While Trump is doing that the U.N are doing THIS:

a reply to: Quetzalcoatl14

It would be like if we had a family of seven, and there were 10 hamburgers. Then, I take 6 of them for myself, but when some of those that have to split a hamburger complain, I tell them they are commies and how dare they take my hard earned hamburgers... It's absurd because it ignores that I took too many in the first place.

Did you cook the hamburgers yourself? If not, then this is a poor analogy and hearkens back to the idea that wealth is a finite pie and there is only so much out there, so if you have some, then you only have it because you took it from someone else.

That is ridiculous.

If I grow a garden in my backyard, I am creating wealth. All of the food that comes out of that garden has real value as food.

Your example above is that I stole all of it from people who did not grow their own gardens even though I was the one who bought the seed, sewed it, tended it all summer, and reaped the harvest ... all on my own labor, off my own investment of money, time, labor, etc.

If they did nothing to either help me with it or to grow their own, then what do they deserve from my garden?

And had I invested none of my time, effort, and capital to create the garden, it wouldn't exist for you all to fight over as if you had some stake in it, nor would there be anything of value in existence from it. In other words, that "piece of the pie" only happened because I made it happen and for no other reason.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: Quetzalcoatl14

It would be like if we had a family of seven, and there were 10 hamburgers. Then, I take 6 of them for myself, but when some of those that have to split a hamburger complain, I tell them they are commies and how dare they take my hard earned hamburgers... It's absurd because it ignores that I took too many in the first place.

Did you cook the hamburgers yourself? If not, then this is a poor analogy and hearkens back to the idea that wealth is a finite pie and there is only so much out there, so if you have some, then you only have it because you took it from someone else.

That is ridiculous.

If I grow a garden in my backyard, I am creating wealth. All of the food that comes out of that garden has real value as food.

Your example above is that I stole all of it from people who did not grow their own gardens even though I was the one who bought the seed, sewed it, tended it all summer, and reaped the harvest ... all on my own labor, off my own investment of money, time, labor, etc.

If they did nothing to either help me with it or to grow their own, then what do they deserve from my garden?

And had I invested none of my time, effort, and capital to create the garden, it wouldn't exist for you all to fight over as if you had some stake in it, nor would there be anything of value in existence from it. In other words, that "piece of the pie" only happened because I made it happen and for no other reason.

With respect, you are missing the forest for the trees here in my point.

Sure, of course it is a far too simplistic analogy. Your points stand somewhat true in a very micro example, but simply do not at the level that very powerful people are extracting money from society. For example, if one has a huge corporation, a CEO didn't magically do all of the work themselves. There are often thousands of employees or partners. Also, the rich and powerful benefit from an already socialized education, road, police, fire, system, which educates their employees, allows for transportation of products, etc. So, no, they have not created or done everything themselves. They benefit from a very complex system of capital and human interactions that are required for their business to flourish, yet they did not create. So if they use these systems and extract money from it, they need to give back.

Of course many of these folks are investing their capital into business initiatives in the first place, or taking on more risk. This is why no sane person would say that they shouldn't earn more. But that's not the issue here.

As most of the sources I've cited in this thread show, you have a very very small minority of the population that has factually accrued 90%+ of the economic gains in recent decades, while almost no-one else has. At some point "they earned that and muh communism" utterly fails to address the scale and extremity of what is actually happening. Can you see what I'm saying? I also would like to point out that compared to everyone on this thread, it's me who has posted most of the sources, instead of just citing right or left wing ideology in a vacuum.

Anti-redistribution people usually start at step two or three after people already have money or capital, rather than going to the roots of how it got that way in the first place. It comes across as misinformed or dishonest. It's not "oppression" of the very wealthy or "class warfare" to develop a system wherein the dividends of systemic economic gains are at least SOMEWHAT shared with other members of society, rather than .1% of the population. What's "oppression and class warfare" is that .1% taking 90%+ of the profit from society. People have to get their heads out of their right wing ideology for a moment and think about this. It's an utter moral failure for 0.1% to extract virtually all of the economic production gains.

Just accounting for inflation and economic production gains, there are economists who calculate that the minimum wage should have been over $15.00 an hour. What's happening is that all of that extra gain is just being siphoned off. That's not right, and i have little patience for people who so badly want to be rich, or are so deluded with right wing ideology, that they think that a handful of the very wealthy should extract all value from our society.

a reply to: ketsukoThat was very well said. Thank you.

originally posted by: Xcalibur254
a reply to: visitedbythem

How is it Obama's fault? The ever increasing wealth gap exists in its current form thanks to economic policies dating back to Reagan.

Trickle down economics causes middle class income to stagnate and three poverty level to increase. The only ones that actually see an increase in their wealth are the wealthy.

Exactly, I've been attacked in this thread for saying the same thing.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: Revolution9

OK.

Again.

The poverty measure was changed under the Obama administration. Instead of being a hardline cutoff ... say $25,000/year (or whatever they set it at), the Obama Admin decided to make it a percentage measure instead of the overall income. So no matter what we are all earning, there will *always* be a certain percentage of the US population living in poverty.

So even if the lower income levels were living in relative comfort, the lowest percentage would still be defined as living in poverty under those rules. For that reason, you cannot simply take the percentage of US citizens living in poverty as reported and equate them to African level mud hut (Central American shanty town for that matter); the picture is more complicated.

There certainly are Americans living in that type of grinding poverty, but not 41% of the population.

The federal measure is far outdated, and that bar only really works in rural areas. There are new better formulas that account for many more variables, for example housing costs, education costs, etc.

www1.nyc.gov...

I survive on less then $10k a year and I live 2 blocks north of Detroit. There are a lot of desperate people around here. People that will cut your throat over a dollar.

I read a lot of people bashing on the poor. I'm just wondering how long until they round us up and gas us? Because to them if we didn't make it in America it must be your own fault. We're nothing but useless eaters to them.

a reply to: Quetzalcoatl14

The rich and powerful benefit from socialized education?

Most of them benefit from private education. If they benefit from socialized education at all, it is because most of us are trapped inside the sub-standard socialized system we are forced to pay for that is inadequate to the task it is empowered to undertake and therefore many who could challenge the privately educated so-called elite do not have the educational background to do so.

But that is not a failing of a capitalist system inasmuch as it is a failing of the current mixed system we have. The peon class is forced to have the socialist system that sucks and the very wealthy can afford to pay to free themselves from it. That is always the way in increasingly socialist economies and countries.

Recall ... you can always pay for what you want, but only *after* we extract all the money you are opted in automatically to pay for all those failing and substandard services for everyone else that you know fail but then can't afford to escape.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: Quetzalcoatl14

The rich and powerful benefit from socialized education?

Most of them benefit from private education. If they benefit from socialized education at all, it is because most of us are trapped inside the sub-standard socialized system we are forced to pay for that is inadequate to the task it is empowered to undertake and therefore many who could challenge the privately educated so-called elite do not have the educational background to do so.

But that is not a failing of a capitalist system inasmuch as it is a failing of the current mixed system we have. The peon class is forced to have the socialist system that sucks and the very wealthy can afford to pay to free themselves from it. That is always the way in increasingly socialist economies and countries.

Recall ... you can always pay for what you want, but only *after* we extract all the money you are opted in automatically to pay for all those failing and substandard services for everyone else that you know fail but then can't afford to escape.

I'm not sure you are reading what I'm saying. The wealthy and capitalist owners benefit from the fact that their employees and consumers have been educated by society. Their entire businesses rely on socialized systems such as transportation, education, police, etc. You guys act as if their success and businesses flourish in some kind of vacuum. Your viewpoint requires a vacuum to support that they created and earned it all, and no one else contributed.

The whole point I'm making here is that this ideology that the uber rich have magically earned all of their overwhelming ownership of society's capital, is not only a myopic view point but fails to examine the system they benefit from without which they couldn't do business, and the labor and contributions of other people and employees that are necessary.

A very small fraction of society should not accrue virtually all economic gains from the entire system while 99.9% of people see no dividends from it. That, is a moral failure of society. People need to stop justifying it. It's harming all of us including you.

I would appreciate it if people actually addressed some of the sources I posted.