solution is for the government to give you what you need. They can get the money by rounding up all of the lazy rich people. Throw them all in jail for their numerous crimes (having things that you donât, for example), and take all of their money.
If you really want poor people to work their way up then YES, we need to make sure the minimum wage is a living wage. You were the one talking about rewarding hard work, so why should anyone who works full-time (even in an unskilled job) have to depend on welfare or take out loans just to survive?
âDriving jobs to China and Indiaâ is a scare tactic anyway. Look around at which people in America are actually making minimum wage (or less): wait staff, agricultural workers, fast food employeesâthe kinds of jobs that canât be shipped overseas. Of the jobs that have been shipped overseas, workers in China and India are making so much less than their American counterparts that we couldnât hope to compete based on wages anyway. Our minimum wage laws barely impact the equation either way.
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Hmmm. You may have a point there. I still worry about the economic impacts. A company has to suddenly start paying people more. In order to stay in business they have to raise prices (probably hurting sales, mandating layoffs) or reduce costs by laying off in the first place and getting by with less people (if your business allows). It is possible that they company could soak up the increased expenses, but by no means guaranteed.
I am certainly not AGAINST the poor making enough money to get by. I just worry about the side effects.
For every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong
- Albert Einstein
Economics is not my specialty. But I have seen way too many cases in politics where the âobviousâ solution turned out to have disastrous unintended consequences.
As far as raising income taxes for the super-rich, I should also like to point out that COMPANIES, as an entity, pay taxes. If you raise a ludicrous tax on, say, all profit over 10 million, there are a LOT of companies that will start to pay a LOT more tax. This means that they have less profit to pay investors, less money to pay employees, less money to sink into R&D, etc. In fact, this might even drive companies to move overseas where they can pay less taxes. Tech companies, in particular, or ones that make durable goods, can probably do this. I think of myself as a good engineer, but I do not think for a second that there are not tons of guys in Europe that could do my job. My company, in particular, has a group of engineers doing pretty much the same thing in Norway. I could imagine that if taxes got too oppressive, my company could move HQ to Norway and close up most of the shops here, causing the loss of thousands of jobs.
Uhhhh. . . âpoorâ? Do the quotations mean that people on the bottom rung of the ladder are NOT actually poor?
Hint: people with no money pay no taxes, in other words, they are poor.
(And anyway, as is often pointed out, even the destitute have to pay sales taxes, gasoline taxes, etc. )
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It wouldnât have to be âsuddenâ if we simply raised the minimum wage periodically to actually keep up with inflation. The minimum wage was originally conceived as a living wage, we just lost sight of that somewhere. When FDR originally made the case for a Federal minimum wage his words were:
No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country⌠By living wages, I mean more than the bare subsistence level - I mean the wages of a decent living.
Congress has increased the minimum wage nine times since it was established in the 1930s (though not nearly enough to keep up with inflation), and every time we hear the same objections. âA sudden increase in wages at the bottom will cripple business!â In truth, the sudden increase in wages at the TOP has been orders of magnitude more dramatic than even the most ambitious hopes for wage increases at the bottom. According to one study CEO pay increased 127 times faster than worker pay over the last few decades.
Why arenât the people who worry about the effects of wage hikes worried about reigning in maximum wage? If my company could save a few thousand bucks a year by outsourcing an unskilled position, how much could we save by outsourcing a top executive who brings home millions of dollars a year? Itâs not like there arenât any talented MBAs in India.
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Nobody said that, but more importantly, just putting it that way implies you donât understand what situations are out there. Because people who arenât able to improve their situation usually arenât laying around, theyâre working very hard just to make ends meet. When we take issue with glib claims like that âanybody has the opportunity to get wealthyâ, itâs because it more or less dismisses all those people right from the start.
I wonder, do you actually understand who we are pointing fingers at? Let me use symbiotic terms.
You have expressed some reasonable gratitude for the mutualist wealthy, whose investment provides valuable development, to the benefit of everyone involved. There could also be commensal rich, who are idle and donât really change much. But there are also parasitic rich, who make their money at the expense of others.
In a few cases this is explicit, as with Bain capital looting established businesses, and I know you donât defend those. But it can also come in the more subtle form of making profits by pushing externalities on to other people. And this is actually really common; one could argue it applies to pretty much all of the ultra-rich, but at the very least it clearly does to the bankers, the oil barons, and the arms dealers who sit at the very top.
Insisting not to âdemonize the richâ is asking us to forget those externalities, but itâs absolutely right to blame the people that are creating them. Indeed, itâs important to do so, because it helps explain why mobility is falling and what we could actually do about it.
Minimum wages keep Lucky Ducky from improving his situation, too. The comic seems appropriate here.
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