It's hard not to believe that someday this situation will end badly for everyone.
From the article:
The distribution of global wealth has stayed just as skewed as last year, according to a huge study by Credit Suisse.
The bank compiled data showing that just 0.7% of the world's adult population owns almost half of the world's wealth, while the bottom 73% have less than $10,000 each.
Here is Credit Suisse:
"The 3.5 billion adults with wealth below $10,000 account for 2.4% of global wealth. In contrast, the 33 million millionaires comprise less than 1% of the adult population, but own 46% of household wealth.
businessinsider.com/credit-suisse-wealth-pyramid-2016-11
Comments
No worries. A billionaire prez with bad hair says he's gonna fix that.
We're supposed to label sarcasm now? I'll have to buy a "season-pass".
Oh! right.
Income inequality - a bad thing. Then ... there is that.
Yes. There was NEVER any income equality. Take any form of Government or Economic System. The problem is never with the design as it was intended. It was always in the implementation. The people at the top always subvert it for their benefit. They always remember have they have been "oppressed" under the old system waiting for their turn to "give it" to the other side. Sometimes, it is gradual degeneration of Society. Like in our case, Capitalism becomes bastardized into Objectivism and people in a Democracy suffer as much as they did under Feudalism, and it is all done under the garb of anti-communist agenda.
Same liquid, new bottle. The difference is some of us have shame, have internet to share that, and some never will and will use internet to lobby its not a problem.
No thanks.
Well said.
Not since around 1974, but we still had a black and white till the early 80's.
Lame stream Media is under the heat lamp at the moment. I'll take it easy on ya.
Wiki/Millionaire data
Enter your numbers and find your global ranking.....no guarantee on who is running the numbers base, eh?
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/?country=USA&income=100000&adults=2&children=0
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
While ranking ones self on a global scale, it should be compared to the cost of living in that country or region as well. $100k is a good income but that would be strained in places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Many international cities like Tokyo or Geneva are higher up on the scale of cost of living.
As incomes rise in these areas, the cost of living usually follows suit.
Oh yes, I agree. Our cost and standard of living in our part of Michigan is very comfortable compared to many places. Know a few folks who lived and worked about 15 miles from Manhattan, their home being in New Jersey. Their property taxes and what it cost to hire someone for yard work and related is a whole other work to where they retired to in Michigan.
I placed a link a few years ago here that allowed one to compare the cost of living in one city versus another. I have been to two Manhattan's in the U.S. They are different worlds indeed. The other Manhattan being Kansas.
If not one else offers, I will find the compare link and post.
EDIT: not the site I used before, but interesting although limited to city choices. This link compares pricing if moving from Manhattan, KS to the NYC/Manhattan area.
Note: my link will not link for entered data. Have to enter your choices.
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx
Got to get some sleep time.......early and busy day tomorrow.
Take care in your part of the world.
Catch
Worry has an incorrect connotation for how I'm looking at retirement. Wonder is probably more accurate. Not only do I wonder what's going to happen, I find it some sort of "wonder" that I have this to consider at all. When the heck did this happen?
Good link. I compared San Francisco and Abilene TX. Worlds apart, especially home prices.
Speaking of California, are they the only state that taxes you even though you moved out? A lot of retirees move to AZ, NV, etc to enjoy retirement with a cheaper cost of of living. California figures they need to tax anything you made in CA, even if you do not reside there. This includes IRAs and 401s and pensions. I call it taxation without representation. This practice should be abolished.
The problem is about fairness. I don't mean to start a war but there are a just too manyr eality tv show stars who should be on food stamps and some educated folk who shouldn't. Livable wage is about decency in society, not a handout. Drug companies, doctors, lawyers, lobbyists and people in government contribute to opoid abuse rendering people homeless while enriching themselves. THIS IS A FACT and is IMO a big reason why the "war on drugs" is being rolled back. It is not just a certain class of society that's suffering any more.
Distractions such as men shouldn't have invented washing machines and women should be living in the stone age, from an advisor to the president, is an orthogonal distraction which contributes to apathy about the issue of income inequality.
Why is the conversation so complicated? If you have played unfair and earned your billions that's as wrong as someone who is able-bodied and just looking for a handout. The problem is we aspire to be the former and detest the latter and that IS a problem.
One just needs to look at that pyramid that started this conversation. I think all of us should stop complaining and shut up. We are f*****g lucky b******s.
Their current (2015) 540NR instructions for filing nonresident and partial year resident income tax returns say: Pretty much every state taxes income with a nexus to that state even if you don't live there. For example, if you own rental property in California, the income that generates will be taxed by California. But likewise, pretty much every state you might live in will give you a credit against your resident income tax for the income taxes you pay to another state.
Maybe Calif. does have a particularly long arm reach on its taxes, but it doesn't look like that extends to IRAs.
What happens when you have such great income disparities if people get really desperate during a severe economic downturn? Violence inevitably happens. It needn't be communist violence either. Violence of a fascist sort is more likely especially in a country like the U.S. and can easily exist in a capitalist society. When people get desperate in any culture they look for a common enemy to blame for it and a strong man who claims "only I can fix it" to lift them up. They willingly give up their liberties to that autocratic ruler for some bread. That's fascism in a nutshell. Immigrants and minorities are an easy target for the strong man autocrat to rally support during such periods, and already we've seen an uptick of white nationalism, hate crimes and hate speech not just here but throughout Europe. There was a similar anti-immigrant sentiment during the Great Depression. Perhaps the most disturbing thing in the U.S. today is there are so many guns, more than 300 million last time I checked. So the potential for extreme violence is very real.
Free market ideologues and libertarians will argue that if we just got rid of all the social programs, taxes and government impediments via regulation all of these problems would naturally work themselves out. But it took over twenty years for the stock market to recover from the crash in 1929 that triggered the Great Depression. And it took the New Deal and massive government spending to finance a war that eventually dug us out. The same ideologues believe the New Deal--but somehow not the War effort--somehow exacerbated the Great Depression, even though both were forms of government socialist spending and there is ample evidence that GDP growth recovered strongly after the New Deal passed and before we entered the war.bea.gov/national/Index.htm
During a twenty year Depression-like era while we wait for the free market to "work its magic," a lot of very bad violence can and will happen if there isn't a social safety net. That sort of violence can hurt everyone, including the super rich if history is any guide. The middle class vanishes--in fact the vanishing middle class is a key ingredient to the widespread discontent--the poor then show up with pitchforks, the rich and demonized minorities are purged as an autocrat seizes power. And the poor are usually left off worse than when the violence started.
Some things do NOT improve when the motive is profit. That is just a fact. This is a bipartisan problem. All those people in government who approved school loans to all the U. of Phoenix s' and ITT Tech s' - wonder where their kids go.
For that matter Congress should have Obamacare. If it's good for the rest of us, it should be good for them. ONLY then will there be no debate as to whether something is good or not. If it's good for all then it really needs to be consumed by all. If it isn't then it isn't.
My parents were born in another country. I am reaped the benefits of them having moved here. I wonder if I'm going to have to prepare my kids to have to move somewhere else. Or maybe I can still convince them to become mutual fund managers. My morals are all screwed up, why mess up my children's minds? To succeed it's best morality and legality is messed up in one's brain. Too late for me, maybe not for them.
Change the import/export model to one which requires direct investment in order to sell in those markets, and labor will again share in a growing economy, and the income inequality will reverse. (Of course, the elites of both parties like income inequality, as the poorer the masses are, the richer the elites are, on a relative basis).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/politics/which-senators-and-representatives-have-signed-up-for-obamacare/646/
This myth may have originated, curiously enough, from VF's phrasing of the issue. Who exactly are "the rest of us"? According to KFF, if one excludes those on Medicare or Medicaid, or those uninsured, 7/8 of "the rest of us" get coverage through our employers: 49% of the total population is employer-covered, 7% has individual (non-group) coverage, the rest is primarily Medicare/Medicaid (the KFF link screens these out).
Nearly all (non-Medicare/Medicaid) insurance comes through work, and only small employers are allowed to provide insurance from exchanges. So if we want Congress members to get insurance the way most of us do - working for small companies that offer exchange plans - we have to treat Congress' employer (the Federal government) as a small company.
Done. An exemption was added to the ACA to treat Congress members as small company employees and get covered through the small business exchange (SHOP).
From such exemptions, myths are created.
Happy Thanksgiving to all
Here is an interesting account of the Indian's side of history:
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/11/23/what-really-happened-first-thanksgiving-wampanoag-side-tale-and-whats-done-today-145807
nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/02/how-robots-algorithms-are-taking-over/
I don't think the U.S. can grow fast enough to replace those lost jobs and even if it could there would be dramatic environmental consequences from that growth.
Obama himself has spoken recently with the New Yorker about these issues after the election. While he initially proposes the usual Democratic line about education being the solution to these problems, he admits it is only a temporary one and that the technology problem will not be solved with any model we currently have. From the article:
Trump had triumphed in rural America by appealing to a ferment of anti-urban, anti-coastal feeling. And yet Obama dismissed the notion that the Republicans had captured the issue of inequality. “The Republicans don’t care about that issue,” he said. “There’s no pretense that anything that they’re putting forward, any congressional proposals that are going to come forward, will reduce inequality. . . . What I do concern myself with, and the Democratic Party is going to have to concern itself with, is the fact that the confluence of globalization and technology is making the gap between rich and poor, the mismatch in power between capital and labor, greater all the time. And that’s true globally.
“The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”
newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency
He's not going to do all that stuff he said to get elected. No prosecuting Hillary. Romney (the "loser") is now a candidate for Sec. of State. The "wall" will be a fence in places. And some General has convinced him that water boarding isn't effective ... etc. etc.
I live in a heavily pro-Trump area. I'm not close to any of those folks but do know several who voted 3rd party or stayed home. The best answer any can give me is: "Hillary's a crook."
Disclaimer: Most of the above is sarcasism.