Screw Income Equality

a reply to: thedigirati

I had to use patches to quit smoking after 45 years, but I did quit.
everything in life is self control, because that is all one CAN control...

So self control after 45 years of none?

a reply to: Xtrozero

you are one of the few people i've heard of who has the right priorities.

originally posted by: Nyiah

originally posted by: StallionDuck
Sure... 65k a year sounds wonderful but it's only great if you live in a small town with no economy. If you're living in a big city, you can't afford to make any less than that. Living in other cities and small towns throughout my life, it's pretty much the same no matter where you live. The cost justifies the salary and no the other way around. It makes it so middle class is really low class and the rich remain rich. There is such a huge gap between the 'can afford' and 'can't afford'.

This is what a LOT of the naysayers keep forgetting, be it willfully, or due to naivete. What we make and live extremely easily on here in MI does not cut it for basics back in FL where we came from, and I'm not talking in just Tampa itself. This income wouldn't pay the rent, utilities & groceries in 100 miles in any direction there, no matter the no-horse boondock bedroom community picked.
I.E, the wide flux in local economies & local CoL are royal bitches to contend with and nullifies the "you spend poorly" arguments. We never spent poorly. We still do not spend poorly. The buck simply stretches a f# of a lot further here up north than it does back down south.

What really needs done before we can even settle on baseline incomes/credits/whatever you want to call it is a stable, country-wide CoL with hard caps & legit inflation reworking. When we tackle THAT, we make serious headway in any other venture.

Exactly. I've been in Austin TX for since 2011. I can say that I'm just another transplant like everyone else here but I actually got promoted to work in our home office - a company that I've been with the last 13+ years. Plus I'm from SW Louisiana so I'm basically family! lol

Since being here, I've watched the MASSIVE influx of people from California. There is a huge bias here against California residents because they're filling in here faster than you can count. The reason? Austin has a huge amount of free space for people working in the tech industry - jobs out the arse! Since we had so much room to fill with all the major tech companies being here, higher pay was easy to obtain because there wasn't enough of us to go around.

Now, California is moving here faster than the Beverly Hillbillies and all the land is being gobbled up and turned into high dollar communities. Housing and Land Taxes are going up so much so fast that people who were living comfortably here before are selling their homes because they can no longer afford the yearly increase. Californians don't care because it's STILL cheaper than they were paying back in their own state.

So now... The jobs are being filled at a far cheaper wage since now companies can pick and choose and there is less of a difficulty in finding jobs.

There are beggars on every damn hwy corner, now... Actually making a living. Natives are moving on the outskirts (I saw all of this happen before - Baton Rouge, LA) because that's all they are able to afford now while Riff Raff are filling the inner city. The popular 6th Street is turning into high noon (at midnight) shootouts and you end up paying homeless bums to watch your car or they'll likely rob it if you refuse them. It's sick. That place used to rock! It's still rocking but not like before and it's dangerous now. The danger back when was getting alcohol poisoning. Now it's catching a stray bullet from some idiot firing off a gun downtown. You don't have to worry about crackheads begging - You now have to worry about heroin and meth addicts walking up to you every 25 steps.

I imagine this place will end up JUST LIKE California one day and people will drain from here and suck the life out of another city capable of giving it's locals a decent living.

Still... People will chalk it up to Survival of the Fittest and Supply and Demand... Yet, they wont see the deeper issue nor the lack of morality that comes with it. Casinos do the exact same thing!

a reply to: StallionDuck

You're upset that people moved to an area with abundant well paying jobs.
Then they had the audacity to use that money to put money into where they live... The horror!

The drug situation is everywhere, rich or poor, that my friend is a whole other post.

a reply to: JAGStorm

I completely disagree with everything you are saying. Maybe in 1975 your post would make some sense. But in 2019, the worker's are being gouged left and right by monopolies and cartels. The CEOs are pigging up all the wages:

Disney isn’t the only company paying its CEO 1,000 times more than its typical employee earns—here are 12 others

"Chief executives have long earned some of the largest paychecks in America, but at what point does their compensation defy reason?"

There are two halves to this equation. Why do Republicans hate the American worker so much? I get some people are bad with their finances. But there's more to this problem than just workers having bad attitudes.

But I get it. You Republicans are always "right". You never admit any public policy originating with Republicans is Republican's fault and you never blame the way the system is rigged in favor of the billionaires. Just once consider maybe the problem is NOT the American people you hate so much. Maybe George Carlin is "right" when he says, "there's a reason":

a reply to: dfnj2015

I only have one thing to say to your post, I'm not a republican.

originally posted by: JAGStorm
a reply to: dfnj2015

I only have one thing to say to your post, I'm not a republican.

It's okay. I listen to George Carlin's advice on what to expect.

a reply to: JAGStorm

Aaand in related news:

Screw the Planet as well cuz The Capital!

#RealEdgyMarxists

a reply to: JAGStorm

I would like the system to be- to just yell,

MINE!

And if someone else also yelled "mine" then there would be a fight to the death unless someone yells i submit.

Or something like that.. take what you want, if you can.

Also i think nobody would be bored ever again, i suspect there would not be time for that.


Also what about Kings and Queens, i mean what the (SNIP)? in modern times they can be those things apparently for all eternity, forever, and ever.
i am pretty sure it is supposed to be like in game of thrones you know, like someone just conquers, out with the old and in with the new, not cool that they can "just be the royals indefinitely, (SNIP) don`t work like that man.

originally posted by: JAGStorm
a reply to: StallionDuck

You're upset that people moved to an area with abundant well paying jobs.
Then they had the audacity to use that money to put money into where they live... The horror!

The drug situation is everywhere, rich or poor, that my friend is a whole other post.

Not really. It's not the fact that people are moving here. It's how the state and city government reacts to it. The resentment isn't from simply moving here. It's everything else that dominoes from it. I don't hate or resent people - so long as they're respectable.

That being said - Yes... Some of the elements coming with californians are composed of a crap ton of violence and turmoil with them. So when Cali moves here at the same time all of the violence starts popping up everywhere - You can pretty much guess where it's coming from.

I mean... Other than the obvious. Let's just say, some cultures don't always get along with others and it has zero to do with my own 'culture'. When an element that wasn't in a place before but suddenly has become common, then with that uncommon element comes violence and shootings... It doesn't take much to figure out. Recreational addictions also became full blown addictions to the point that it's more than obvious. It's not just an everywhere thing. It's a specific change in the environment. It's more than just having addicts everywhere.

a reply to: solve

No, that's my mine. MINE!

Fck you naked apes (or I might) and gimme my gold already! Monoatomic...whatever or not.

Clear? But I don't come across like a reptile plotting to enslave humanity or something, do I? I mean... they said I better don't... no idea why.

Humans. Pff...

originally posted by: rickymouse
I owned a construction company. As workers became more experienced I boosted their wages. Some new guy who is a nice guy and trainable might take a while before you started making money off of him/her until they learned how to do things correctly. I had many times we had to redo things that a new guy worked on. And then you hire someone who says they know how to do something and they screw it up. So raising a person's wage when they gain experience on your crew is essential. If you don't, they go to work for someone that will pay more.

I trained a lot of people to work in my life.

Another thing is a guy working in a nice warm office should not get as much as people working out in the hot sun, the freezing cold, and in the rain and snow. Office workers should not get paid as much as a guy working on a roof or high building or lifting heavy things where risk is higher. The society we are in has pay not relative to work preformed. Work that is hard on the body should pay more. Everyone would want to work at McDs if the pay was equal, there would not be any construction workers.

Couldn't disagree more with your last paragraph.

I work in an office.. Tell me what someone who just works outside in weather like you listed does to make more than I what I have earned the right to make in my career?

Oh wait, is this one of those "manual labor" is more noble then other types of work BS?

a reply to: JAGStorm

THIS SYSTEM ISN'T A FAIR SYSTEM.

For instance, I'm an Actor and I'm not earning anything near what Di Caprio or Brad Pitt or other A Listers earn and I've been professional for 10 years now. the system doesn't filter down to the Actors who aren't well known and some of us could be just as good as those two but havn't been given the opportunity and are ignored by Casting Directors who want A-list stars in their movies like the 2 mentioned above. Yes, they bring in lots at the box office but so could new faces!

originally posted by: SeaWorthy
a reply to: thedigirati

I had to use patches to quit smoking after 45 years, but I did quit.
everything in life is self control, because that is all one CAN control...

So self control after 45 years of none?

can you show me where I said I tried to quit for 45 years??

please?

I tried to quit once, do you smoke?

originally posted by: Edumakated
Also, a lot of these people didn't actually set out to become billionaires. They just happened to create something that is popular on a global scale.

My wife worked with a woman whose son is worth like $200 million or more now. He created a popular snack bar in his garage about 6 or 7 years ago. The company took off and he got bought by one of the major food companies for like $500 million dollars.... he took a risk and it paid off. He didn't steal the money.

I have an uncle who went in with some of his military pals on a startup in Silicon Valley back in the days when it was just becoming a thing.

He made his first million somewhere in his mid-30s. He was a dirt-poor Kansas kid who took a risk and it paid off. He retied early and then came out of retirement and went to work in the upper structure of Apple for a few more years and made even more money before recently retiring again.

If people would stop trying to keep up with the jones things would go a lot further...

There is a joke about an E-1 with an escalade or a 5.0 mustang with that low low interest rate of 30%, I said joke but its a very common aight on 99% of military bases all branches.

Some people have no clue about money and will always make bad decisions.

a reply to: Irishhaf

Some people think they need a new car and the latest iPhone all the time or they think people look at them funny or something.

originally posted by: JAGStorm
a reply to: rickymouse

Another thing is a guy working in a nice warm office should not get as much as people working out in the hot sun, the freezing cold, and in the rain and snow.

I've worked high in the office and I've worked in hard labor. I have to disagree with you.
People are free to work in whatever field they want. No one is forced to work labor or an office.

A person working in an office might be gifted in math, a person working as a carpenter might be gifted in woodworking.
We should not pit the two against each other. They should be paid according to what the free market decides.

Some people do good work in an office, and they are worth more than some of them that can't seem to get anything right. Now do you feel that you having to babysit and make up for those who aren't worth a pinch means that you do not get more wages than them. Advancement is often given to those who prove they are worth giving a raise to. Sadly I have worked in places where some who cheat and deceive get higher up and a lot of time those people are taking credit for others hard work. I think you know what I mean.

originally posted by: opethPA

originally posted by: rickymouse
I owned a construction company. As workers became more experienced I boosted their wages. Some new guy who is a nice guy and trainable might take a while before you started making money off of him/her until they learned how to do things correctly. I had many times we had to redo things that a new guy worked on. And then you hire someone who says they know how to do something and they screw it up. So raising a person's wage when they gain experience on your crew is essential. If you don't, they go to work for someone that will pay more.

I trained a lot of people to work in my life.

Another thing is a guy working in a nice warm office should not get as much as people working out in the hot sun, the freezing cold, and in the rain and snow. Office workers should not get paid as much as a guy working on a roof or high building or lifting heavy things where risk is higher. The society we are in has pay not relative to work preformed. Work that is hard on the body should pay more. Everyone would want to work at McDs if the pay was equal, there would not be any construction workers.

Couldn't disagree more with your last paragraph.

I work in an office.. Tell me what someone who just works outside in weather like you listed does to make more than I what I have earned the right to make in my career?

Oh wait, is this one of those "manual labor" is more noble then other types of work BS?

Construction workers used to make more than people working in an office or working in a store. But it seems like in the last fifteen years the tide has turned and people doing jobs that are not really needed for survival of our people are making more than those who actually make our society more secure. I know someone selling phone packages that make more than a grocery store manager. I know people who are working for AT&T selling cell phone packages who make more than the people repairing the phone lines for the same company. Those who can trick people into buying things they do not really need make more than those who actually provide necessary services for society.

www.marketwatch.com

This article makes a lot of sense

Opinion: Billionaires haven’t earned all they have

The very wealthy do produce some value, but most of them are rentiers, piggybacking on the work of others

By proposing to tax large incomes at a higher rate and to tax the wealth of the very rich, progressive politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are forcing a long-overdue re-examination of what billionaires actually contribute.
Are billionaires and other “people of means” (billionaire Howard Schultz’s preferred phrase) the main engines of social progress and economic growth, as many on the right say? Or, are they “vampire squids” sucking the lifeblood of the economy, as a few on the left believe?

Are billionaires the greatest makers in the economy, or the greatest takers?

My own view is that most billionaires do create some value, but they generally take more than their share of money and power. Their wealth far exceeds their economic contributions. Plutocrats don’t deserve the guillotine, but neither do they deserve billions of dollars.
Plutocrats are, above all, rentiers.

The rentier class

Most wealth is created, maintained and sustained by extracting unearned rents from the rest of us. The wealthy take advantage of monopolies, asymmetric information, network effects, regulatory capture, artificial scarcities created by patents, licenses or trademarks, bailouts, subsidies, protectionism, financialization, and globalization.

In economics, “rents” is a word that means “leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth,” in the words of economic historian Rutger Bregman. The concept dates back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who argued that owners of land or natural resources could demand payments in excess of what’s required to bring their land or resources into production.
The classic example of a “rent” is a landowner who controls both banks of a river and charges a toll on anyone who wants to sail through. The rentier did not create the river, but collects the rent anyway.
More recently, economists on both the right and left have championed the theory of “rent-seeking” behavior (or cronyism) by those who want to profit from patents, subsidies, licenses, bailouts, protections, or just having the authorities look the other way.
It’s not just wealth that they take, but political power as well. Do you think that Donald Trump, or Howard Schultz, or the Koch brothers, or Mike Bloomberg, or Warren Buffett, or George Soros, or Kanye West could get anyone to pay any attention to their political views if they weren’t already rich and connected?
What upsets the ruling class most about Warren, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and others isn’t the threat to their wealth — they would barely notice the level of taxes now being proposed. Rather, it’s the threat to their political superpowers. Don’t these mortals know better than to challenge the gods?

Bernie Sanders

✔@SenSanders

The grotesque level of wealth inequality, from a moral, economic and political perspective, is the great challenge we face. We cannot have a vibrant democracy or a just economy when so few have so much, and so many have so little.

Who’s who in the rentier class

Enough theory. Let’s look at some facts.
Forbes, Bloomberg News and others try to quantify how much wealth the very wealthy have. It’s best to think of these billionaire rankings as rough estimates, because so much wealth can be (and is) hidden. Others lie about their wealth to make them seem much richer than they are. Wilbur Ross and Donald Trump are good examples of this.
Didier Jacobs, senior economist for Oxfam America, estimated in 2016 that about 75% of U.S. billionaire wealth is derived from rents.
Jacobs looked at the Forbes billionaires list to see which industries produced the most billionaires. Not too surprisingly, the rentier sectors produce almost the billionaires.

Bezos, Gates and Buffett

I’ll go through the current Bloomberg Billionaires list for some specific examples

At the top with $135 billion sits Jeff Bezos of Amazon AMZN+1.6% No one can fault his work ethic or his business instincts. He deserves to be rich, but his status as the richest human is bolstered by the monopolies that Bezos has created in retailing and cloud services. Amazon knows what you want before you do.
In addition, Amazon is hyperaggressive about evading taxes and it has received billions in favors from local governments.
Next up, Bill Gates of Microsoft MSFT+0.74% with $96 billion. Gates (and No. 18 billionaire Steve Ballmer) built a suite of monopolies based on copyrights and network externalities. The bigger Microsoft got, the more powerful its monopoly became.
In third place, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway BRK with $86 billion. Unlike Bezos or Gates, Buffett didn’t invent or perfect any technology or company. His one big idea was to invest ruthlessly in companies that have “moats” that protect them from competition. In other words, the world’s third largest fortune is based entirely on investing in monopolies.
And so on. No. 4 billionaire Bernard Arnault “earned” $77 billion by integrating a number of luxury-goods brands into one company, LVMH IT:LVMH+0.27% High-end brand names are able to command much higher prices than competing goods, throwing off billions in rents to Arnault and others, such No 12 billionaire Françoise Bettencourt Meyers ($48 billion), who inherited the L’Oréal FR:OR-1.2%  fortune, and Giovanni Ferrero at No. 32 who inherited the chocolatier and Tic Tac maker worth $24 billion.

Others have made their fortunes by going down-market: Phil Knight (No. 26) got $32 billion by selling the only sneakers you can buy that have a swoosh NKE+0.12%  . The Walton siblings (Nos. 13, 14 and 17) inherited the retail giant Walmart WMT+0.5% that delivers everyday low prices to the masses by leveraging its monopsony power.
No. 5 Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook FB+2.1%  ($67 billion) and No. 8 Larry Page ($55 billion) and No. 9 Sergey Brin ($54 billion) of Google GOOG+0.05% GOOGL-0.01%  invented dominating online platforms that suck in more than half of all online advertising, without creating any appreciable content of their own.
No. 7 Carlos Slim earned his $60 billion fortune the old-fashioned way: He got an exclusive license from the Mexican government to run the mobile phone network MX:AMXA+4.58% Mukesh Ambani (No. 11) and the Koch brothers (Nos. 15 and 16) got rich selling hydrocarbons that nature so thoughtfully laid down a few hundred millions of years ago.
Except for the ones who inherited a fortune, these people work extremely hard for their money. They deliver goods and services that consumer love and depend on. There’s no doubt that they produce value.
They also capture a lot of rents, which means they really haven’t earned everything they have. Nor do they deserve the political power they use to protect and expand their rent-seeking behavior.

The problem we have with billionaires isn’t that they have wealth, it’s how they got it. An economy based on collecting rents is inefficient and unfair. It’s the rent-seeking we need to eliminate, not the wealth.