Well, that's my point, really. I think where we are differing is really over the definition of what is a market-led process and what isn't. You see cheating and corruption and being a process of free markets. I see it as a frustration of free markets.
Rule is made (market is no longer free because there's a government imposition)
Rule is ignored or evaded on a massive scale. Market is now "Freeer"
And, as a broader point, you talk about regulation as a solution. Maybe it is - the right regulation.That's quite a heroic assumption. My brief perusal of Dodd-Frank is that a lot of deck chairs (and derivatives) will be shuffled about, but probably won't change the fundamental issues. Which is something, I guess.
Pssst.. you're arguing with yourself :)
Well, generally speaking the decision by your Supreme Court seems quite perverse to me. It overturned a quite sensible piece of legislation on a bizarre pretext and opened to door the special pleading and corporate interests....
Welcome to America! Corporations now have the right to bear arms. Shadowrun here we come!
Shadowrun 4 life!
There's a reason I've been reading all these steam- and cyberpunk books lately.
Some services (by no means all) are tradeable. The UK's biggest export is financial services, for example - so some people do want other countries' services (Lloyds of London is a big international insurance market, as an illustration, and London generally is a finance hub for Europe and beyond). But the "services-only" model was more a thought experiment to point out that a country won't simply cease to exist without a manufacturing sector than a suggestion of how to actually run the economy.
Here's the problem: You're still looking at the country as a singular, monolithic entity rather than as a group of people. That's where your theory is in for some serious trouble.
Finance is very... top heavy? I think would be the term for it. You have one person at the top and they're making earning all of your money or adding most of your value. Intensive manufacturing would be bottom heavy, if you want to make 1 dollar per hand crafted widget the way you make more money is by paying for more hands. So you have a lot of people directly involved in your factory, as well as
Lets take this to an extreme. Someone has complete control of the London financial sector. He owns it all.
How many other people does he need?
He needs a few assistants, a few secretaries , someone cleaning the office, occasionally he needs construction workers to build a building but once thats up they're really not that useful. He needs an IT guy to keep the computers running.
That's all he need to move around billions of dollars from one account in a bank around the world to another. He can import food (because farming is labor intensive and people elsewhere do it cheaper) , electronicns, clothes...
On paper England is doing great! It has this massive amount of money and its throwing its weight around by manipulating markets.
But what you have is one person with all the money and power, 100 people with crumby paying jobs (high supply low demand) and 50,999,899 people with nothing.
Just for info:
I love the way they cite the world bank assessment and then proceed to talk about regulations completely unrelated to what the world bank was assessing, without mentioning that.
I cant get behind a movement that has no clear goal. Seriously listen to an interview. No one is down there for the same thing. The nearest I can see as a unified message is " You make more money then me so give me some!"
They are entitled children that dont want to do anything and get free things for it. Those huge companys didnt start out making billions of dollars. They where started by a person or people with an idea and the drive to make it what is it. Stop trying to shame them into giving you free stuff and follow thier lead.
These people are blaming the government and big business for all thier problem when they should be looking at themselves. Ya , you lost your home , but do you know why and whos to blame. SPOILER ALERT , its your fault. The bank offered you a loan with rediculous term and you signed it. They didnt tie you to the chiar. They didnt put a gun to your childs head. You freely signed a piece of paper that said your getting a 300,000 dollar loan to pay for a property thats worth half that. Then on top of all of that , You didnt put any money down and agreed to a have they payment to go $2500 a month after three years.
The american population is general are whiney , entitled babies looking for a handout ( yes I am american as well. thats why it pisses me off so much) . What the hell happened to the ideals of the older generations. I miss the 40s and 50s.
I cant get behind a movement that has no clear goal. Seriously listen to an interview. No one is down there for the same thing. The nearest I can see as a unified message is " You make more money then me so give me some!"
They are entitled children that dont want to do anything and get free things for it. Those huge companys didnt start out making billions of dollars. They where started by a person or people with an idea and the drive to make it what is it. Stop trying to shame them into giving you free stuff and follow thier lead.
These people are blaming the government and big business for all thier problem when they should be looking at themselves. Ya , you lost your home , but do you know why and whos to blame. SPOILER ALERT , its your fault. The bank offered you a loan with rediculous term and you signed it. They didnt tie you to the chiar. They didnt put a gun to your childs head. You freely signed a piece of paper that said your getting a 300,000 dollar loan to pay for a property thats worth half that. Then on top of all of that , You didnt put any money down and agreed to a have they payment to go $2500 a month after three years.
The american population is general are whiney , entitled babies looking for a handout ( yes I am american as well. thats why it pisses me off so much) . What the hell happened to the ideals of the older generations. I miss the 40s and 50s.
3/5
You got the entitlement meme, but you really didn't highlight the jealousy angle all that well. Bonus point for rose-colored glasses view of the 40s and 50s, though. Miss-spelling ridiculous was another nice touch.
If, on the other hand, you were being serious, I plead Poe's law.
2/5I cant get behind a movement that has no clear goal. Seriously listen to an interview. No one is down there for the same thing. The nearest I can see as a unified message is " You make more money then me so give me some!"
They are entitled children that dont want to do anything and get free things for it. Those huge companys didnt start out making billions of dollars. They where started by a person or people with an idea and the drive to make it what is it. Stop trying to shame them into giving you free stuff and follow thier lead.
These people are blaming the government and big business for all thier problem when they should be looking at themselves. Ya , you lost your home , but do you know why and whos to blame. SPOILER ALERT , its your fault. The bank offered you a loan with rediculous term and you signed it. They didnt tie you to the chiar. They didnt put a gun to your childs head. You freely signed a piece of paper that said your getting a 300,000 dollar loan to pay for a property thats worth half that. Then on top of all of that , You didnt put any money down and agreed to a have they payment to go $2500 a month after three years.
The american population is general are whiney , entitled babies looking for a handout ( yes I am american as well. thats why it pisses me off so much) . What the hell happened to the ideals of the older generations. I miss the 40s and 50s.
Not trolling. If people are looking for the source of thier problem they should buy a mirror. I refered to the 40s and 50s in referance to them earning what they had and not looking for others to just give them things.
Not trolling. If people are looking for the source of thier problem they should buy a mirror. I refered to the 40s and 50s in referance to them earning what they had and not looking for others to just give them things.
Hey, don't be mad! I went back and gave you another point!
Not trolling. If people are looking for the source of thier problem they should buy a mirror. I refered to the 40s and 50s in referance to them earning what they had and not looking for others to just give them things.Hey, don't be mad! I went back and gave you another point!
Well its just my opinion after all. Everyone would rather blame some one else then take on any type of responsibility.
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The american population is general are whiney , entitled babies looking for a handout ( yes I am american as well. thats why it pisses me off so much) . What the hell happened to the ideals of the older generations. I miss the 40s and 50s.
What happened was that we had a brief period where we NEEDED workers because we were the only industrialized society that hadn't been bombed back to the renaissance. The pay was good because companies weren't allowed to collude, they had a harder time busting up unions with the national guard, and if you worked hard there was a decent job for you.
People worked without gas masks breathing in toxic chemicals and asbestos because they didn't know any better. So what if you broke your back at 50 and died at 53 from Lung cancer? 53 is plenty old!
Then we realized that society would not simply fall apart unless we worked ourselves to death. Reasonable hours with reasonable pay that you could live on and live with were POSSIBLE. Our choices weren't grubbing in the dirt to make 5 people in the country insanely rich or starve: we could all share in the wealth we were creating to have a decent life.
Well "decent" profits aren't good enough. Corporations want more.. more.. MORE! They think they have to , to survive the other corporations, because these days a corporation isn't about what you do its about how much your stock is worth.
Now there's no reason to have an American worker when a worker overseas is far cheaper. The money can flow overseas to hire workers and flow back in when you sell products here. Of course, that only works as long as there's someone here to actually buy the product...
Well its just my opinion after all. Everyone would rather blame some one else then take on any type of responsibility.
Fair enough -- you are certainly entitled to your opinion. But you shouldn't be surprised if you get "Hi Welcome" when you jump to the end of 17 pages of people discussing why they don't think things are that simple.
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I cant get behind a movement that has no clear goal. Seriously listen to an interview. No one is down there for the same thing. The nearest I can see as a unified message is " You make more money then me so give me some!"
They are entitled children that dont want to do anything and get free things for it. Those huge companys didnt start out making billions of dollars. They where started by a person or people with an idea and the drive to make it what is it. Stop trying to shame them into giving you free stuff and follow thier lead.
These people are blaming the government and big business for all thier problem when they should be looking at themselves. Ya , you lost your home , but do you know why and whos to blame. SPOILER ALERT , its your fault. The bank offered you a loan with rediculous term and you signed it. They didnt tie you to the chiar. They didnt put a gun to your childs head. You freely signed a piece of paper that said your getting a 300,000 dollar loan to pay for a property thats worth half that. Then on top of all of that , You didnt put any money down and agreed to a have they payment to go $2500 a month after three years.
The american population is general are whiney , entitled babies looking for a handout ( yes I am american as well. thats why it pisses me off so much) . What the hell happened to the ideals of the older generations. I miss the 40s and 50s.
Yes, because requiring a college education to get a job but that job not being able to pay back the loans required for the college education is entirely a product of the housing collapse (hint: its been happening for 20 years)
Or how about the fact that our standard of living has been in decline since the 70s - yep, entirely a factor of the housing bubble. No, wait. Its a function of corporations increasing their proffits by paying less for labor relative to inflation, claiming they need to do it in order to stay competative, while simultaneously producing some of the highest proffits relative to inflation. Oh, and the CEOs of the companies are getting paid reccord bonuses, driving the companies to the brink of collapse through high risk ventures showing short term gains to spike their bonuses, and then bailing when it proves too risky.
Or how about how the government facilitated these risky activities through deregulation lobbied for by these corporations when watchdog groups were raising red flags. Then they mitigated the risk by funneling billions of dollars to the failing companies, who then used that money to pay out bonuses for high earners and laying off middle class workers.
Or how about how we cannot get ballanced news reporting anymore, since all of the major news networks are owned by corporations that have a vested interest in feeding specific information to the consumers.
There are dozens of different requests, but if you cannot see the forrest through the trees I'm not sure you can be helped. There are many common themes.
1. Corruption - between government, corporations, and media.
2. Living Wages - wages do not match cost to get the training required, and even then the fields are flooded so there is no guarantee that after going 20K-120K in debt you will be able to find a job in that field. The costs of living have rose too high relative to wages. Without investing in the training though, you cannot find a job for significantly more than minimum wage.
3. Health Care - routinely people have to choose between death and debt.
Well its just my opinion after all. Everyone would rather blame some one else then take on any type of responsibility.Fair enough -- you are certainly entitled to your opinion. But you shouldn't be surprised if you get "Hi Welcome" when you jump to the end of 17 pages of people discussing why they don't think things are that simple.
Im not. Just putting in my opinion on the housing mess. I know things arent that simple but it bugs the crap out of me when I see a news report with some guy yelling about how the evil banks are taking his house away because he cant afford the payment now that its jump up so high. I just cant help but think , why are you surprised that it went up.
Not trolling. If people are looking for the source of thier problem they should buy a mirror. I refered to the 40s and 50s in referance to them earning what they had and not looking for others to just give them things.
Do you realize that in the 40s and 50s trained labor was able to maintain a standard of living that involved
A. not living from hand to mouth (living wages)B. paying for medical expenses (employer health care)
C. not worrying about retirement (pensions, stable social security)
Oh look, people are complaining about.
A. Not getting living wages -college graduates can't pay off debt and afford rent and food, even without dependants. edit: At least 25% of the country is unemployed or underemployed.
B. having to pay for medical expenses - medical coverage is no longer standard and paid for by the employers. Meanwhile costs have skyrocketted.
C. Social Security will be broke in 10 years without a major overhaul noone is willing to do and pensions are gone, replaced by investing in the stock market (which has major corruption issues)
Not trolling. If people are looking for the source of thier problem they should buy a mirror. I refered to the 40s and 50s in referance to them earning what they had and not looking for others to just give them things.Do you realize that in the 40s and 50s trained labor was able to maintain a standard of living that involved
A. not living from hand to mouth (living wages)
B. paying for medical expenses (employer health care)
C. not worrying about retirement (pensions, stable social security)Oh look, people are complaining about.
A. Not getting living wages -college graduates can't pay off debt and afford rent and food, even without dependants. edit: At least 25% of the country is unemployed or underemployed.
B. having to pay for medical expenses - medical coverage is no longer standard and paid for by the employers. Meanwhile costs have skyrocketted.
C. Social Security will be broke in 10 years without a major overhaul noone is willing to do and pensions are gone, replaced by investing in the stock market (which has major corruption issues)
Holy hell dude. I was just talking about the housing issue. Dont know what the issue is though. I have a house that im not under water in. I have a college education with out any outstanding loans and full medical coverage.
Edit - Ya you could maintain the standard of living back then. Thats why I said that.
Cain, I think he's just having trouble realizing it's the entire gov't, not just Reps OR Dems. The housing bubble is clearly Dodd and Frank's fault, and well, almost all of congres during Clinton's presidency.
Us vs. them is hard to let go of sometimes, I'm guilty of this myself.
You do have to admit, though, 20 bucks an hour for a minimum wage, or even thinking jacking up minimum wage will fix anything, is off.
The wage is inexorably tied to the value of money. if you falsely jack up how much x amount of labor is worth, the dollar gets devalued that much more. It means less.
I understand the frustration with how much a college education costs, I dropped out of college for that reason. I do not think it's an entitlement, however. How much a private school charges is controlled by that school, isn't it? For a public university, by that state's legislature? How do you decide the value in such a thing? To charge 120k for a 50 or 60k a year job? Is it the fault of the corporation that the job isn't in fact worth 120k a year, or the school for overcharging? I always figured private schools used high tuition as a way to weed out "undesireables" and the goal posts kept moving...then other schools decided how much you paid for tuition = quality of education, and jacked their tution up accordingly. I don't know who to blame for this but the schools, honestly. Add on to this the thought that other people should have to pay for your overly inflated tuition, it's mind boggling.
Holy hell dude. I was just talking about the housing issue. Dont know what the issue is though. I have a house that im not under water in. I have a college education with out any outstanding loans and full medical coverage.
Roughly how old are you and what do /did you do for a living?
Cain, I think he's just having trouble realizing it's the entire gov't, not just Reps OR Dems. The housing bubble is clearly Dodd and Frank's fault, and well, almost all of congres during Clinton's presidency.
Us vs. them is hard to let go of sometimes, I'm guilty of this myself.
You do have to admit, though, 20 bucks an hour for a minimum wage, or even thinking jacking up minimum wage will fix anything, is off.
The wage is inexorably tied to the value of money. if you falsely jack up how much x amount of labor is worth, the dollar gets devalued that much more. It means less.I understand the frustration with how much a college education costs, I dropped out of college for that reason. I do not think it's an entitlement, however. How much a private school charges is controlled by that school, isn't it? For a public university, by that state's legislature? How do you decide the value in such a thing? To charge 120k for a 50 or 60k a year job? Is it the fault of the corporation that the job isn't in fact worth 120k a year, or the school for overcharging? I always figured private schools used high tuition as a way to weed out "undesireables" and the goal posts kept moving...then other schools decided how much you paid for tuition = quality of education, and jacked their tution up accordingly. I don't know who to blame for this but the schools, honestly. Add on to this the thought that other people should have to pay for your overly inflated tuition, it's mind boggling.
I understand the cliton administrations idea of " Everyone shoud have a chance to get a home" and the bills that followed are the reason why everyone was able to get a loan. Im saying that they took take some responsilility and say ya I signed that. Ya it was a bad deal. This isnt the banks fault this is my fault for accepting these terms.
As for the cost of education , ya its high and getting higher.
Holy hell dude. I was just talking about the housing issue. Dont know what the issue is though. I have a house that im not under water in. I have a college education with out any outstanding loans and full medical coverage.Roughly how old are you and what do /did you do for a living?
Im 30. I work in the car industry. Got my degree in 2005.
Cain, I think he's just having trouble realizing it's the entire gov't, not just Reps OR Dems. The housing bubble is clearly Dodd and Frank's fault, and well, almost all of congres during Clinton's presidency.
Us vs. them is hard to let go of sometimes, I'm guilty of this myself.
You do have to admit, though, 20 bucks an hour for a minimum wage, or even thinking jacking up minimum wage will fix anything, is off.
The wage is inexorably tied to the value of money. if you falsely jack up how much x amount of labor is worth, the dollar gets devalued that much more. It means less.I understand the frustration with how much a college education costs, I dropped out of college for that reason. I do not think it's an entitlement, however. How much a private school charges is controlled by that school, isn't it? For a public university, by that state's legislature? How do you decide the value in such a thing? To charge 120k for a 50 or 60k a year job? Is it the fault of the corporation that the job isn't in fact worth 120k a year, or the school for overcharging? I always figured private schools used high tuition as a way to weed out "undesireables" and the goal posts kept moving...then other schools decided how much you paid for tuition = quality of education, and jacked their tution up accordingly. I don't know who to blame for this but the schools, honestly. Add on to this the thought that other people should have to pay for your overly inflated tuition, it's mind boggling.
Oh, there are lots of problems. I'm not sure what any solution is. But until people get out in force and convince someone that there actually is a problem, most people will emulate ostriges.
Really, this movement hasn't been up to this point about proposing solutions - and that is for a reason. They don't have the answers. They know what the problems are. They have generated a lot of discussions about how to solve those problems - many of which are idealistic and dumb, but many of which are thoughtful and realistic. The moment they say what they, as a group, want, they ostricise people and they limmit the ammount of discourse going on, focusing it to their goal. Possible better solutions never get thought up because discussions ended.
Im 30. I work in the car industry. Got my degree in 2005.
Holy hell dude. I was just talking about the housing issue. Dont know what the issue is though. I have a house that im not under water in. I have a college education with out any outstanding loans and full medical coverage.Roughly how old are you and what do /did you do for a living?
How many people at your place are 22- 28? '
There's a summary about a page back.
Like our internet overlord, the housing/financial crisis is a many tentacled beast.
Im 30. I work in the car industry. Got my degree in 2005.
Holy hell dude. I was just talking about the housing issue. Dont know what the issue is though. I have a house that im not under water in. I have a college education with out any outstanding loans and full medical coverage.Roughly how old are you and what do /did you do for a living?
How many people at your place are 22- 28?
There's a summary about a page back.Like our internet overlord, the housing/financial crisis is a many tentacled beast.
Wife so 1
I hate it when you guys make sense. Damn lefties.
I understand the cliton administrations idea of " Everyone shoud have a chance to get a home" and the bills that followed are the reason why everyone was able to get a loan. Im saying that they took take some responsilility and say ya I signed that. Ya it was a bad deal. This isnt the banks fault this is my fault for accepting these terms.
As for the cost of education , ya its high and getting higher.
I used to agree with you. Then I realized that a lot of time blame did fall on the banking industry too. The types of loans that they used were non-obvious and often deceptive, and it was common practice to convinve people they could afford more than they actually could. I realized this after my friends tried getting a loan and the bank was trying to convince them to take out a larger one that they knew they could not afford, and the bank telling them how they could fudge numbers to get them more. Yes, the person has to have the responcibility to not take out a loan they cannot afford, but the bank also has a responcibility to help the people know what they can afford and to convey actual risks to underwritters instead of fictitious numbers. If they conveyed actual risks on the loans, they would not have been rated as high, and there would have been less demand for the debt, reducing the ammount banks would have had available to lend, thus enforcing better banking practices.
Besides, the vast majority of the homes that were forclosed on were not forcing people on the street. A huge portion of them were people looking to flip them and new home construction. The numbers I have seen put it as something like 30% of homes that went under water were the only house of the occupants.
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Some services (by no means all) are tradeable. The UK's biggest export is financial services, for example - so some people do want other countries' services (Lloyds of London is a big international insurance market, as an illustration, and London generally is a finance hub for Europe and beyond). But the "services-only" model was more a thought experiment to point out that a country won't simply cease to exist without a manufacturing sector than a suggestion of how to actually run the economy.Here's the problem: You're still looking at the country as a singular, monolithic entity rather than as a group of people. That's where your theory is in for some serious trouble.
Finance is very... top heavy? I think would be the term for it. You have one person at the top and they're making earning all of your money or adding most of your value. Intensive manufacturing would be bottom heavy, if you want to make 1 dollar per hand crafted widget the way you make more money is by paying for more hands. So you have a lot of people directly involved in your factory, as well as
Lets take this to an extreme. Someone has complete control of the London financial sector. He owns it all.
How many other people does he need?
He needs a few assistants, a few secretaries , someone cleaning the office, occasionally he needs construction workers to build a building but once thats up they're really not that useful. He needs an IT guy to keep the computers running.
That's all he need to move around billions of dollars from one account in a bank around the world to another. He can import food (because farming is labor intensive and people elsewhere do it cheaper) , electronicns, clothes...
On paper England is doing great! It has this massive amount of money and its throwing its weight around by manipulating markets.
But what you have is one person with all the money and power, 100 people with crumby paying jobs (high supply low demand) and 50,999,899 people with nothing....
No, sorry, it doesn't really work like that. Finance also employs loads of people too, not just in the City but across the country. Yes, a few people earn millions. But lots of people earn decent money even if they aren't star traders, as actually there's an awful lot of support staff (by far the majority in any bank): settlements, payments, collateral management, product control, risk management, internal audit, IT... Even most traders aren't proprietary trading, but simply executing deals for customers. And that's just in wholesale banking, but corporate and retail banking are also big (and probably employ more). And I haven't even started on insurance or asset management. Oh, and the hedgies. I don't earn millions (sadly) but I do alright too, and I'm just a sort of hanger-on. There's a few thousand of us in the FSA alone. And then there's the accountants and the lawyers who are also integral to finance. Finance is well-paid, at virtually every level. And that's just the direct impact, not counting stuff like taxis, barbers, bars, lap-dancing clubs... So your view of finance is a bit skewed.
And you might be right about hand crafts. You might not about more commoditised stuff. It could be easier and cheaper to sack a load of workers and buy a machine. I think I read somewhere that the proportion of manufacturing in the UK economy has been reasonably static (I'm guessing a bit, as I can't remember the numbers, but maybe 20%; actually, found a link, trending down a bit but roughly 20%) for about the last 10 years or so, but employment has fallen, suggesting increased use of technology over labour. Most manufacturing in developed economies involves the use of high tech computerised tools, I am led to beleive.
I hate it when you guys make sense. Damn lefties.
I try to consider myself socially left and fiscally right.
I hate it when you guys make sense. Damn lefties.I try to consider myself socially left and fiscally right.
I used to be Right on both accounts, till I saw how much political time was wasted on worrying about what other people did, or what a sculpture in front of a courthouse had writen on it. It simply doesn't matter, especially when people can't find work.
So, now im more socially libertarian, and fiscally conservative.|
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I understand the cliton administrations idea of " Everyone shoud have a chance to get a home" and the bills that followed are the reason why everyone was able to get a loan. Im saying that they took take some responsilility and say ya I signed that. Ya it was a bad deal. This isnt the banks fault this is my fault for accepting these terms.
As for the cost of education , ya its high and getting higher.
I used to agree with you. Then I realized that a lot of time blame did fall on the banking industry too. The types of loans that they used were non-obvious and often deceptive, and it was common practice to convinve people they could afford more than they actually could. I realized this after my friends tried getting a loan and the bank was trying to convince them to take out a larger one that they knew they could not afford, and the bank telling them how they could fudge numbers to get them more. Yes, the person has to have the responcibility to not take out a loan they cannot afford, but the bank also has a responcibility to help the people know what they can afford and to convey actual risks to underwritters instead of fictitious numbers. If they conveyed actual risks on the loans, they would not have been rated as high, and there would have been less demand for the debt, reducing the ammount banks would have had available to lend, thus enforcing better banking practices.
Also remember conventional wisdom at the time was that house prices would always go up, so you could just refinance to a lower interest rate when your teaser rate reset to something unaffordable.
Yeah, suckers got taken by the con. But don't blame only the suckers.
They were being lied to. The professionals knew or should have known what they were selling.
Actually, you'd be surprised. One of the mantras before the collapse was that house prices could not go down across the country (the US) at the same time. I know as in my former job I audited our US asset management subsidiary. These were supposedly sophisticated investors, but they got badly burnt by some mortgage backed securities they had bought. Coming from a small country, and with the memory of the 1990 crash engraved in my mind (I hit the jobs market round about then) a nationwide crash seemed eminently possible. Of course, I only told them that after the fact...
An interesting propoganda video. Anyone know how accurate their claims are?
I love the way they cite the world bank assessment and then proceed to talk about regulations completely unrelated to what the world bank was assessing, without mentioning that.Just for info:
There's also a link to the treasury's statement in the article.
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Are the protestors on the right track? Are they mad at the right people? Is the media ignoring the event?
They are on the right tract. I'll illuminate why I agree.
Greed, and not just from Wall Street, has been killing our economy. As the top income tax rates have been slashed over the last several decades, wealth has been concentrated in the top 20% of Americans (though the most serious amount occurs in the 1%). When 20% of the population has 80% of the weatlh, spending and thus the economy slows.
As jobs have been lost and wages have remained stagnant for the majority of Americans, the government tax revenue hasn't been able to keep up with increased demand for assistance.
Now, the top 20% of Americans have dramatically increased their wealth and corporate profits are actually higher than ever.
The answer is to incentivize an increase in wages and jobs. Lowering taxes helped cause this so that's not the right answer. Also, globalization and the availability of cheap foreign labor has hurt us in that regard so tax incentives (specifically for wages/jobs) must be aimed at American workers.
Doubling the deduction for wages to American workers would work. Wages would rise and hiring would increase. A cap could be put on the amount of an annual salary subject to the doubling.
The housing bubble is clearly Dodd and Frank's fault,
So the housing bubble which burst in Q3 2008 happened because of the Dodd-Frank act, proposed in 2009 and signed into law last year?
Can you explain further or is this evidence of TIME TRAVELING COMMIES!
No, sorry, it doesn't really work like that. Finance also employs loads of people too, not just in the City but across the country. Yes, a few people earn millions. But lots of people earn decent money even if they aren't star traders, as actually there's an awful lot of support staff
Finance employs a very small amount of people for the money it makes.
In the US it employs
8,145,500 people out of 150,931,700 workers or 5.4% of the working population. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
(2008 figures but i doubt the % has changed much)
It makes 31% of the GDP. On the one hand thats efficiency. On the other hand its a lot of people out of work.
And just wait till Watson takes over trading from the humans completely.
And you might be right about hand crafts. You might not about more commoditised stuff. It could be easier and cheaper to sack a load of workers and buy a machine.
It usually is. Lumberjacks always complain about hippies costing them their jobs, when it was really giant robots of arboreal destruction doing the job faster cheaper and safer.
Manufacturing was about 8.9 % of the workforce and about 33% of the GDP. But manufacturing employs a lot more extra sectors than finance does: namely natural resources.
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Like our internet overlord, the housing/financial crisis is a many tentacled beast.
Specifically, it's a mutant, 20-tentacled octopus of fail squirting poisonous ink at those trying to pin it down.
I don't know about you, but I've my BBEG for my next game.
The housing bubble is clearly Dodd and Frank's fault,So the housing bubble which burst in Q3 2008 happened because of the Dodd-Frank act, proposed in 2009 and signed into law last year?
Can you explain further or is this evidence of TIME TRAVELING COMMIES!
Yes, becasue that's the only "fair housing" stuff they worked on, and had nothing to do with the workings of Fannie or Freddie.
Excuse me if I truly misunderstood you, or the other way around, but isn't it the same affirmation you called "silly" some posts back??No, what I referred to as silly was the suggestion that everyone would end up unemployed as a result of Chinese competition. I don't deny that there will be local issues (like Detroit's depopulation and impoverishment). Part of the reason Detroit is depopulated is because people have moved on to jobs elsewhere. The social issues with those left behind strike me as the area of concern, rather than trying to prevent competition as such.
Oops. Looks like we were screaming past each other. You thought I was claming that ALL manufacturing jobs would vanish, which I didn't (didn't meant at least, maybe something was lost in translation), and I thought you were claiming that NONE had or would disappear, which seemed quite ludicrous.
It turns out I agree with you on most things, including that better regulations than the ones we got would be fine, and that the "robbers" tends to be always a step beyond the "cops" (that is you) in this game. Maybe because it pays more to design ridiculously complex derivatives than to regulate them, as you most likely know firsthand.
Also, it seems than our glorious leaders seems more interested in looking good on the G20 group picture than to work seriously on durable answers. You certainly remember the offshore paradises list back in 2008 for what it was: a really sad joke.
I strongly disagree (both with you and with english policy) mostly on the importance given to the financial industry. It should shrink back to a tool answering to the needs of the "real" economy, and not be an end in itself. A lot of financial practices could disapeear without any real damage. Alas, our governments don't seem inclined to do the pruning/regulation needed.
There is a strong law philosophy point here. Common Law is more contract-driven than continental legislations: everything not prohibited is permitted, which let the financial industry exercise its considerable imagination to create ever more complex and lucrative products and practices. Maybe it would be best to consider enacting regulation the other way around, by prohibiting everything not allowed (that is, by freezing a list of allowed products and practices). Who needs high frequency trading and negotiable CDS ?
No, sorry, it doesn't really work like that. Finance also employs loads of people too, not just in the City but across the country. Yes, a few people earn millions. But lots of people earn decent money even if they aren't star traders, as actually there's an awful lot of support staffFinance employs a very small amount of people for the money it makes.
In the US it employs
8,145,500 people out of 150,931,700 workers or 5.4% of the working population. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
(2008 figures but i doubt the % has changed much)
It makes 31% of the GDP. On the one hand thats efficiency. On the other hand its a lot of people out of work.
And just wait till Watson takes over trading from the humans completely.
The finance GNP figures are always suspect. How much of it is real added value, and how much is made of hot air, bound to vanish suddenly when the next bubble explodes?
As Aubrey already said, Iceland HAD a nice GNP in 2007. It was mostly built on sand.
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Hurray for my local PD
I may try to check things out this weekend.
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It turns out I agree with you on most things...
This continues to be the moral of this thread for me.
The housing bubble is clearly Dodd and Frank's fault,So the housing bubble which burst in Q3 2008 happened because of the Dodd-Frank act, proposed in 2009 and signed into law last year?
Can you explain further or is this evidence of TIME TRAVELING COMMIES!
Yes, becasue that's the only "fair housing" stuff they worked on, and had nothing to do with the workings of Fannie or Freddie.
When you mention the two names together I assumed you meant the Dodd-Frank act. Did you not? What specifically were you referring to?
I still find it pretty disingenuous to overly blame the homeowners, who have very little power over the underlying financial mechanisms, when it was the brokers and bankers who caused the crisis. Are they somewhat to blame? Sure. Absolutely. They should have read the fine print, they should have been smarter, they should have known the subprime mortgages were too good to be true. In making these sorts of claims you're essentially saying "well, they shouldn't have been such suckers!", and making those claims admits that they were taken advantage of.
Look, you can keep beating your drum about how the people who had these bad mortgages are at fault, but it's about (random number out of my ass) 12% of the fault spread out over (oh look another number) 90% of the actual parties involved (mortgage holders) as opposed to the rest of the blame that lies in a few hundred high level bankers, securities brokers, and rating agency workers.
That was a big blotchy run-on sentence, and I'm not citing my sources so I'm inviting you to show me how wrong I am and it's really the sucker's fault for taking the bait.
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Are the protestors on the right track? Are they mad at the right people? Is the media ignoring the event?They are on the right tract. I'll illuminate why I agree.
Greed, and not just from Wall Street, has been killing our economy. As the top income tax rates have been slashed over the last several decades, wealth has been concentrated in the top 20% of Americans (though the most serious amount occurs in the 1%). When 20% of the population has 80% of the weatlh, spending and thus the economy slows.
That is not true.
Pareto's principle- In any given society, 20% of the population has 80% of the wealth. This is true in a free market society, this is true in a communist dictatorship. It was true in the USA in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, people who garden can notice the same thing there. For example, in any given garden, roughly 80% of the peas come from 20% of the pods.
Due to the scale-invariant nature of the power law relationship, the relationship applies also to subsets of the income range. Even if we take the ten wealthiest individuals in the world, we see that the top three (Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helú, and Bill Gates) own as much as the next seven put together.
Now in reality the US is probably closer to 85% of the wealth in the hands of 15% of the people. But that is just statistical variation. The principle(with statistical variation) holds throughout history and every society human beings have ever formed. Probably the best you could ever hope for is 75% in the hands of 25%.
The reason no one admits this is it is too embarrassing. Socialists won't admit that all their...
Actually, what I said was true, and what you said isn't.
You present a well-said defense bereft of context in order make elitist apologist statements.Here's some context, the top 1% in this country have had a share of about 20% of the income in this country; however, only at a few points in time in the last century, the Great Depression and the current recession.
Here's the chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chart_of_US_Top_1%25_Income_Share_%281913 -2008%29.svg
So, when money is being sucked out of the economy by a few, the economy falters. Between those two period in time, there is also a curve in regard in the wealth inequality, not just income.
Meanwhile, you presented an observation by an Italian philosopher that might fit on a bumper sticker but never makes the a point than an 80/20 split is good for the economy. Pareto, whom the principle is named after, was actually making an obervation that "20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas." That's hardly saying that such a thing is the most efficient. It's just an observation.
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It's astonishing how many people read Ayn Rand and think she knows what she's talking about.