"The 67 People As Wealthy As The World's Poorest 3.5 Billion" - link to Forbes article
67 people own more wealth than half the planet's population.
Imagine what the average quality of life would be if that wealth were more equally distributed.
No one needs even ONE billion dollars. But if our system had a cap so that a person had to divest his wealth after hitting that, or even better, restructure the cost of his goods or services and increase the rate he paid his workers, then equality would be more even.
There will come a day when humans are no longer required to work. When that day comes, and it's approaching far faster than most people think - it won't happen in my lifetime, but it might in some of yours - then humans will by necessity have to be taken care of.
To achieve that goal, there are two probable routes. One is to allow the status quo to remain, and see the rise of an Elysium type world where the UHNWIs ( link to Wikipedia UHNWI article ) own everything and the poor get the scraps of what's left over, having to fight for it in a Hunger Games world, or worse.
But the other route is more Star Trekesque: A world where people are freed from the drudgery of a 9-5 or even worse, a hot, hazardous job of rote work monotony that takes its toll on the collective human psyche, erasing creativity and dulling the senses.
Imagine a world where people are free to pursue intellectual goals that benefit humankind. There will always be those who scoff, but just a hundred years ago, the assembly line wasn't created, computer technology didn't exist, and women didn't have the right to vote (and still don't in some places).
Reality will probably play out somewhere between the two, but what might drive us as a race will be the climate change that we ourselves have set into motion. We may need every human who can to work on solving the problem while our automation builds, farms, and does the menial work now done by...well, in the US...immigrants.
I'd rather see a world closer to Star Trek than Elysium. But the 67 billionaires I cited earlier will fight that tooth and nail, as will other UHNWIs.
I count myself luckier than most, but I'll still fight for better. For everyone.
Showing posts with label wealth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wealth. Show all posts
Friday, September 12, 2014
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Why The Estate Tax Must Approach 100% (I'd settle for 95%) - Do The Math!
This is what I've been talking about both on my blog and on Google+ the last few years, that if we don't do something about this soon, it will be too late - permanently. Here's why:
Let's say that, as a starting point or tipping point, where we go from sustainable inheritance to unsustainable inheritance, that inherited wealth accounts for, oh, 20% of the wealth of the republic. This isn't just cash or paper investments, it's real property like homes, land, and buildings. So, if that 20% is passed on, curated and managed, and passed on again, it should have doubled over the life of it's first heir. Now it's worth 40% of the wealth of the republic. That is to say, people who didn't work for it now own 4 out of every 10 dollars worth of anything.
The cycle repeats, the 40% is passed on, it's curated and managed, and passed on again, having doubled over the life of the heir. Now they own 80% of everything.
Follow me? Now, do it again. What's left for anyone else? By that point, the poor and middle-class will have had to sell everything they own just to survive. Now they're renters, probably from the same people they work for. From whom they also buy groceries - from the stores the people who essentially own them also own.
THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT!
If you don't think so, you're delusional.
At best, we would indeed see a landed gentry like in Europe who never work again, who outright own politicians so that laws are never considered which favor anyone but them and their ability to accumulate wealth. Old European money is so far removed from the day-to-day affairs and worries that they don't bother with whatever affects the commoners. They do as they please, the cops don't bother them because they really can't in most cases unless the person really screws up and his crime goes public, and their money pile grows larger and larger.
When I lived in Germany, my German boyfriend and I would be out and about and I'd ask him about some place that looked very nice, expensive, and old, and he would say that it belonged to some wealthy family, but despite the fact that they'd lived in the same mansion for a couple hundred years, no one knew anything about them. Later, I found that to be true in more than just Germany. People don't know, and know that they shouldn't go around asking.
That will happen here. In fact, it already has in wealthy enclaves. It will get worse as the already-elitist monied youth grow older, feel even more entitled, buy power, get richer, and feel superior even more so than today.
If we don't end it now, we're screwed. Do the math for yourself. It could happen still in my lifetime, much less the lifetimes of younger people like Millennials.
Let's say that, as a starting point or tipping point, where we go from sustainable inheritance to unsustainable inheritance, that inherited wealth accounts for, oh, 20% of the wealth of the republic. This isn't just cash or paper investments, it's real property like homes, land, and buildings. So, if that 20% is passed on, curated and managed, and passed on again, it should have doubled over the life of it's first heir. Now it's worth 40% of the wealth of the republic. That is to say, people who didn't work for it now own 4 out of every 10 dollars worth of anything.
The cycle repeats, the 40% is passed on, it's curated and managed, and passed on again, having doubled over the life of the heir. Now they own 80% of everything.
Follow me? Now, do it again. What's left for anyone else? By that point, the poor and middle-class will have had to sell everything they own just to survive. Now they're renters, probably from the same people they work for. From whom they also buy groceries - from the stores the people who essentially own them also own.
THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT!
If you don't think so, you're delusional.
At best, we would indeed see a landed gentry like in Europe who never work again, who outright own politicians so that laws are never considered which favor anyone but them and their ability to accumulate wealth. Old European money is so far removed from the day-to-day affairs and worries that they don't bother with whatever affects the commoners. They do as they please, the cops don't bother them because they really can't in most cases unless the person really screws up and his crime goes public, and their money pile grows larger and larger.
When I lived in Germany, my German boyfriend and I would be out and about and I'd ask him about some place that looked very nice, expensive, and old, and he would say that it belonged to some wealthy family, but despite the fact that they'd lived in the same mansion for a couple hundred years, no one knew anything about them. Later, I found that to be true in more than just Germany. People don't know, and know that they shouldn't go around asking.
That will happen here. In fact, it already has in wealthy enclaves. It will get worse as the already-elitist monied youth grow older, feel even more entitled, buy power, get richer, and feel superior even more so than today.
If we don't end it now, we're screwed. Do the math for yourself. It could happen still in my lifetime, much less the lifetimes of younger people like Millennials.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
It's Not Wealth Redistribution; It's Wealth Redistribution Redistribution: Get It Right!
The US needs to raise taxes on the highest income groups. We need to realize that "trickle down" economics are a failed proposition.
Wealth sympathizers will say that the ultra-wealthy deserve what they have, but it bears remembering that most of the people employed in the factories and businesses owned by these individuals earn below-living wages, and often must draw public assistance in order to survive. We all have to pitch in, and thereby tighten our own belts, in order for the ultra-wealthy to remain ultra-wealthy. This must end.
I have no problem with wealth. What I have a problem with is earning that wealth by paying employees a sub-standard wage and pocketing the difference while forcing EVERYONE ELSE to pitch in enough so that their employees can simply live.
What we need isn't wealth redistribution, it's wealth redistribution redistribution. That is, this is taking the wealth STOLEN from the paychecks of employees due to below-living wages and putting it back in those paychecks relieving EVERYONE ELSE from the necessity of doing for the needy what the greedy - the ultra-wealthy - won't.
Stop allowing the ultra-wealthy - and their syncophants - to portray forcing them to pay living wages as wealth redistribution. It's not. It's wealth redistribution redistribution. Get it right!
Monday, August 19, 2013
Response to Sanjay Sanghoee's blog on HuffPo
The current class war began January 20, 1981, the day that Ronald Reagan took office. He and Nancy made it a point to undo the populism that Jimmy Carter had brought to the White House, with Nancy infamously holding $5M cocktail parties while the country went through 3 separate recessions, all caused by what his former-opponent-cum-Vice-President George HW Bush had labeled 'Voodoo Economics' or what came to be known as 'Trickle-Down Economics'.
Reagan was a strong proponent of privatization and of limited government. You have to ask yourself why. Why do the wealthy want limited government? Is it just because they want lower taxes? No, that's not all. Limited government means limited power to oversee things like predatory lending, byzantine derivatives, shoddy work at top-tier prices, sub-standard materials in things like roads and bridges, and on and on. If they can get by on the cheap, they pocket the difference. If they can get by without that pesky guy from the Labor Bureau looking over their records, they can pay people whatever they want and pretend they only worked half as many hours, thereby pocketing the tax difference.
Take every "white collar" crime you've heard of from Martha Stewart's insider information to defense contractors underbidding and overcharging. Make 10,000 copies of each crime, then mix them all up and scatter them piecemeal all over your list of corporations. That's what privatization will lead to, but it will conveniently skip that annoying indictment and prosecution process and won't lead to jail, but to a new cabana in the USVI.
Privatization is the glue that binds class warfare as well as the engine that powers it. If the wealthy own it, the government can't very easily control it, and when they own every-damned-thing, the government will be a toothless tiger.
Remember what the poet John Donne said, and think about it in a privatization context: "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were."
When we allow a single piece of public property that should remain in public holding to pass to privatization, America will be the less.
Reagan was a strong proponent of privatization and of limited government. You have to ask yourself why. Why do the wealthy want limited government? Is it just because they want lower taxes? No, that's not all. Limited government means limited power to oversee things like predatory lending, byzantine derivatives, shoddy work at top-tier prices, sub-standard materials in things like roads and bridges, and on and on. If they can get by on the cheap, they pocket the difference. If they can get by without that pesky guy from the Labor Bureau looking over their records, they can pay people whatever they want and pretend they only worked half as many hours, thereby pocketing the tax difference.
Take every "white collar" crime you've heard of from Martha Stewart's insider information to defense contractors underbidding and overcharging. Make 10,000 copies of each crime, then mix them all up and scatter them piecemeal all over your list of corporations. That's what privatization will lead to, but it will conveniently skip that annoying indictment and prosecution process and won't lead to jail, but to a new cabana in the USVI.
Privatization is the glue that binds class warfare as well as the engine that powers it. If the wealthy own it, the government can't very easily control it, and when they own every-damned-thing, the government will be a toothless tiger.
Remember what the poet John Donne said, and think about it in a privatization context: "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were."
When we allow a single piece of public property that should remain in public holding to pass to privatization, America will be the less.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Karl Rove and class warfare
Ever since Karl Rove's involvement with the GOP began, there's a trend in campaigns he touches where the candidates deny or denigrate a negative issue within their own policies or ranks by projecting it onto their opponents.
So when Romney/Ryan/Republicans talk about class warfare, they're merely attempting to move that failure from their brand and rebrand it Democratic. Sadly, it works when you also own a media outlet watched by the vast majority of your party's supporters. But to those not so close to the trees that they can still see the forest, it's a puerile tactic.
The same goes for wealth redistribution. While it's a conservative ideal to move wealth upward, they fear any downward redistribution, even when that redistribution is simply paying the middle and working classes living wages.
Their belief is that by being proactive rather than reactive, they control the ball and hence the game. But telling a lie before the fact doesn't exonerate the liar, it merely doubles down the offense by virtue of premeditation.
So when Romney/Ryan/Republicans talk about class warfare, they're merely attempting to move that failure from their brand and rebrand it Democratic. Sadly, it works when you also own a media outlet watched by the vast majority of your party's supporters. But to those not so close to the trees that they can still see the forest, it's a puerile tactic.
The same goes for wealth redistribution. While it's a conservative ideal to move wealth upward, they fear any downward redistribution, even when that redistribution is simply paying the middle and working classes living wages.
Their belief is that by being proactive rather than reactive, they control the ball and hence the game. But telling a lie before the fact doesn't exonerate the liar, it merely doubles down the offense by virtue of premeditation.
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