Wealth distribution in the US

[Red1966]

then WFT did Obama get one for?

Well, OK, ONE prize, but that was a special case.

 

[UncleBuck]

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.

yeah, because someone like you who complains that blacks get to go vote after church isn't deserving of the label "stormfront red".

good luck convincing us of that, baby casket seller.

i called you a nobel prize winning toilet scrubber in error. what i meant to say is that you must scrub the toilets of your nobel prize winning colleagues you told us about. someone like you who can't spell "pilgrims" correctly is definitely not working with nobel prize winners, unless you are the one scrubbing their toilets and emptying out their garbage cans.

baby caskets.

 

[Padawanbater2]

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.

Good reply, you should stick around and continue to provide examples of how to respond to these types of heated questions civilly

This system, as you've outlined it, is impossible to change because it requires the same amount of effort from everyone involved, we're talking tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people. Not only that, but think of all the inadvertent repercussions a shift of that magnitude could cause. If everyone just decided to stop shopping at chains for their basic needs, where would they get them? Sure, mom and pop stores could service a few hundred people, maybe a couple thousand, but what about the rest? We don't have a viable second option to choose from and the way the system is working, I don't see how one could be created to compete.

So if we are essentially powerless to do anything, nothing will get done, and both sides can't agree on even step one, that there's even a problem to begin with. We've even got half the nuckleheads responding to this thread believing everything is fine and those who are not successful are either too lazy or stupid, dismissing the fact there are homeless Ph.D holders in this country, right now. 8-12 years of secondary education is lazy?..

In fact, lets get some actual numbers; https://www.rollitup.org/politics/641661-wealth-distribution-us-legit-flawed.html

 

[Red1966]

Good reply, you should stick around and continue to provide examples of how to respond to these types of heated questions civilly This system, as you've outlined it, is impossible to change because it requires the same amount of effort from everyone involved, we're talking tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people. Not only that, but think of all the inadvertent repercussions a shift of that magnitude could cause. If everyone just decided to stop shopping at chains for their basic needs, where would they get them? Sure, mom and pop stores could service a few hundred people, maybe a couple thousand, but what about the rest? We don't have a viable second option to choose from and the way the system is working, I don't see how one could be created to compete. So if we are essentially powerless to do anything, nothing will get done, and both sides can't agree on even step one, that there's even a problem to begin with. We've even got half the nuckleheads responding to this thread believing everything is fine and those who are not successful are either too lazy or stupid, dismissing the fact there are homeless Ph.D holders in this country, right now. 8-12 years of secondary education is lazy?.. In fact, lets get some actual numbers; https://www.rollitup.org/politics/641661-wealth-distribution-us-legit-flawed.html

Yes, anyone with 8-12 years of secondary education and no job is either lazy or incredibly stupid.

 

[Padawanbater2]

Yes, anyone with 8-12 years of secondary education and no job is either lazy or incredibly stupid.

You don't think there are any other variables which could contribute to someones employment?

 

[Red1966]

There are exceptions, but as a rule, no.

 

[Canna Sylvan]

Yes, anyone with 8-12 years of secondary education and no job is either lazy or incredibly stupid.

How many job opportunities are there for a PHD in drama?

 

[Hemlock]

How many job opportunities are there for a PHD in drama?

Well I don't know tell us we understand you have one.

 

[RyanTheRhino]

It's not the truth because American economic policy doesn't depend on a gamble.

Casinos are businesses meant to turn a profit. The US government isn't.

From what I can gather from this thread, you seem to believe that if you can cheat the house, all is good, as long as you get away with it, even though that isn't how the house is supposed to conduct business. Anyone who complains about loaded dice or counting cards is rounded up and ejected from the building.

The way you, and people like you, conduct business is immoral, inhumane, against equal rights and against freedom. You're simply in it for you, for whatever you can make and walk away with, and you feel that's the American dream! There are so many slick, slimy fucks like you out there it turns good people bad. Makes good, honest people think the system is out to get them, and you prove them right with every day you wake up. You can cheat the system, fuck it, as long as you make it out on top! You think the system has failed you? You're an idiot who is too stupid or who has failed too many times at conning honest, hardworking people to get to the top. So fuck you!

Honestly, dude.. from your history on this forum, my impression of you is that you're a terrible person, only interested in securing your own future, not concerned with anyone but yourself. If someone has found a way to screw over 60% of the rest of the country, it's because he was smart enough to do it! This is someone we should look up to according to you and your philosophy.

In contrary I think people like you are just upset about reality. The American dream work hard and you can be sucsseful. Sounds great but is not nesesarily true. Anybody can work hard but unless you bring something unique into the picture you aren't worth the paper your printed on.

oh and your defense above was the government is not a private party. What does that have to do with the richest 1% , they are a private corp.

And another thing think about how much say Exon Mobil is worth. That top one percent's wealth isn't just counting their pocket change. It includes their entire net worth.

dam that billionaire even though 90% of his wealth is tied up In refineries , tanker ships, and fleets of trucks. How dare he make sure my gas station has fuel

 

[Dr Kynes]

In contrary I think people like you are just upset about reality. The American dream work hard and you can be sucsseful. Sounds great but is not nesesarily true. Anybody can work hard but unless you bring something unique into the picture you aren't worth the paper your printed on.

oh and your defense above was the government is not a private party. What does that have to do with the richest 1% , they are a private corp.

And another thing think about how much say Exon Mobil is worth. That top one percent's wealth isn't just counting their pocket change. It includes their entire net worth.

dam that billionaire even though 90% of his wealth is tied up In refineries , tanker ships, and fleets of trucks. How dare he make sure my gas station has fuel

brilliantly put.

thats why farmers are "rich" on a balance sheet but have to bust their asses to make the mortgage, and lose their farms if the rains dont come, or locusts do, but most often they lose their farms to the tax man, or a guy in a suit who wants to build a shopping mall.

 

[Doer]

How many job opportunities are there for a PHD in drama?

The world is your oyster if you have PHD in Drama. You can teach anywhere if you want to suffer academia.

But, that doesn't mean you will work in Drama, just because you have a PHD. It you wanted to work in field you should have stopped at Master, and made sure your activities were 100% dramatic.

Really there are only a few times and cases where grads pop out and are hired. We do hire new college grads in tech, but you have to have made a very dramatic set of grades at MIT, Standford, etc.

 

[Doer]

Really what we see here, Dr. Kynes; no one know what wealth is. I assure you wealth is not a big pile of money. Nor it is some kind of life style. When I was in commercial real estate, we ignored the young guys that babbled around in suits. No money, just talk.

When I found a "farmer" in the outskirts wanting to sell some property, sigh....I'll drive out there......wow...5000 acres....just for the house??? Another 20K acres, for the cattle. And you have a 3 million dollar office complex down town, you want me to sell???? OK.

(glad I took off the suit and put on the boots...he liked my Tony Lamas)

 

[Canna Sylvan]

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.

He already explicitly said such. He only has use for online friends because he has no time for maintenance, plus he can dehumanize them with the anonymity. But at the same time he wants government to subsidize his Walden Pond life dream of living "off grid."

 

[Doer]

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.

Bahhh. You are missing the point. I'm sure, Pad cares not one whit, for your personalized scorn and rebuke.

But, by judging in this personal way, you, yourself are judged.

 

[Red1966]

Perhaps you should read his and my posts again. I was using a slightly edited version of his post to rebuke him. The scorn was his returned to him.

 

[RyanTheRhino]

brilliantly put.

thats why farmers are "rich" on a balance sheet but have to bust their asses to make the mortgage, and lose their farms if the rains dont come, or locusts do, but most often they lose their farms to the tax man, or a guy in a suit who wants to build a shopping mall.

This is not an argument against anyone I just got bored an is not meant to be the actual perfect values.

This actually got me curious, so I did some home work to see how much 1% actually have.
So I went to FINVIZ to grab the market cap of the largest 100 companies & multiplied it by insider ownership %, to weed out the public shareholders.


They have 5.95 Trillion in investment. There are about 1500 mega-large-mid caps in the USA

I will use exponential decay to calculate the rest of the companies for the sake of time. It will actually give a more conservative number(meaning lower then actual) because the last 500 will only have around $800 of ownership at that point.

With that said for the top 1500 major US companies, the owners have a total of 14.63 Trillion in assets alone. your video said what 55 Trillion net worth for USA.

so that's 26.6 % right there

assuming each company has 10-co owners

that 15,000 people

That's your 0.5% that every one keeps hating on.


but the video was referring to 1% so we need to add 0.5% More people

lets go ahead and add 25% to the value including the rest of the companies I left out. I wont double it because as the companies get smaller they are worth less.

so your 1% has a total of 18.3 Trillion dollars


About 34% of the entire US wealth is in assets

And they have 3.3 Trillion in pocket change

So 1% ers have around 120 million spending money

 

[tokeprep]

This system, as you've outlined it, is impossible to change because it requires the same amount of effort from everyone involved, we're talking tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people. Not only that, but think of all the inadvertent repercussions a shift of that magnitude could cause. If everyone just decided to stop shopping at chains for their basic needs, where would they get them? Sure, mom and pop stores could service a few hundred people, maybe a couple thousand, but what about the rest? We don't have a viable second option to choose from and the way the system is working, I don't see how one could be created to compete.

So if we are essentially powerless to do anything, nothing will get done, and both sides can't agree on even step one, that there's even a problem to begin with.

My point wasn't that we should "do anything," only that we could. Since the masses are perpetuating wealth disparity they have no room to complain; ultimately, the vast majority of people live very, very well compared to even 50 years ago, so there really isn't a wealth disparity problem that people would have any serious interest in correcting.

The best change wouldn't be a fundamental shift in the economy built up on efficient outcomes--better service, better quality, lower price. Ceasing intergenerational wealth transfer would be more meaningful.

We've even got half the nuckleheads responding to this thread believing everything is fine and those who are not successful are either too lazy or stupid, dismissing the fact there are homeless Ph.D holders in this country, right now. 8-12 years of secondary education is lazy?..

Education is a product like any other. When schools accept people and take their money, they aren't guaranteeing them jobs--that's up to the student. Of course, the unemployed PhD holder probably came out of history, classics, feminist studies, or some other "soft" area where demand is exceedingly low. Math? Engineering? Computer science? Those would have been better investments, if only Americans were willing to take them on. But that stuff is "hard," so increasingly we don't. People getting degrees in areas with no demand have only themselves to blame. With that in mind, I would assert that someone with 8-12 years of secondary education could certainly be lazy. Most people are in school less than 20 hours a week with 4-5 months of breaks. Hard worker? That's why employers look for real experience and real accomplishments when they're hiring; that thesis on some topic no one cared about isn't going to cut it.

The problem in higher education is the federal government's willingness to spit out tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for education in fields with poor job prospects, which produces lots of people with worthless degrees. We could resolve this immediately. Classics majors have a 20% in field hire rate? Alright, no one's allowed to borrow government money to study classics. Crap law school has just 25% of its graduates employed in law jobs? The federal government shouldn't disburse another dime to that school. And let's not forget the University of Phoenix and its ilk, hawking worthless education to people who are never going to get taken seriously and hired--they're sucking up a huge portion of the education budget and giving the taxpayer almost nothing in return. In a free market, these places would have long been dead.

 

[tokeprep]

In contrary I think people like you are just upset about reality. The American dream work hard and you can be sucsseful. Sounds great but is not nesesarily true. Anybody can work hard but unless you bring something unique into the picture you aren't worth the paper your printed on.

The complexity of a global economy makes starting a worthwhile business more difficult than it was in the past. If you wanted to open a garment factory 100 years ago, you probably would have done far better than you possibly could today. That's technology at work--there were no huge container ships carrying vast quantities of shirts from crowded Chinese factory floors back in the day.

The truth is that the "American Dream" of rags to riches is achievable only by a select group of people with intelligence, natural talent, patience, and other uncommon qualities. That's always been the truth. Moving up seems more difficult now because people start at the 50th floor of a 100 floor building instead of in the basement. If you grew up in a crumbling house without electricity or plumbing, went to bed hungry sometimes, and had to sew your own clothes, modern middle class existence would look like paradise.

That was reality for most people until not too long ago. Alas, modern generations never experienced life in that old world and we only know what we know today. We don't think we have very much and we think we deserve more, but that's a really ignorant notion when you consider how people lived in just the past few centuries, isn't it? The air conditioner breaks down, the power goes out, the internet connection goes down for a few hours--all that is insufferable barbarism to us, the people who take those things as given.

Human greed and jealousy are truly offensive. Other people built all this up for us, giving modern people so much, and all we do is bitch about how we want and should have more. We make up all kinds of excuses for why we can't get ahead: it's the government's fault, other people cheating the system, discrimination--always some external thing keeping us behind. But the system isn't rigged and the American dream is not impossible. There's $15 trillion up for grabs in this country every single year. Has all the easy stuff been done? Yeah, probably, and that makes getting ahead of everyone else more difficult. But that's not some mysterious, conspiratorial force working against us; it's progress!

You're holding a fucking iPad right now, a little piece of glass and metal that can instantly call up any book, person, or piece of information in the world. That machine and all the infrastructure that enables it cost people a lot of jobs: telephone operators, any kind of printing or publishing, shippers/carriers, dozens of other occupations that are being totally wiped out even though they used to employ millions. Yeah, we get some jobs back in other places, but they tend to be fewer and for lower wages. But you love your iPad, don't you? You use it all the time and you can't stop using it--you can't imagine life without it. By demanding that machine, by flocking out to buy its latest iteration, you and tens of millions of other people are the conspirators.

 

[Doer]

I just don't think this is true. There are opportunities always, everywhere. But, it is hard work if you want to live within civilization. A much different and much harder on the frontiers.

With Ebay, you just find a need and fill it. It is not rocket science. It is the same supply chain concept as taking the risk to schelp out and trap furs all winter. The risks are different, is all.

If you are willing to practically pay them, to get into something you are interested in, I don't care what it it. If you are willing they will teach you.
Carrie on Mythbusters would not go home. She wasn't paid but aways had a broom and willing to help.

Sweep floors, study at night. I'm not kidding.

How about this idea. Profit triangles. Do logging crews need fish sandwiches to trade for cash and a truck load of redwood boughs? Those you take to the worm farm where they use them for shading compost where you get a bit of cash a bunch of worms. The worms go back with you to the fishermen.

They give you a little cash and a good amount of fish for your family and .....for fish sandwiches...for the loggers.

So, my gloom and doom friends. This is called a trade triangle. It has existed as the way commerce has been conducted since the dawn of man. Nothing has chanced. There is even more opportunity now. But, you still need drive and don't quite and play crazy defense with capital in the trade triangle.

Wherever, and believe me I can construct one for anything. I mean that. Skyscraper City to the Amazon basin, there are trade triangles just sitting there.

I have seen this work first hand. I was astounded. It was an outdoor guide I met on Kauai. I got to see it.

He was the guide on the Napali Coast inflated boat trip. He found out I had a rented car. So, he picked up the 50 piece case of underwater disposable cameras he had shipped to the boat place, and crammed his knock down bicycle in my trunk.

These we took the other end of the island. Poipu Beach. He sold that case full of cameras, that he paid $3 per, for $20 each. I remember they were only 12 shots. Guys and family might buy 6 or more. Gone in 30 minutes. !!!! Amazing.

Got dissed at the bait store, being Hoauli. So, went and dug up his surf cast gear and went for something else with lures. That's another leg of his service/trade triangle.

We got 3 big fish in the surf down on the rocks. He sold those to the restaurant and I bought dinner for my pop up Island surf cast adventure guide. He was living out in the bird sanctuary and so took off before real dark.

But, we talked about how this was only one of his trade legs. He did guiding on the Colorado river and was a Ski Patrol in winter.

Plenty to do. More than ever. Just find those profit triangles.

 

[Red1966]

This is not an argument against anyone I just got bored an is not meant to be the actual perfect values. This actually got me curious, so I did some home work to see how much 1% actually have. So I went to FINVIZ to grab the market cap of the largest 100 companies & multiplied it by insider ownership %, to weed out the public shareholders. They have 5.95 Trillion in investment. There are about 1500 mega-large-mid caps in the USA I will use exponential decay to calculate the rest of the companies for the sake of time. It will actually give a more conservative number(meaning lower then actual) because the last 500 will only have around $800 of ownership at that point. With that said for the top 1500 major US companies, the owners have a total of 14.63 Trillion in assets alone. your video said what 55 Trillion net worth for USA. so that's 26.6 % right there assuming each company has 10-co owners that 15,000 people That's your 0.5% that every one keeps hating on. but the video was referring to 1% so we need to add 0.5% More people lets go ahead and add 25% to the value including the rest of the companies I left out. I wont double it because as the companies get smaller they are worth less. so your 1% has a total of 18.3 Trillion dollars About 34% of the entire US wealth is in assets And they have 3.3 Trillion in pocket change So 1% ers have around 120 million spending money

1% of the US population (300 million) is 3 million, not 22,500. "assuming each company has 10-co owners" is ridiculous. They have thousands, some have millions. Your numbers are so far off it's laughable.