Wealth distribution in the US
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cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
It's the engineer in me. For something to be accurate, it must have some precision. cn
Mindmelted
Well-Known Member
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
looks like the inbred southerners stick together.
nontheist
Well-Known Member
lol............................libatard?
Oh Buck you can call me what you like.
We both know what you are just a loud mouth.
36,000 post in less than 2 years? Really?
Still trying to stay under the radar UB
This guy has been banned on more than one occasion, fights with everyone he comes in contact with.
Don't you get it Buck, 99% of us don't want you here. Leave.
We both know what you are just a loud mouth.
36,000 post in less than 2 years? Really?
Still trying to stay under the radar UB
This guy has been banned on more than one occasion, fights with everyone he comes in contact with.
Don't you get it Buck, 99% of us don't want you here. Leave.
Hey Florida break off and crash into Haiti. Poor Haitians.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
please list all the times i was banned.
am curious to see how you came up with this 99% number. did you take a poll that i somehow missed?
seems to me like you are being a loudmouth here. only difference is, your loudmouthing is coming from a place of visceral hatred and ignorant southern ennui rather than flippant lightheartedness and trolly ennui.
you poor thing, you probably didn't understand half those words.
Harrekin
Well-Known Member
He's a redneck, he probably hasn't figured out that the Internet was invented to anonymously shout at people and get shouted back at.
Its how ideas grow.
On the original topic of the video:
First, on CEO pay specifically:
The data has been manipulated to produce a more distorted figure. The union included 300 companies from the S&P 500 Index, presumably the larger ones. Rather than actually comparing CEO pay against employee pay at those firms, the union used average worker pay for the whole US. "Average worker pay" at some of those S&P companies is certainly above that national level. The average CEO makes far, far less than the video claims.
Even more compelling when you consider that those CEO pay numbers are based on the present value of equity compensation. A company might grant its CEO $10m in stock valued at a price of $50, with the value locked up for some period of years; if in five years the stock is worth $30 a share, the equity grant is worthless. The value of stock grants depends on the success of the business.
CEO pay at large firms has grown as market capitalization has grown. The top ten S&P 500 companies in 1980 were worth $240 villion, versus $2.5 trillion in 2012--an increase of almost ten times. If you look at growth in CEO pay, it tracks this increase. Sensible enough. Who would run a $10 billion firm for $10m a year with the choice of running a $1 billion firm for $10m a year?
More Generally:
The multitude of American consumers bears responsibility for increased concentration of wealth. People have chosen lower prices, convenience, and standardization over mom-and-pop businesses. When you buy your coffee at Starbucks, eat dinner at Applebees, and buy your groceries from Wal-Mart, the profit of that consumption accrues to its owners--the shareholders of those firms. They make money by paying less to other people. You sell coffee cups? I'll buy 10 billion, but not for more than 1 cent. Coffee? I'll buy everything you've got, but I want it for $1 a pound. Now imagine this on Wal-Mart scale, with more than $400 billion in sales every year. Yeah, Wal-Mart does Ok, they make billions out of that, to the detriment of squeezed suppliers; but consumers come out ahead too. Of the tens of billions of dollars in revenue Wal-Mart deprived its suppliers of, consumers got most of the benefit in the form of lower prices. And we love it.
If the American consumer--the collective controller of trillions of dollars in annual consumption--shifted away from national companies, wealth concentration would be immediately reduced. Is that going to happen? No, it won't, because the American consumer is totally happy with its choice.
Consumer culture is also the reason why people don't get a share of the profit. I know plenty of people with no savings and investments who have new cars, fully loaded Macbooks, and expensive leather bags. Some of them go out to lunch every day too, and to bars several nights a week--all that adds up. If you took all that bullshit money from the past 10 years and had invested it in Apple stock over time, you'd be sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars. If only we were so clever--most people don't even try.
You blame the owners? That's silly. All they do is give us, the consumers, exactly what we want. And we reward them with our patronage, which is the basis of their profit. We pick the winners.
Don't forget, wealth is usually just an imagined paper value. Bill Gates might have a few billion in cash, but most of his money is locked away in investments, unavailable for consumption. That's true for most wealthy people. The 99%, the exalted non-elites, control the vast majority of annual consumption. We could almost immediately decimate the consumer industry if we so chose. But we don't make that choice; we're too content.
Those who favor redistribution tend not to fault us, the mass, with the choices we've made. They try to convince us that greedy corporate interests conned everyone with manipulative advertising and other cheap tricks, coldy sucking up our wealth, extracting it. But that's silly. We made a free choice and we should accept the consequences of that choice. It's not something we can't change by our own collective action. But give up Starbucks? Use a search engine other than Google? Visit some other weed forum? Why!? I like the one I have!
That's the end of collective action. We're addicted to Wal-Mart; we can't live without Mcdonalds breakfast! How unfortunate that we're all so petty, if you believe wealth should be more widely distributed.
But if you believe in the free market, as I do, you accept the consumer choice. It was cheap, reliable, and "better" than everything else. How can I argue? God bless Ikea for selling a table for $7--I furnished my living room for $20. Mom-and-pop can't do that. Chains are all about scale--you make efficiencies by cutting middle men out and demanding lower prices, which means more money flows up to the top.
That poor farmer: twenty years ago, he made $500,000 a year from those peanuts, and today it's less than $100,000. Yeah, let's acknowledge that Wal-Mart took $50,000 of his money for this example--but we took the rest. To some extent, capitalism redistributes wealth as part of its nature. People paid $4000 for cell phones in 1980--for one that just took phone calls, mind--the equivalent of more than $10,000 today. Now we all have that--almost everyone--for less than $100 a year for the phone and $50 a month for voice and internet service. When you complain that wages are stagnant, how do you value that?
I look around and see people who are as fat and happy as they've ever been, sipping on their lattes, stuffing their faces, and gooning around on their iPads and iPhone 5s with every spare second. You're drinking your retirement and wasting it on toys, but do you care? Nope.
So be it. We could change it at any time we felt the urge, but we don't and probably never will.
Finally, on living standards (as referenced above):
They're better than they ever have been for more people than at any other time in human history. Wealth is not equally distributed, but the fact that it's not equally distributed is what encourages the creation of wealth.
Inequality reflects progress.
Caveat: I think inheritance is an inefficient economic distortion, so I presume that it shouldn't exist and that wealth generally reflects merit, not unearned wealth. Obviously that's not the case in the real world. Nonetheless, we do perpetuate wealth disparity by utilizing the enterprises underlying significant amounts of wealth; we could deprive inheritors of substantial value by altering our patronage.
First, on CEO pay specifically:
The data has been manipulated to produce a more distorted figure. The union included 300 companies from the S&P 500 Index, presumably the larger ones. Rather than actually comparing CEO pay against employee pay at those firms, the union used average worker pay for the whole US. "Average worker pay" at some of those S&P companies is certainly above that national level. The average CEO makes far, far less than the video claims.
Even more compelling when you consider that those CEO pay numbers are based on the present value of equity compensation. A company might grant its CEO $10m in stock valued at a price of $50, with the value locked up for some period of years; if in five years the stock is worth $30 a share, the equity grant is worthless. The value of stock grants depends on the success of the business.
CEO pay at large firms has grown as market capitalization has grown. The top ten S&P 500 companies in 1980 were worth $240 villion, versus $2.5 trillion in 2012--an increase of almost ten times. If you look at growth in CEO pay, it tracks this increase. Sensible enough. Who would run a $10 billion firm for $10m a year with the choice of running a $1 billion firm for $10m a year?
More Generally:
The multitude of American consumers bears responsibility for increased concentration of wealth. People have chosen lower prices, convenience, and standardization over mom-and-pop businesses. When you buy your coffee at Starbucks, eat dinner at Applebees, and buy your groceries from Wal-Mart, the profit of that consumption accrues to its owners--the shareholders of those firms. They make money by paying less to other people. You sell coffee cups? I'll buy 10 billion, but not for more than 1 cent. Coffee? I'll buy everything you've got, but I want it for $1 a pound. Now imagine this on Wal-Mart scale, with more than $400 billion in sales every year. Yeah, Wal-Mart does Ok, they make billions out of that, to the detriment of squeezed suppliers; but consumers come out ahead too. Of the tens of billions of dollars in revenue Wal-Mart deprived its suppliers of, consumers got most of the benefit in the form of lower prices. And we love it.
If the American consumer--the collective controller of trillions of dollars in annual consumption--shifted away from national companies, wealth concentration would be immediately reduced. Is that going to happen? No, it won't, because the American consumer is totally happy with its choice.
Consumer culture is also the reason why people don't get a share of the profit. I know plenty of people with no savings and investments who have new cars, fully loaded Macbooks, and expensive leather bags. Some of them go out to lunch every day too, and to bars several nights a week--all that adds up. If you took all that bullshit money from the past 10 years and had invested it in Apple stock over time, you'd be sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars. If only we were so clever--most people don't even try.
You blame the owners? That's silly. All they do is give us, the consumers, exactly what we want. And we reward them with our patronage, which is the basis of their profit. We pick the winners.
Don't forget, wealth is usually just an imagined paper value. Bill Gates might have a few billion in cash, but most of his money is locked away in investments, unavailable for consumption. That's true for most wealthy people. The 99%, the exalted non-elites, control the vast majority of annual consumption. We could almost immediately decimate the consumer industry if we so chose. But we don't make that choice; we're too content.
Those who favor redistribution tend not to fault us, the mass, with the choices we've made. They try to convince us that greedy corporate interests conned everyone with manipulative advertising and other cheap tricks, coldy sucking up our wealth, extracting it. But that's silly. We made a free choice and we should accept the consequences of that choice. It's not something we can't change by our own collective action. But give up Starbucks? Use a search engine other than Google? Visit some other weed forum? Why!? I like the one I have!
That's the end of collective action. We're addicted to Wal-Mart; we can't live without Mcdonalds breakfast! How unfortunate that we're all so petty, if you believe wealth should be more widely distributed.
But if you believe in the free market, as I do, you accept the consumer choice. It was cheap, reliable, and "better" than everything else. How can I argue? God bless Ikea for selling a table for $7--I furnished my living room for $20. Mom-and-pop can't do that. Chains are all about scale--you make efficiencies by cutting middle men out and demanding lower prices, which means more money flows up to the top.
That poor farmer: twenty years ago, he made $500,000 a year from those peanuts, and today it's less than $100,000. Yeah, let's acknowledge that Wal-Mart took $50,000 of his money for this example--but we took the rest. To some extent, capitalism redistributes wealth as part of its nature. People paid $4000 for cell phones in 1980--for one that just took phone calls, mind--the equivalent of more than $10,000 today. Now we all have that--almost everyone--for less than $100 a year for the phone and $50 a month for voice and internet service. When you complain that wages are stagnant, how do you value that?
I look around and see people who are as fat and happy as they've ever been, sipping on their lattes, stuffing their faces, and gooning around on their iPads and iPhone 5s with every spare second. You're drinking your retirement and wasting it on toys, but do you care? Nope.
So be it. We could change it at any time we felt the urge, but we don't and probably never will.
Finally, on living standards (as referenced above):
They're better than they ever have been for more people than at any other time in human history. Wealth is not equally distributed, but the fact that it's not equally distributed is what encourages the creation of wealth.
Inequality reflects progress.
Caveat: I think inheritance is an inefficient economic distortion, so I presume that it shouldn't exist and that wealth generally reflects merit, not unearned wealth. Obviously that's not the case in the real world. Nonetheless, we do perpetuate wealth disparity by utilizing the enterprises underlying significant amounts of wealth; we could deprive inheritors of substantial value by altering our patronage.
Red1966
Well-Known Member
Can't see your chart or graph or whatever it is. I have seen stuff saying the lower class wage increases have kept up with upper class wage increases, while middle class wage increases have fallen behind. So who knows what the truth is? However, pretending you are NOT envious is just laughable.
Red1966
Well-Known Member
Honestly, dude.. from your history on this forum, my impression of you is that you're a terrible person, only interested in taking from others to secure your own future, not concerned with anyone but yourself. If someone has found a way be a success, it's because he was cheating to do it! This is someone we should crucify according to you and your philosophy.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
oh, my. that's just grand given your history of chastising blacks for voting after church and asserting that gays already have full marriage equality if only they would just marry heterosexually.
i'd ask your wife and kids what they thought about you, but, well...you know.
baby caskets.
Red1966
Well-Known Member
You have no clue how a business works. All the workers and people it took to create your product are expenses. You know, the 95% of the cost of your product? You only get 5% and you should give nearly all of it to those you've already paid for their contribution? My wages keep going up, yours don't? Sounds like the problem is you. Your blather about a fictional bake sale doesn't deserve a response. Your constant whining about your inability to succeed and blaming your failure on others gives a poor impression of you. I can see why none will pay you more than minimum wage. You don't sound like you're worth even that much.
Red1966
Well-Known Member
" it doesn't benefit me to earn someone else money" Really? You weren't paid? I doubt that. So if you don't earn them anything, why should they pay you?
Red1966
Well-Known Member
They're the majority now. They think they can make it work that way. They don't understand that those who produce the things we need will stop doing so when they can't keep the rewards of their labor. The pilgrams came to America and tried collectivism and most of them starved to death before they learned collectivism doesn't work.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
*pilgrims
world class intellect from a nobel prize winning toilet scrubber right there.
don't tell your fellow righty fb360 that the pilgrims didn't flourish, he swears they did.
you might want to get together with your fellow righties and get your stories straight, you guys seem to take opposing lessons from the same history.
Red1966
Well-Known Member
There's no prize for toilet scrubbing. Sorry to disappoint you. All those years of shitting your pants to avoid dirtying up the toilet and you don't even get a shot at winning a Nobel prize. Poor baby, it must be such a big disappointment for you. You seem to have some silly notion that whatever erroneous label you put on others somehow defines them. Your labels tell us more about you than those you would assign them to.
echelon1k1
New Member
then WFT did Obama get one for?