Income Inequality

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

If I deduce correctly, after reading between the many lines of you congratulating yourself on the pleasant smell of your own farts, your argument seems to be "things could be worse, so quit your moaning and get back to work pussy.'

Which is an especially useful line since it can be used by almost anyone, anywhere, at anytime and basically be true; it doesn't really contribute much to a discussion on, or even address, the effects of income inequality though.

The deduction is, there is plenty of opportunity for success without sitting in front of a computer claiming to be a 19th century African slave.

OOOOOOOH! Must have missed it.

Having cleared that up, could we discuss whether or not income inequality might have a distorting effect on markets that could hurt some of those opportunities without too many stories about who did or didn't have to walk 50 miles to school in the snow uphill both ways?

[Hastur]

Yea, and if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Listen up youngin,' in my day we only had dial up.

It took damn near half an hour to call a stranger a pussy on, what we called, the World Wide Web!

[Hastur]

[Montegriffo]

You live in the most wealthy nation in the history of the planet, at the height of global peace, and you allow yourself to be convinced that you know what it's like to a middle ages peasant.

You don't seem to understand the difference between a wealthy nation and a uniformly wealthy population. As that is the point of this thread you may need to go back to the start and read it all again.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Hard to argue with this kind of homespun wisdom around here. Yes, cell phones are amazing, and we have internetz. We sometimes have enough money to buy our very own house, and even pay for it. Why, you can gorge yourself on substandard food at any hour! All good things for the lower classes. Yes, the moneyed-classes are busy building Versailles and cruising around in private aircraft carriers, but we can all agree that the streets are relatively clean.

It's hard for the human mind to grasp the stratospheric launch of the modern US economy from just a few decades ago. We hear "richest country in the world" all the time, but then think nothing more of it. Being the world's reserve currency means that (for the moment) we have near-infinite wealth via our money printing machines at the Fed. There's no limit to the wealth that we can create, but we've certainly tried.

Yet somehow, inconceivably, the middle class is being lowered - not slowly. There's effectively no difference between a middle-class income and a min-wage laborer, on the scale of American incomes. If you were to take an "average" of them, it would be around $150k/year. That's because the vast majority of that new wealth has gone to the ruling class.

COMMIE! you scream, desperately clinging to your chosen propaganda. SOSHULIZM! though you have no clear understanding of what that term means.

Oh, the chains are very real. You won't feel them on your wrists, until you refuse to pay your 24% interest debts, but they're there. The guilt, the shame, the self-blame when your family doesn't look like what you grew up with. When you can't make that house payment, and have to load the kids into the van to live with (hopefully) your parents. All of the weight of society telling you that it's your fault because you just didn't work hard enough. Be sure to stay out of the left lane where the Teslas drive.

You want to ignore (and most don't even understand) that inflation is slowly eating away at your savings and earnings, because surely the system can't be rigged that way. After all, grandpa saved up every penny and ended up a wealthy man. That couldn't possibly have changed, so it's your fault that you're broke. You failed.

You don't understand wtf a stock market is, or why anyone would care what it does, but it sure seemed to matter in 2008 for some reason. No worries for you though, you'll never have anything to put in it, you loser. At least there's HDTV, beaming 1,000 hours of advertising into your brain every year. Just one more Snuggie or some hot wings, and you can forget the pain. Your wife will love you, if you go deep enough into debt for a diamond. Your kids just need enough electronics to feel your love, then you'll feel better. Hey pretty people drink lite beer, and sit in bars - sounds good enough for me.

Grind that wheel, little hampster, live your television dreams. Don't worry about what the rest are doing - what are you, some kind of jealous commie? Stay in your box, pretend you have value, and you're making a difference just by being you. You don't pay taxes, you get refunds! That should make the next credit card payment... now how bout a new TV?

[SilverEagle]

I'll say it again.

You pussies with your talk of, "the man taking all the money," is nothing more than weak hearted bullshit.

When I was little, my job was to keep the fire in the fireplace going throughout the night. If I woke up and the fire had gone out, I had to go out to the woodshed, in the dead of winter, and chop fresh kindling to get a new fire started.

I lived in a house built in the 1820s. Because the house was built before indoor plumbing, we had an outhouse. The one room in the house with plumbing was the kitchen. In addition to the sink and oven, the kitchen also had the washer and dryer. Being nearly two hundred years old, the house was heavily sunk into the ground, and we kids had to sit on the washer during the spin cycle to keep it from walking across the kitchen.

In the morning, my dad would turn on the dryer to warm up the kitchen where we would take sponge baths out of a pot of hot water heated by the fireplace.

You'll have to forgive me for seeing you as nothing other than colossal pussies when I think back on that, and realize that you are right now sitting in comfort that I never imagined as you prattle on on your keyboards about your slave existence in the modern day with your warm showers and internet.

Today, I own two houses, three cars, and will soon be buying a third house when we move back to Ft. Hood. None of your bullshit talking points are going to cause me to forget that my life is monumentally more comfortable than where I came from.

Add to that, my wife grew up on mud floors on a literally dirt poor island in the Caribbean. From where she came from, I was rich.

Fucking perspective. Get some.

As for me and my house, we will be ever cognizant of our blessings, and will ignore your attempts to convince us that we are down trodden.

If I deduce correctly, after reading between the many lines of you congratulating yourself on the pleasant smell of your own farts, your argument seems to be "things could be worse, so quit your moaning and get back to work pussy.'

Which is an especially useful line since it can be used by almost anyone, anywhere, at anytime and basically be true; it doesn't really contribute much to a discussion on, or even address, the effects of income inequality though.

Yep! Okee prefers to stick his head in sand and call it a 5 star beach vacation. Okee you must be pretty damn blind if you don't see the chains of regulation that is orchestrated by large corporations and put into law by the politicians which had their pockets lined by said corporations. Opportunity for us is less than it was for our parents and will be even less for our kids and grand kids. One day you will struggle for air with your head buried in the sand and when you try to get up you'll be held down and only in the bitter end you'll realize that the 5 star beach vacation was all along.....just a trap.

[The Conservative]

Most people know what I went through to finally land this job... also what I have for disabilities. The fact is that there is a job out there geared for you, the problem is finding it.

Sometimes it's your fault for not getting a job, other times it's inside politics that you never see... other times its just dumb lack of luck that causes it to happen. The point is that even someone who has "issues" like I do can find a job. It just takes time, effort, and hard work... nothing will ever be handed to you.

24 hours before I got this job, my electricity was being turned off for lack of payment, my water and gas was also being threatened to be turned off... I had no money in the bank account, and my phone was shut off as well... I was pretty much one step away from being homeless with a family. Social services refused to put us on an emergency list for whatever reason, and we couldn't halt things from being turned off because my son was over a year old. So if you want to know how bad things can go before turning around, I think I nearly get the gold on this forum...

On a side note:

If you want to go old school, I remember a time before there was even internet... and we had these things called rotary phones, where you could call the operator and she would patch you into the person you wanted. They would also interrupt your call if an important one was coming through

[SilverEagle]

Hard to argue with this kind of homespun wisdom around here. Yes, cell phones are amazing, and we have internetz. We sometimes have enough money to buy our very own house, and even pay for it. Why, you can gorge yourself on substandard food at any hour! All good things for the lower classes. Yes, the moneyed-classes are busy building Versailles and cruising around in private aircraft carriers, but we can all agree that the streets are relatively clean.

It's hard for the human mind to grasp the stratospheric launch of the modern US economy from just a few decades ago. We hear "richest country in the world" all the time, but then think nothing more of it. Being the world's reserve currency means that (for the moment) we have near-infinite wealth via our money printing machines at the Fed. There's no limit to the wealth that we can create, but we've certainly tried.

Yet somehow, inconceivably, the middle class is being lowered - not slowly. There's effectively no difference between a middle-class income and a min-wage laborer, on the scale of American incomes. If you were to take an "average" of them, it would be around $150k/year. That's because the vast majority of that new wealth has gone to the ruling class.

COMMIE! you scream, desperately clinging to your chosen propaganda. SOSHULIZM! though you have no clear understanding of what that term means.

Oh, the chains are very real. You won't feel them on your wrists, until you refuse to pay your 24% interest debts, but they're there. The guilt, the shame, the self-blame when your family doesn't look like what you grew up with. When you can't make that house payment, and have to load the kids into the van to live with (hopefully) your parents. All of the weight of society telling you that it's your fault because you just didn't work hard enough. Be sure to stay out of the left lane where the Teslas drive.

You want to ignore (and most don't even understand) that inflation is slowly eating away at your savings and earnings, because surely the system can't be rigged that way. After all, grandpa saved up every penny and ended up a wealthy man. That couldn't possibly have changed, so it's your fault that you're broke. You failed.

You don't understand wtf a stock market is, or why anyone would care what it does, but it sure seemed to matter in 2008 for some reason. No worries for you though, you'll never have anything to put in it, you loser. At least there's HDTV, beaming 1,000 hours of advertising into your brain every year. Just one more Snuggie or some hot wings, and you can forget the pain. Your wife will love you, if you go deep enough into debt for a diamond. Your kids just need enough electronics to feel your love, then you'll feel better. Hey pretty people drink lite beer, and sit in bars - sounds good enough for me.

Grind that wheel, little hampster, live your television dreams. Don't worry about what the rest are doing - what are you, some kind of jealous commie? Stay in your box, pretend you have value, and you're making a difference just by being you. You don't pay taxes, you get refunds! That should make the next credit card payment... now how bout a new TV?

[SilverEagle]

Most people know what I went through to finally land this job... also what I have for disabilities. The fact is that there is a job out there geared for you, the problem is finding it.

Sometimes it's your fault for not getting a job, other times it's inside politics that you never see... other times its just dumb lack of luck that causes it to happen. The point is that even someone who has "issues" like I do can find a job. It just takes time, effort, and hard work... nothing will ever be handed to you.

24 hours before I got this job, my electricity was being turned off for lack of payment, my water and gas was also being threatened to be turned off... I had no money in the bank account, and my phone was shut off as well... I was pretty much one step away from being homeless with a family. Social services refused to put us on an emergency list for whatever reason, and we couldn't halt things from being turned off because my son was over a year old. So if you want to know how bad things can go before turning around, I think I nearly get the gold on this forum...

On a side note:

If you want to go old school, I remember a time before there was even internet... and we had these things called rotary phones, where you could call the operator and she would patch you into the person you wanted. They would also interrupt your call if an important one was coming through

um......this thread is really not about if you can find work or not because if you want to work you can indeed find work. It's about compensation for workers, you know that amount you make per year vs how much the CEO makes and how that gap is widening by percentage each decade.

Key note. We're talking percentage and not cash because percentage will tell you the truth of the matter.

Have you ever heard of the Robber Barrons? We've been heading on a path to the Robber Barrons 2.0 since the 1970's.