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    Default to wuf: faultlines and the rich, obama's failings

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    The most fundamental thing to understand about economics is that it's all about recycling wealth. Imagine that every dollar you ever got was numbered in order of receiving it, and you have to spend each dollar in order of reception. This would illustrate a continual recycling pattern of every penny in the economy. When the amount recycled slows, the economy slows, and the effects are layoffs and reduced wages, etc.

    The reason this is an important illustration is that you can now do the same with rich peoples money. You will then see that because rich people save more money than non-rich people, any money that goes to them has an aggregate slowing effect on the economy. Our economy is so bad simply because rich people have so much of the money borne of the economy, that it has slowed the recycling to the current pace. This is one of two main reasons why high taxes on the rich is the only way to run a successful economy. The other main reason high taxes on the rich are necessary is that it deletes capacity for corruption because there's no excess cash laying around. People can't bribe politicians when they don't have lots of extra money with which there aren't other things for them to buy.

    A lot of people will then say that taxes are bad because it monopolizes the government, but that's not actually true. Government is only corrupted when it doesn't tax its corrupters. If you want government to suddenly start working very efficiently and for the people, you have to tell the rich that they owe the system that made them rich

    Being frank about it, the real laws should be something along the lines of any income 5x above median is taxed at 100%. We're supposed to be fellow humans here, not wolves and lambs. When one person is rich, it's because other people are poor. Nobody has ever been able to deny this reality of economics
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    When one person is rich, it's because other people are poor.
    Hmmm, poker players should have an intimate grasp on this concept
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    Hi I'm wufwugy.
    back to the commune hippy.

    ?wut
  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    The most fundamental thing to understand about economics is that it's all about recycling wealth.
    Wat? wrong
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    The reason this is an important illustration is that you can now do the same with rich peoples money. You will then see that because rich people save more money than non-rich people, any money that goes to them has an aggregate slowing effect on the economy. Our economy is so bad simply because rich people have so much of the money borne of the economy, that it has slowed the recycling to the current pace.
    no
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    This is one of two main reasons why high taxes on the rich is the only way to run a successful economy.
    No!!

    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    When one person is rich, it's because other people are poor. Nobody has ever been able to deny this reality of economics
    ok?

    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    bla bla bla some other stuff
    inb4 you say everything you just wrote came directly from paul krugman
  6. #6
    IMO,

    (1) The rich are rich because they keep doing the things that made them rich.
    (2) The poor are poor because they keep doing the things that made them poor.

    When you increase taxes on the rich and give it to the poor, the rich will continue to do (1) and the poor will continue to do (2).

    The rich will stop spending and increase prices on goods and services to make up for higher taxes.

    The poor will complain about high prices but still spend on the higher prices goods and services once again making them poor.

    Repeat steps (1) and (2)

    When a poor person wins the lottery do they stay rich or become poor again?

    If rake was 1% at 10NL and 70% at 500NL would anyone play 500NL?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    IMO,

    (1) The rich are rich because they keep doing the things that made them rich.
    (2) The poor are poor because they keep doing the things that made them poor.
    I believe these assumptions to be highly fallacious.

    If I were from poorer origins, I would tend to find myself worse off. If I were from wealthier origins, I would tend to find myself much better off. If I happened to contract an expensive illness without insurance, I would very likely find myself perpetually broke. If I were to inherit a large sum of money tomorrow, I would very likely manage to maintain and enhance that wealth.

    The difference between rich people and poor people is in bank account alone, not something innate in the process of the people.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Penneywize View Post
    Wat? wrong


    no


    No!!



    ok?



    inb4 you say everything you just wrote came directly from paul krugman
    Oh no, you made wuf angry, you won't like him when he's angry.

    Inb4 penny suddenly stops posting and wuf hands over $10k to a mysterious stranger on the dark web.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    When a poor person wins the lottery do they stay rich or become poor again?

    If rake was 1% at 10NL and 70% at 500NL would anyone play 500NL?
    These are neat questions. The first question supposes someone who probably is not prepared to have money. In that that person probably has no analogue for what someone successful would do with money, and no network of people he can trust to give him the information he needs to not be preyed upon.

    So a poor person would probably have a tough time maintaining or enhancing his wealth due to many pitfalls and weaknesses in how he'll naturally approach his wealth.

    The second is cool because the obvious answer is no, every player will aim to maximize his winrate/wintotal, so no one would ever play in the theoretical 500NL game with 70% rake. Hell, they'll probably hit a limit and quit playing poker all together looking elsewhere for better opportunities.

    I think both questions are rhetorical and the best answer is, "the questions are inherently meaningless."
    Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 08-08-2011 at 01:33 PM.
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    Talking out of your ass with authority is still talking out of your ass.
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    Whose ass is talking?
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    Hi, I'm wufwugy.
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    Well, you made me think I may have been talking out of my ass.

    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    The difference between rich people and poor people is in bank account alone, not something innate in the process of the people.
    This statement is very close to being empty or untrue.

    There is no "the difference" and I think balancing it on the word innate keeps its meaning. But there are still very certainly poor people in India/Mexico/China who would do very well in America and poor people in those same countries who would do very poorly. I think it may have to do with how a person could look around to his poor family and neighbors and be motivated to want more whereas the same person could look to his declining middle classed friends and family and not be motivated to work harder than the previous generation for seemingly less.

    I would amend it to say: Of the many differences between rich people and poor people, very few to almost none are innate, and many relate to matters of circumstance.
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  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    The rich will stop spending and increase prices on goods and services to make up for higher taxes.
    Even if that were true, it wouldn't have a detrimental effect on the economy because of turnaround spending with tax dollars. But also, that's not a worry because the idea of taxing the rich more than the poor is borne of hoarding practices that come around when people are effectively too rich

    Penney, would be nice to get an actual rebuttal
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    14 Ways a 90 Percent Top Tax Rate Fixes Our Economy and Our Country | OurFuture.org


    Quoting my fave

    14) Finally, for good measure, increasing top tax rates will cause those affected to work harder to make up the difference. The Ayn Randians claim the very rich are the “producers” and all the rest of us are just parasites and slackers who feed off their “work.” So it will be very good for our economy to get them working harder by taxing them at 90%! You may have heard about those 25 hedge fund managers who brought in an average of $1 billion each last year – an amount that would have paid for 658,000 teachers* -- while the rest of the country suffered through a terrible economy. If we had a top tax rate of 90% they would “only” take home $100 million or so each – in a single year. And we could have 658,000 more teachers. So it’s a win-win.

    Read "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis. It illustrates exactly how this went down, for those who had no idea (and still don't) about what happened and how.
    Last edited by Jack Sawyer; 08-08-2011 at 03:00 PM.
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  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    Even if that were true, it wouldn't have a detrimental effect on the economy because of turnaround spending with tax dollars. But also, that's not a worry because the idea of taxing the rich more than the poor is borne of hoarding practices that come around when people are effectively too rich

    Penney, would be nice to get an actual rebuttal
    It would be nice to get an actual rebuttal. Tell me why it's not true.

    Turnaround spending? Explain. I'm no economics expert and really don't care to be.

    Hoarding practices? So people who are in a 50% tax bracket should not try to find ways to pay less taxes.

    @a500lbgorilla I like the self debate. Keep it going
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    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    ...we've all learned long ago how to share the truth without actually having the truth.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    @a500lbgorilla I like the self debate. Keep it going
    I could use your help :P
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  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    It would be nice to get an actual rebuttal. Tell me why it's not true.
    Higher taxes on the wealthy doesn't curb their spending and investment because it's meant to address the hoarding issue. We're not interested in cutting into their cyclical consumption or investment. That's why one of the caveats of progressive taxation is that investment can lower your bracket. This is one reason why high taxes on the rich work so well, because it promotes investment instead of hoarding. Currently, our paradigm is the opposite. Soooooo much money has been hoarded, that the richies say they're waiting to use it on good investments, but they don't realize (or more like don't care) that it's because of all that hoarding that the consumption cycle is disrupted and those investments opportunities are not arising

    Turnaround spending? Explain. I'm no economics expert and really don't care to be.
    Taxes don't just disappear. In fact, they're the highest economic multipliers. It's only when the wealthy are taxed so little that they have so much money they use to corrupt governments that tax dollars are secretly returned to the rich that tax dollars lose their big multipliers. The US government is the largest employer of a middle class than any institution on the planet, and many of what tax dollars pay for are things that greed would like to do away with, but would have egregiously detrimental effects on the masses.

    Also, all tax dollars are spent, but not all tax cuts are. If you reduce taxes, you can expect only a fraction on the dollar to return to the economy, but when increase spending by the exact same amount instead of cutting taxes you get the entire sum returning to the economy

    Hoarding practices? So people who are in a 50% tax bracket should not try to find ways to pay less taxes.
    They should, but nobody in the US is in that bracket (except possibly some measure of poor people when you combine all taxes). Look at it this way, if taxation is progressive and people are paying the top rate, imagine how bad it would have been if that top rate was low because the only reason they're in the top rate is because they have soooo much money that they're not recycling it, and thus the aggregate economy suffers.

    All us normies do cyclical consumption. That's what economies are based in. But the rich don't want to do their part in cyclical consumption. Why should you and I be structurally determined to recycle 100% of our wealth through the economy, yet richies should only be structurally required to do a fraction of that?
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    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    I believe these assumptions to be highly fallacious.

    If I were from poorer origins, I would tend to find myself worse off. If I were from wealthier origins, I would tend to find myself much better off. If I happened to contract an expensive illness without insurance, I would very likely find myself perpetually broke. If I were to inherit a large sum of money tomorrow, I would very likely manage to maintain and enhance that wealth.

    The difference between rich people and poor people is in bank account alone, not something innate in the process of the people.
    I don't agree. Good examples: look into the rates of bankruptcy and/or brokeness among lottery winners and former (ahem, and current) professional athletes. It is staggering.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Warpe View Post
    Talking out of your ass with authority is still talking out of your ass.
    His views are so extreme that he is actually doing more harm than good for his cause.

    If there's a surefire way to alienate moderates like me, it's blatant extremes (e.g. wufwugy, palin)
  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    I don't agree. Good examples: look into the rates of bankruptcy and/or brokeness among lottery winners and former (ahem, and current) professional athletes. It is staggering.
    I tried to address this a bit. But instead, I'll ask this: what is an innate difference between the rich and the poor?

    That there seems to be one evidenced in lotto winners and rich athletes does not mean there necessarily is one, just that there seems to be one.
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  23. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    I don't agree. Good examples: look into the rates of bankruptcy and/or brokeness among lottery winners and former (ahem, and current) professional athletes. It is staggering.
    That doesn't actually tell us anything because it doesn't isolate much. Besides, it's an effect that should be predicted if rilla's assertion was right because it would demonstrate a lot of rich people not being rich based in merit. And what about all those hard workers who are financially astute, yet not rich

    The best idea we have about the difference between rich and poor is circumstance. This is why we see structural problems of things like blacks on average being substantially poorer than white people. Is Bill Gates a harder worker and smarter than many millions of his peers? No. Was he one of the only people on the planet who had personal access to a computer at the time based on circumstance, then with a little bit of innate human creativity and work, he sparked a wildfire? Yes
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    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    I tried to address this a bit. But instead, I'll ask this: what is an innate difference between the rich and the poor?

    That there seems to be one evidenced in lotto winners and rich athletes does not mean there necessarily is one, just that there seems to be one.
    I think your points earlier about some in other countries really not having a realistic chance of becoming rich are pretty spot on. e.g. one couldn't convince me that a starving kid in Africa has much of a chance

    As it relates to those who have access to a computer, the internet, enough time to surf FTR, and literary ability to read this message there isn't a comparable excuse.

    Among the rich that I know (friends and acquintances) there is a certain amount of drive, responsibility, and refusal to fail in all of them that I would not expect to see among the typical poor person.
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    That doesn't actually tell us anything because it doesn't isolate much. Besides, it's an effect that should be predicted if rilla's assertion was right because it would demonstrate a lot of rich people not being rich based in merit. And what about all those hard workers who are financially astute, yet not rich
    I proposed that in a direct response to rilla's quote that the only difference between rich and the poor is in the bank account. Which, actually, in a roundabout way with a strict definition might actually be right

    The best idea we have about the difference between rich and poor is circumstance. This is why we see structural problems of things like blacks on average being substantially poorer than white people. Is Bill Gates a harder worker and smarter than many millions of his peers? No. Was he one of the only people on the planet who had personal access to a computer at the time based on circumstance, then with a little bit of innate human creativity and work, he sparked a wildfire? Yes
    Yet another thing I talked about in another thread about how not everything is black and white and there are varying shades of gray. You seem to think that circumstance is the most important thing; I realize it's a factor just less so than you do. Such is life.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    Among the rich that I know (friends and acquintances) there is a certain amount of drive, responsibility, and refusal to fail in all of them that I would not expect to see among the typical poor person.
    Out of curiosity, how many poor people do you know closely?
    Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

  27. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    I proposed that in a direct response to rilla's quote that the only difference between rich and the poor is in the bank account. Which, actually, in a roundabout way with a strict definition might actually be right


    Yet another thing I talked about in another thread about how not everything is black and white and there are varying shades of gray. You seem to think that circumstance is the most important thing; I realize it's a factor just less so than you do. Such is life.
    You are right that I think circumstance is the most important thing. It's what I see in any area whenever I look. One example is evolution being almost entirely about environment. Biologically, nothing about who we are wasn't borne of circumstance. It's a difficult thing to reconcile with other things like ego, though, because even things that seem non-circumstantial still are. Like one person being smarter or more driven is still best explained by that person's circumstances. The way I look at it is that when you're living your own life, you have to treat things as if they're not circumstantial and there is no determinism, but when developing macro models for things like society, you have to account for circumstantial selection, so to speak
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    I think my posts come off easier to read if one would define rich-poor as more of a spectrum, since most people fall somewhere between the extremes. Or the ever-arbitrary continuum of successful-not successful.

    To answer your question somewhat directly, it depends on how you define 'poor'. If by poor you mean homeless, scraping to get by and live-- I don't know any. If we broaden the definition to include those that get by under the poverty line, have no real ambition in life and drink a 12 pack a night (sorry to bust out possible stereotypes etc. but it's not so far removed from reality), I'd say I know several.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    I think your points earlier about some in other countries really not having a realistic chance of becoming rich are pretty spot on. e.g. one couldn't convince me that a starving kid in Africa has much of a chance

    As it relates to those who have access to a computer, the internet, enough time to surf FTR, and literary ability to read this message there isn't a comparable excuse.

    Among the rich that I know (friends and acquintances) there is a certain amount of drive, responsibility, and refusal to fail in all of them that I would not expect to see among the typical poor person.
    This all sounds spot on. I guess I just see drive and responsibility as attributes of circumstance and not innate. I believe that you could take the same person and have him put up in two different environments and see him turn out to be two different people: one driven, hungry, with an intuition that is honed to the problems at hand, and one that turns out more or less worthless by comparison. But both are still innately the same person.

    That is to say that your life could have developed in such a way that you would possess an entirely different skill set than you do today but still be entirely the same person. In a sense, in a parallel universe there may exist a fat, nerd Lukie who is entirely driven to develop the mathematical understanding of a world of entirely imperfect shapes and patterns which arise from simple and regular events on a tiny scale but fails because of legal intervention into his life's pursuits. And there could exist another Lukie still, essentially the same, who slipped into a bit of a meth habit.

    This all builds upon a central belief of mine: that we're all 100 fold more similar than we are different. There don't exist supermen - just normal men who seemingly manage to accomplish things on a super scale.

    So the rich don't strike me as special, though every bit of their life story could show how they had a deep desire and ability which lead to accumulated wealth, nothing that went into building them was destined for greatness. Just as the poor don't strike me as worthless, though every bit of their life story could show how little they endeavored to succeed and how often they seemingly chose to fail.
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    You are right that I think circumstance is the most important thing. It's what I see in any area whenever I look. One example is evolution being almost entirely about environment. Biologically, nothing about who we are wasn't borne of circumstance. It's a difficult thing to reconcile with other things like ego, though, because even things that seem non-circumstantial still are. Like one person being smarter or more driven is still best explained by that person's circumstances. The way I look at it is that when you're living your own life, you have to treat things as if they're not circumstantial and there is no determinism, but when developing macro models for things like society, you have to account for circumstantial selection, so to speak
    I can't really disagree with this but it's really on a fundamentally different discussion on a different level. Especially the bolded. I don't believe it is society's or government's job to correct for one person being more intelligent and driven than another.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    I proposed that in a direct response to rilla's quote that the only difference between rich and the poor is in the bank account. Which, actually, in a roundabout way with a strict definition might actually be right
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    Being frank about it, the real laws should be something along the lines of any income 5x above median is taxed at 100%
    Wuf I am honestly trying to wrap my head around this idea. Can you help explain a) how this is fair and b) why this would result in a net positive for society?

    Putting myself (and just about anyone else that I know of) in a situation where we are making, >250k, the only real logical thing to do then from a utility standpoint would be to do the least amount of work with the least amount of effort possible while still making 250k. Anything after that effectively would get split up 300,000,000 ways (over simplified, of course), essentially making it worthless.
  33. #33
    You explained it well with the multiverse, a500lbitch.

    I'd like to also mention, why is being very ambitious an innately good thing? That's actually a rare quality. I believe we have been so brainwashed by the hugely ambitious among us running the society, that we see super successful people as normal and normal people as slackers. Criminals are a great example of this kind of thing. We think of criminals as bad people, but they're not, they're normal people who couldn't fit in this world. Chronic criminality isn't even a thing in tribalism, in the kind of society we evolved for.

    I personally am not an ambitious person. I'm very kind, pretty cleaver, and a hard worker, but I don't want to do what it takes to make a lot of money in this world. I have no ambition for greatness, I just want to live and die with my family and friends. And that's how it's supposed to be. But in this world, if you're like that, you're cattle

    That's actually been an enormously destructive thing for me. The reality that I live in a world that values me based on my ability to chase money, yet I don't want to chase money, compounded by the fact that everybody else lives in this same world, and so the entire thing is functional dysfunction, and then people make movies called Crash where the theme is that society's structure is so fucked up that in order to be human you have suffer extremism
  34. #34
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    What you do with your time and energy is up to you. I wholeheartedly respect your opinion on that.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    Wuf I am honestly trying to wrap my head around this idea. Can you help explain a) how this is fair and b) why this would result in a net positive for society?

    Putting myself (and just about anyone else that I know of) in a situation where we are making, >250k, the only real logical thing to do then from a utility standpoint would be to do the least amount of work with the least amount of effort possible while still making 250k. Anything after that effectively would get split up 300,000,000 ways (over simplified, of course), essentially making it worthless.

    Lukie, I linked to a nice page on the internet which gives not 1, but 14 reasons why its a great thing. Here it is again for your convenience.

    14 Ways a 90 Percent Top Tax Rate Fixes Our Economy and Our Country | OurFuture.org


    I think a correct analogy would be the value of tournament poker chips. As you progress on the leaderboard, the value of each additional chip (to you) decreases. The more chips you have, the less the chance of getting wiped out in a single hand/bad beat/dumb play. As you get short stacked, the value of each additional chip (once again, to you), increases dramatically as a single blind can knock you out.

    There comes a point in life which, through hard work and dedication, you have amassed a large enough sum of money to live comfortably for the rest of your life. Let's say you have an income of 1 million dollars on a yearly basis. Would this literally not be enough to like, party like a madman, travel the globe, buy decent houses and cars, escorts & bitches galore, booze, coke and all the other things you would spend money on in life?

    High income taxes incentivize you to reinvest the money back into the economy. Once you invest it, it is no longer income, therefore no longer taxed as income. And you can still have that Ferrari you always wanted. Win/win however you see it.

    Oh, and the concept of Trickle Down Economics is a particularly perverse fairy tale. Think pedo bear reads Goldilocks to a kindergarten audience.

    Tweo articles on the subject, one from 8 years ago, and one from now.
    Trickle-Down Economics: Four Reasons Why It Just Doesn&#039;t Work | United for a Fair Economy
    Warren Buffett: Trickle Down Economics Doesn't Work - Blog For Arizona
    Last edited by Jack Sawyer; 08-08-2011 at 05:33 PM.
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  36. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    Higher taxes on the wealthy doesn't curb their spending and investment because it's meant to address the hoarding issue. We're not interested in cutting into their cyclical consumption or investment. That's why one of the caveats of progressive taxation is that investment can lower your bracket. This is one reason why high taxes on the rich work so well, because it promotes investment instead of hoarding. Currently, our paradigm is the opposite. Soooooo much money has been hoarded, that the richies say they're waiting to use it on good investments, but they don't realize (or more like don't care) that it's because of all that hoarding that the consumption cycle is disrupted and those investments opportunities are not arising
    So if the rich don't invest in a bad economy then you raise their taxes to try to force them to invest so they will be in a lower bracket. What if they decide to cut costs by laying off employees, or reduce income by closing stores? It's their choice but they get targeted by the guvmint with all the blame.

    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    Taxes don't just disappear. In fact, they're the highest economic multipliers. It's only when the wealthy are taxed so little that they have so much money they use to corrupt governments that tax dollars are secretly returned to the rich that tax dollars lose their big multipliers. The US government is the largest employer of a middle class than any institution on the planet, and many of what tax dollars pay for are things that greed would like to do away with, but would have egregiously detrimental effects on the masses.
    Greed? When someone will not do with THEIR money what you want them to do then they are greedy? No sale there.

    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    Also, all tax dollars are spent, but not all tax cuts are. If you reduce taxes, you can expect only a fraction on the dollar to return to the economy, but when increase spending by the exact same amount instead of cutting taxes you get the entire sum returning to the economy.
    Of course all tax dollars are spent. It's not their money. It's easy not to be greedy with other people's money. If you lower taxes on the rich will they be more or less likely to hoard?


    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    They should, but nobody in the US is in that bracket (except possibly some measure of poor people when you combine all taxes). Look at it this way, if taxation is progressive and people are paying the top rate, imagine how bad it would have been if that top rate was low because the only reason they're in the top rate is because they have soooo much money that they're not recycling it, and thus the aggregate economy suffers.

    All us normies do cyclical consumption. That's what economies are based in. But the rich don't want to do their part in cyclical consumption. Why should you and I be structurally determined to recycle 100% of our wealth through the economy, yet richies should only be structurally required to do a fraction of that?
    Seems a bit greedy to try to tell other people to do with their money regardless of how much they have.

    How about this?
    I don't think anybody should be able to withdraw any of their poker BR. It stays online where other people have the chance to win it. When you withdraw it to buy a townhouse or a BMW 3 series 335i coupe, you are being greedy (not aimed at you M2M ). When you get to 5000NL you should be required to use 40% of your BR to stake microstakes players so they have a chance to be successful at poker too (not aimed at you Keith ). They didn't earn it but it's fair. If you do not stake the micro players then the amount of rake that only you pay increases by 20%. You don't agree with this thhen you are greedy?

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    @jack

    Thanks for posting that again. I understand well the concept of decreasing marginal utility. And while I don't agree that a 90% top tax is anything evening approaching fair or ideal, a 90% tax above $1,000,000 is far different than wuf's proposition of a 100% tax above $250,000.

    Beyond that though I think there is a fundamental and philosophical difference of opinion here that no amount of debate will change.
  38. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer View Post
    I think a correct analogy would be the value of tournament poker chips. As you progress on the leaderboard, the value of each additional chip (to you) decreases. The more chips you have, the less the chance of getting wiped out in a single hand/bad beat/dumb play. As you get short stacked, the value of each additional chip (once again, to you), increases dramatically as a single blind can knock you out.
    But what if you decide that you are going to sit out of the tournament for a while and just donate your blinds. Then the tournament director decides you are being greedy and forces you to play more hands and actually bet some of your chips. If you refuse then he takes 20% of your chips and divides them between the short stacks. Will you play in this type of tournament again?
    "Just cause I'm from the South don't mean I ain't got no book learnin'"

    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    ...we've all learned long ago how to share the truth without actually having the truth.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    Beyond that though I think there is a... philosophical difference of opinion here that no amount of debate will change.
    This (edited) every time. That's why I tried to show my hand as best I could in my last post. Whatever it is that places you on one side of the divide from the other, it strikes me as something which isn't grounded in any true difference. That your opinion can become my opinion and vice versa but if we both pursue the truth, debate is not the tool that shall get us there. Debate/ discussion/ rhetoric is the tool that we use to share the truth once we've found it. It's just that we've all learned long ago how to share the truth without actually having the truth.
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  40. #40
    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    Wuf I am honestly trying to wrap my head around this idea. Can you help explain a) how this is fair and b) why this would result in a net positive for society?

    Putting myself (and just about anyone else that I know of) in a situation where we are making, >250k, the only real logical thing to do then from a utility standpoint would be to do the least amount of work with the least amount of effort possible while still making 250k. Anything after that effectively would get split up 300,000,000 ways (over simplified, of course), essentially making it worthless.
    I don't know what the best numbers are, but the base is in developing a system where one person's worth doesn't exceed a particular percentage of median would be probably the best realistic way of doing it. We already have very strong evidence for this kind thing anyways in that income of the wealthy has been dramatically increasing relative to median, yet the health of the society has gone down.

    Other necessary things to look at include how there's generally a finite amount of stuff humans need or want, diminishing returns after a certain point, and that social health has been largely shown to be a product of equality levels not absolute wealth levels i.e. poor people with poor neighbors are happier than poor people with rich neighbors. Another thing that shows just how incredibly dependent on the social humans are is that some studies have been showing that financial rewards don't produce better results from employees, but in fact often make worse results. We're so deeply human that money is more of an afterthought to the work and interactions themselves

    But the point is egalitarianism. Which is partially a foreign concept to humans. Only partially. Our biology was originally about organism survival of the fittest (which our economy reflects quite well), but animals and human specific evolution has changed it a lot of it from "survival of the fittest organism" to "survival of the fittest society". In some ways, we're still the isolated organisms fighting everything, but in most ways that has changed into being members of a social group. This is even why concepts like friends and family are so strong among humans. Imagine what a tiger would think about the idea of "friends"

    I'm saying all this to lay the point that the goal should be striving towards the benefit of the society, and that alone is why clipping the capacity for too much wealth accumulation is beneficial to humanity.


    Anyways, the kind of thing that would happen with a similar paradigm to what I propose is that median incomes go up by a lot (and thus top bracket goes up). Opportunity, that thing that libertarians and conservatives and capitalists say they care so much about, would SKYROCKET, and community and small business would return. The social model would be much more family and friend oriented, which isn't too much different than how it used to be before top earners got enormous with multinational corporations and such, and if you made it big, there would still be ample room for others to copy you, and in effect you would have copied somebody else.

    Besides, they say the way to find your career is to find what you love. Well, if that's true then you're not going to suddenly stop loving what you do if it's not making you richer. In fact, there's a wealth of evidence that the best things come without monetary incentive. Most great artists and scientists did it for the love, not the money. They weren't babies like megacorp CEOs whining and lying about how if they don't get everything they want they'll stop creating jobs

    Regardless of what it takes, my proposal is for a system that provides for people. In economics, this means that there can't be that much wealth inequality. As to how much, I dunno

    To make sure to answer your question: the top bracket would be designed to be where the reasonable top level of wealth is. If this means after you achieve that wealth you give somebody else your job, sit back and live the good life and receive royalties, doesn't sound like a bad thing at all. Our problem is that we're just redefining royalty and serfdom with our system. Private jet richness is simply too rich. Our economy doesn't have enough wealth in it to provide private jets for some without really hurting a lot of others
  41. #41
    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    ...we've all learned long ago how to share the truth without actually having the truth.
    I like this. My new sig.
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    Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
    ...we've all learned long ago how to share the truth without actually having the truth.
  42. #42
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    I like this. My new sig.
    Wear it with pride, my friend. :P
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  43. #43
    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    @jack

    Thanks for posting that again. I understand well the concept of decreasing marginal utility. And while I don't agree that a 90% top tax is anything evening approaching fair or ideal, a 90% tax above $1,000,000 is far different than wuf's proposition of a 100% tax above $250,000.

    Beyond that though I think there is a fundamental and philosophical difference of opinion here that no amount of debate will change.
    FWIW, if I were in charge I would probably go for something like 60% at income above 1 million. My other proposal would drastically change the world and would do things like stifle some aspects of globalization. But I think it would actually boost technological advances. Regardless, the perfect world paradigm is very tight-nit with very low inequality
  44. #44
    If you taxed the top 1% at 100% would this help?
    "Just cause I'm from the South don't mean I ain't got no book learnin'"

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  45. #45
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    But what if you decide that you are going to sit out of the tournament for a while and just donate your blinds. Then the tournament director decides you are being greedy and forces you to play more hands and actually bet some of your chips. If you refuse then he takes 20% of your chips and divides them between the short stacks. Will you play in this type of tournament again?
    In sticking with the poker tournament analogy, the blinds always keep going up. Assuming your proposition to sit out, there inevitably comes a point where the blinds are so high that you are still blinded out.

    It's in the game already and the tournament director doesn't have to say anything about it. And, more importantly, it is going to happen in a realistic amount of time that it actually incentivizes you to either keep playing or lose.

    Real life does not work that way. The proverbial blinds are either nonexistent or so low that if you are ever given the opportunity to hoard in an all-you-can-eat fashion you will then be able to actually sit out for GENERATIONS without ever having to re-input one dime back into the game (once you pay whatever tax you had to pay on that particular income, that is). Therein lies the problem.


    @Rilla, with dressing obv.!
    Last edited by Jack Sawyer; 08-08-2011 at 06:19 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    If you taxed the top 1% at 100% would this help?
    10 CEOs On $1 Salaries (Apart From Their $Millions in Stock Options) | Business Pundit


    But no, that's not it. The idea is not to take all the money away; the idea is that those who can easily carry a higher burden for the good of the entire society, to actually do so.Having a 10 figure salary is nice, but it also means that you can proportionality carry a much higher burden than someone who has a 5 figure salary.
    Last edited by Jack Sawyer; 08-08-2011 at 06:08 PM.
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  47. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by Sasquach991 View Post
    So if the rich don't invest in a bad economy then you raise their taxes to try to force them to invest so they will be in a lower bracket.
    The economy is bad because they have too much of its money. At every given point we're dealing with finite wealth in an economy, and since the economy churns only on cyclical consumption, when there is lack of demand it's because there's too much wealth stuffed away in pockets of the system not contributing. The rich are currently richer than they have ever been. That is why the economy is so shitty. They are holding onto the very wealth that is needed to run the economy via cyclical consumption

    What if they decide to cut costs by laying off employees, or reduce income by closing stores?
    Then they would be terrible businessmen. But the the evidence has shown that when the rich have a smaller portion of the pie, businesses actually thrive due to more customers spending more money.


    Greed? When someone will not do with THEIR money what you want them to do then they are greedy? No sale there.
    Be sure to not impose things like morality onto economics. Economics is a mathematical and behavioral system. Moral ideas like ownership are afterthoughts and facets of the system. I mean, I guess you could claim moral ideas are paramount, but don't pretend you're referring to economics then. The fact is that if you want to run an economy, you have to run an economy

    Also, the greed I was referring to was the stuff that makes the corruption and bribery


    Of course all tax dollars are spent. It's not their money. It's easy not to be greedy with other people's money. If you lower taxes on the rich will they be more or less likely to hoard?
    They have and will be more likely to hoard. We've been running the same dysfunctional "give the rich more" econ strategy for four decades now. And things have only gotten worse for everybody else. Much worse, in fact.




    Seems a bit greedy to try to tell other people to do with their money regardless of how much they have.
    Well that's not what greed is. Such irony in being able to claim trying to stamp greed in exchange for fairness as itself greed

    Bill gates worked a "little bit"? Really?
    He most certainly never worked harder than my father. Or my brother-in-law. Or me. Or most normal people
  48. #48
    Quote Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer View Post
    The idea is not to take all the money away; the idea is that those who can easily carry a higher burden for the good of the entire society, to actually do so.Having a 10 figure salary is nice, but it also means that you can proportionality carry a much higher burden than someone who has a 5 figure salary.
    Laffer curve - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Just because you raise the tax rate does not mean that you collect more taxes.
  49. #49
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    FWIW, if I were in charge I would probably go for something like 60% at income above 1 million. My other proposal would drastically change the world and would do things like stifle some aspects of globalization. But I think it would actually boost technological advances. Regardless, the perfect world paradigm is very tight-nit with very low inequality
    what are people paying above 1 million now? 35% federal income tax + payroll taxes (capped) + state + local? Isn't that close to 50% already for someone making $1m/year? Heck pre-Bush tax cuts it is probably right around that 60%.

    I don't think the current sytem is as bad as you make it out to be. Perhaps closing some particularly egregious tax loopholes would be a good start.

    edit: I am not an economist and am not claiming to know what an ideal top tax rate is
    Last edited by Lukie; 08-08-2011 at 07:20 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    what are people paying above 1 million now? 35% federal income tax + payroll taxes (capped) + state + local? Isn't that close to 50% already for someone making $1m/year? Heck pre-Bush tax cuts it is probably right around that 60%.

    I don't think the current sytem is as bad as you make it out to be. Perhaps closing some particularly egregious tax loopholes would be a good start.

    edit: I am not an economist and am not claiming to know what an ideal top tax rate is
    I wonder what would happen to the tax take if nobody tried to evade any tax? or if everyone involved in tax evasion (the people paying less tax AND the lawyers and accountants who signed in on it) was busted and charged - jail is probably more of a deterrent (1/2 of the deterrent/punishment thing) to these people than to your average neighbourhood crack dealer...
  51. #51
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  52. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
    what are people paying above 1 million now? 35% federal income tax + payroll taxes (capped) + state + local? Isn't that close to 50% already for someone making $1m/year? Heck pre-Bush tax cuts it is probably right around that 60%.

    I don't think the current sytem is as bad as you make it out to be. Perhaps closing some particularly egregious tax loopholes would be a good start.

    edit: I am not an economist and am not claiming to know what an ideal top tax rate is
    Exemptions and capital gains. I think it's accurate to say that the majority of enormous earnings come in form of capital gains, which are taxed low. Regardless, big earners avoid sooooooooooo much taxation through exemptions. I believe it was Warren Buffet who said he pays a lower rate than his secretary
  53. #53
    nvm I regret entering this thread
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  54. #54
    wufindows 8:

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  56. #56
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    When one person is rich, it's because other people are poor. Nobody has ever been able to deny this reality of economics
    Let's say I own a huge tomato farm, and I have what people feel are the best Tomatoes in the entire world. People come from all over the United States to buy my Tomatoes during harvest (at only slightly above a normal tomato's price cause i'm an altruistic guy). I earn 1 million dollars from the harvest and a couple hundred thousand people have my tomatoes.

    Each person who buys my tomatoes feels they are of equal or greater value than the money they exchanged for them because a) they were willing to purchase them and b) many were willing to even spend money and time coming to buy them. Therefore, every person who buys a tomato is actually gaining wealth when they use their money. Nobody has become poorer in this exchange, except maybe for me because I could have charged more for my tomatoes.

    I think you're confusing who gains more cash in the exchange for who becomes wealthier.
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  58. #58
    Quote Originally Posted by Numbr2intheWorld View Post
    Let's say I own a huge tomato farm, and I have what people feel are the best Tomatoes in the entire world. People come from all over the United States to buy my Tomatoes during harvest (at only slightly above a normal tomato's price cause i'm an altruistic guy). I earn 1 million dollars from the harvest and a couple hundred thousand people have my tomatoes.

    Each person who buys my tomatoes feels they are of equal or greater value than the money they exchanged for them because a) they were willing to purchase them and b) many were willing to even spend money and time coming to buy them. Therefore, every person who buys a tomato is actually gaining wealth when they use their money. Nobody has become poorer in this exchange, except maybe for me because I could have charged more for my tomatoes.

    I think you're confusing who gains more cash in the exchange for who becomes wealthier.
    I'm glad you did this because it can perfectly illustrate the US economy of recent



    Then we eat the tomatos, but you don't eat your money. You put some of your money back into personal consumption, some for your business investments, and save some. We (your customers) lost the wealth of the tomatos we bought from you, but we want more, and need more money for that. So we work for the money. Who pays us? You do, and people like you. Where did you get your money? From us, from our consumption, from the work, from the entire process of a churning economy

    But what happens when a percentage of your income from tomatos sales is regularly put into savings? There is then less money to pay workers, and you end up selling fewer tomatos, and we all suffer. You saving personally was not a problem, but every other business owner is doing the same, and then we created a Tragedy of the Commons, where a sizable chunk of the economy is cleaved from that economy, and everybody else suffers. Saving for a rainy day is good, unless everybody saves for it, and then that rainy day comes due to too much saving.


    When you look at the data over the last four decades, you see this is what has happened. Productivity as gone up and profits have gone up, but their share has been decreasingly in the middle class and poor. People had less money to buy stuff, but the game of cyclical consumption must go on. So we started in on credit cards. It was as good as money, and it kept the game going without executives having to share profits with their workers. But that started becoming a problem, because you can only accumulate so much debt, and bumped up a few bubbles in tech and housing, but those burst. The second one so badly that we couldn't so quickly re-bubble to get out of it like we did the tech one

    Over the last four decades, policy has made the rich richer, and poor poorer. No matter the ideology, that's the fact, and that's the problem. There is a wealth of evidence in our history and in other modern nations about this kind of thing. The game of the economy is most fundamentally about how the wealth flows through what sectors. Stagnations and disruptions cause turmoil and destruction of wealth. Just follow the money. When it moves its way to the top, then a portion of that doesn't come back down, the economy is less healthy. It's supply and demand, cyclical consumption and production. We have been systemically dumping our economy's wealth onto only one side, then wonder why there is no balance
  59. #59
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    I'm glad you did this because it can perfectly illustrate the US economy of recent



    Then we eat the tomatos, but you don't eat your money. You put some of your money back into personal consumption, some for your business investments, and save some. We (your customers) lost the wealth of the tomatos we bought from you.
    Under your world view the person who doesn't eat any food and is malnourished is wealthier than the person who eats food and stays healthy... Is that really true?
  60. #60
    Quote Originally Posted by Numbr2intheWorld View Post
    Under your world view the person who doesn't eat any food and is malnourished is wealthier than the person who eats food and stays healthy... Is that really true?
    That's the opposite of what I'm saying. That the latter is more wealthy is a demonstration of the necessity of cyclical wealth distribution. I'm not advocating for an equity of all wealth throughout the system, but a balance. The lower rungs of an economy are necessary to keep the higher rungs operating well. The lack of investment we're seeing now is because the lower rungs are not able to participate in the economy the way they're supposed to. This is due to pretty much just two reasons 1) widening of wealth inequality, and 2) rising energy costs.
  61. #61
    We can use the tomatoes to create batteries and then I'll be like, what energy crisis?

    No wait, that's potatoes. Please continue.
  62. #62
    I always thought it was BennyLaRuskie, not BennyLaReilly
  63. #63
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    We (your customers) lost the wealth of the tomatos we bought from you
    ...
  64. #64
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    I'm glad you did this because it can perfectly illustrate the US economy of recent



    Then we eat the tomatos, but you don't eat your money. You put some of your money back into personal consumption, some for your business investments, and save some. We (your customers) lost the wealth of the tomatos we bought from you, No, you lost money and gained a tomato. Wealth isn't just money. If you bought a bunch of cars and houses for money would you say you lost wealth? but we want more, and need more money for that. So we work for the money. Who pays us? You do, and people like you. Where did you get your money? From us, from our consumption, from the work, from the entire process of a churning economy. Ummmm what?

    But what happens when a percentage of your income from tomatos sales is regularly put into savings? There is then less money to pay workers, and you end up selling fewer tomatos, and we all suffer. This is absurd logic. This isn't how the economy or any business works. The owner takes some amount of money from his profits to pay himself for his work. That doesn't harm anyone, unless you consider not giving charity as harm. You saving personally was not a problem, but every other business owner is doing the same, and then we created a Tragedy of the Commons, where a sizable chunk of the economy is cleaved from that economy, and everybody else suffers. Saving for a rainy day is good, unless everybody saves for it, and then that rainy day comes due to too much saving. So we should force everyone to spend and consume because that helps everyone right?


    When you look at the data over the last four decades, you see this is what has happened. Productivity as gone up and profits have gone up, but their share has been decreasingly in the middle class and poor. People had less money to buy stuff, but the game of cyclical consumption must go on. So we started in on credit cards. It was as good as money, and it kept the game going without executives having to share profits with their workers. But that started becoming a problem, because you can only accumulate so much debt, and bumped up a few bubbles in tech and housing, but those burst. The second one so badly that we couldn't so quickly re-bubble to get out of it like we did the tech one There is no logic or evidence here you are just spouting out your opinions.

    Over the last four decades, policy has made the rich richer, and poor poorer. You got this right. No matter the ideology, that's the fact, and that's the problem. There is a wealth of evidence in our history and in other modern nations about this kind of thing. The game of the economy is most fundamentally about how the wealth flows through what sectors. Stagnations and disruptions cause turmoil and destruction of wealth. Just follow the money. When it moves its way to the top, then a portion of that doesn't come back down, the economy is less healthy. It's supply and demand, cyclical consumption and production. We have been systemically dumping our economy's wealth onto only one side, then wonder why there is no balance
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  65. #65
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    That's the opposite of what I'm saying. That the latter is more wealthy is a demonstration of the necessity of cyclical wealth distribution. I'm not advocating for an equity of all wealth throughout the system, but a balance. The lower rungs of an economy are necessary to keep the higher rungs operating well. The lack of investment we're seeing now is because the lower rungs are not able to participate in the economy the way they're supposed to. This is due to pretty much just two reasons 1) widening of wealth inequality, and 2) rising energy costs.
    I don't know what any of this means. Does anyone get what he's saying here?
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  66. #66
    Quote Originally Posted by Numbr2intheWorld View Post
    ...
    You were telling me that I said burning wealth and no longer participating in the system is better than consuming wealth and further participating in the system.

    Regardless, this kind of deep abstraction is mostly irrelevant to the real-world operation of the system
  67. #67
    Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan View Post
    No, you lost money and gained a tomato. Wealth isn't just money. If you bought a bunch of cars and houses for money would you say you lost wealth?
    That was after I ate the tomato and you didn't burn the money I paid for it with

    Ummmm what?
    Supply and demand. That thing that has always been the backbone of economics, yet we've forgotten about due to the brainwash machines pumping full-force ideologies that only benefit the owners of those machines

    This is absurd logic. This isn't how the economy or any business works. The owner takes some amount of money from his profits to pay himself for his work. That doesn't harm anyone, unless you consider not giving charity as harm.
    My next sentence expounded. The problem is not in the taking of profit, but when too much profit is taken. Profits not returned the economy are an effective reduction of wealth from that economy. When amount of profits are reasonable, this is not a problem because they're used for further consumption and investment. But when profits are unreasonably high, the few who have them stop using them because of lack of stuff to use them on. And when they do use them, they mostly go towards sectors that don't recycle the wealth through the rest of the economy. The extreme growth of the finance industry and luxury items, and the huge amounts of money currently sitting in incredibly rich peoples' vaults doing nothing has proven this point. The reason all this over-profit taking is bad is because it hurts everybody else by siphoning wealth from the economy and thus from everybody else

    So we should force everyone to spend and consume because that helps everyone right?
    Well, if you want an economy, then yes it needs to be structurally designed on cyclical consumption and production. That's what economics is, after all.

    This is all a matter of the super rich among us wanting to force an economy upon everybody else, but not themselves. They want us to give them our money for their goods, then they want to keep that money and not pay it back. They refuse to participate in an economy. This is the contrast between actual economics and the Randian Libertarian sort. The former is, well, actual economics, the latter is a moral system of arbitrary deservedness masquerading as economics

    When running an economy, the wealth that gets distributed from consumer to producer MUST be then redistributed back from producer to consumer in order to repeat the cycle and keep the economy operating. What we have been seeing these last several decades is the producer not wanting to play his part, wanting to keep everything he deems worthy based on a dysfunctional moral ideology, and create a new rendition of nobility and serfdom

    There is no logic or evidence here you are just spouting out your opinions.
    I thought the last time we went at it, I did provide some evidences. The issues of wealth inequality and household debt accumulation are well documented. Bureau of Labor and such
    Last edited by wufwugy; 08-09-2011 at 06:16 PM.
  68. #68
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    You were telling me that I said burning wealth and no longer participating in the system is better than consuming wealth and further participating in the system.
    I didn't want to even take it that far. I wanted to know whether you thought a hungry person who owns a tomato is wealthier than a satiated person who just consumed a tomato.
  69. #69
    Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan View Post
    Rich are richer and poor are poorer because of regulations of the government.
    What regulations?
  70. #70
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    What regulations?
    Look in the last thread where we argued. I'm sorry, I admire your passion for talking about politics but I don't really want to get into this stuff anymore. gl
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  71. #71
    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    What regulations?
    I'm prob not going to look at this thread anymore but to give one good example: the regulation of the beer industry. There's a great documentary called beer wars I think that gets into it. The regulations are set up so the small companies have an artificially large disadvantage over larger competitors.
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  72. #72
    Well if you won't see this, you won't see it, I guess

    Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan View Post
    I'm prob not going to look at this thread anymore but to give one good example: the regulation of the beer industry. There's a great documentary called beer wars I think that gets into it. The regulations are set up so the small companies have an artificially large disadvantage over larger competitors.
    That does happen, and is a problem in some industries. Gambling is a perfect example. Others like software, entertainment, and probably your beer example are good ones too. However, there are two necessary things to apply: 1) what happens with no regulation in either direction? Some industries are not naturally competitive, and so not regulating for some equity will just create the same results as regulating against equity. 2) Some industries are the opposite what works best for an economy when deregulated. Banking and healthcare are big ones. A lot of industries are in the middle where some aspects should be regulated but others should not. Like food and drugs. Both over-regulation and over-deregulation would be disasters

    Also, regulation is itself a non-separable facet of society. Regulation is just another way of saying words like "rules" and "laws", and will always manifest in some way. Even Peter Schiff once slipped up and said (not verbatim) that it's not so much that he's for or against amount of regulation, but that he's for smarter regulation. Which is right, yet belies the position that all we need is deregulation

    Regardless, there are a wealth of industries that are fucked up by bribery lobbying government to regulate for benefit of the special interests. But sadly, the times in which we hear about how government is so bad is when the Koch's don't like the EPA and want to be able to dump chemical waste wherever they please, or when Goldman Sachs doesn't like the SEC trying to stop them from their ability to create bubbles then bet against the bubble not bursting, etc

    Corporate personhood has turned government into lobbied whores for those with the money to buy them, and we find over-regulation in areas where that is destructive for the society yet beneficial for the special, and under-regulation in areas where that is destructive for society yet beneficial for the special.

    It's about creating smart laws, not creating absence of laws
  73. #73
    Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan View Post
    Rich are richer and poor are poorer because of regulations of the government.
    That seems like an absurd over-simplification of a complex issue.

    You can cherry-pick examples of extreme regulation hurting the little guy just like you could cherry-pick examples of extreme deregulation allowing the big guy to screw over the little guy.

    The fact is that we need regulation of some form, and we also need taxes. The extent of each is up for debate, but laisse-faire economic libertarianism taken to an extreme allows for things like the american housing bubble crash to occur when groupthink sets into the minds of the "great" fiscal minds of wall street. Canada for example has much stricter lending policies and its housing market was relatively unscathed.

    I know there are some bullshit regulations out there, and they should be dealt with, but I also don't believe we can throw the baby out with the bathwater and have wild-west economics either.
  74. #74
    Quote Originally Posted by d0zer View Post
    That seems like an absurd over-simplification of a complex issue.

    You can cherry-pick examples of extreme regulation hurting the little guy just like you could cherry-pick examples of extreme deregulation allowing the big guy to screw over the little guy.

    Give me one example big guy screwing over little guy without doing something currently illegal and without government help

    The fact is that we need regulation of some form, and we also need taxes. The extent of each is up for debate, but laisse-faire economic libertarianism taken to an extreme allows for things like the american housing bubble crash to occur when groupthink sets into the minds of the "great" fiscal minds of wall street. Canada for example has much stricter lending policies and its housing market was relatively unscathed.

    The american housing bubble without a doubt was caused by regulation that artificially increased demand for home ownership from the government forcing banks to make loans to people who wouldnt be able to pay the loan if they met even a little bit of a snag income wise. The government caused unstrict lending policies.

    I know there are some bullshit regulations out there, and they should be dealt with, but I also don't believe we can throw the baby out with the bathwater and have wild-west economics either.
    You don't believe it but that doesn't make it any less correct.

    K I'm bored I came back.
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  75. #75
    Quote Originally Posted by d0zer View Post
    The fact is that we need regulation of some form, and we also need taxes. The extent of each is up for debate, but laisse-faire economic libertarianism taken to an extreme allows for things like the american housing bubble crash to occur when groupthink sets into the minds of the "great" fiscal minds of wall street. Canada for example has much stricter lending policies and its housing market was relatively unscathed.
    The US had very strong regulations on housing loans. They strongly encouraged banks to make shitty loans in the name of the "American Dream." The housing crash had everything to do with regulation.

    Having strict regulations the other way doesn't help much either. When you have very strict, conservative lending policies you end up fucking the middle class because banks who actually would have take a chance on them are prohibited from giving them a loan. I'm not surprised the housing market was unscathed because your prices we're probably falling well before.

    That being said, if the regulations of Canada matched the normal due diligence a good bank would do before giving a loan, then they would be fine.

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