Ultra-rich getting richer: study

Ultra-rich getting richer: study

ca.news.yahoo.com

OTTAWA - Canada has entered a 1920s-like Gilded Age, where the super-rich consolidate their wealth while the middle class stagnates.

That's the conclusion of a new study based on income-tax forms filed up until 2007, showing that the richest one per cent of Canadians took home 13.8 per cent of all incomes claimed that year.

The share of total income going to the richest of the rich has risen steadily since the early 1980s, reversing a long-term trend toward a more equal distribution

(visit the link for the full news article)

Well it is pretty much true that the richer get rich, the poorer get poor, and the middle class stagnates without earning any new income unless they win the lottery or something, but we know the chances are greater that one gets hit by lightning than actually winning.

I really don't know what to say, but am a bit surprised how the economy is going, we know a quite people dropped off Forbes richest peoples list, but who really knows...

ca.news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by hypr2008


Not something i care about, why should it matter what others have, as long as you have enough.

I do not understand motivation to have all the money they do, but maybe power trips maybe has something to do with it as they usually are ones running things. Power over lifes is probably more what they want over money.

Originally posted by andy1033
reply to post by hypr2008

 

Not something i care about, why should it matter what others have, as long as you have enough.

Therein lies the rub, bub.

The richest of the rich are getting . . . well . . . richer and the unfortunate result is that more and more don't have enough. I don't think I need to back that up with a whole lotta sources because it's common knowledge . . . there isn't one of my friends or neighbors who are not feeling the pinch, some worse than others.

Even if you do have enough at this point, I trulybelieve we collectively have to care because once you stop giving a jiggly rats ass about others, you become part of the problem.

Not rippin', just sayin'

The not caring attitude is the nub of the problem of the world as a WHOLE.
IF the middle class are getting poorer and the uber rich getting richer, and there's people that 'have enough' and don't care about the ones getting poorer, thats their choice, but 'having enough' will NOT LAST LONG, once the middle class have been placed into debt, do those that do not care think that the UBER RICH and UBER GREEDY will simply STOP clamouring for more wealth?
Having enough now only means thaty the uberrich will come for your 'enough' at a later date.

Sooner or later the 'have enough' brigade will be in the same boat as the poor, and who then will they complain to?

Like the saying goes. ( or something similar)

They came for the coloureds, I wasn't a coloured so I kept quiet.
They came for the Jews, I wasn't a Jew so I kept quiet.
The came for the poor, but I wasn't poor so I kept quiet.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to help me.

Originally posted by hypr2008
Well it is pretty much true that the richer get rich, the poorer get poor, and the middle class stagnates

This is not true in every possible system.

It's true in ours (meaning pretty much everywhere in the world right now) because money, the means of exchange, is completely controlled by central bankers at the top. If you dig deeper you usually find that the "ulta-rich" are in bed with the state, either getting political favors such as "regulations" favoring them at the expense of any competition, or getting direct contracts where they are paid in essentially printed money. As this new money ripples through the economy, it causes inflation which is essentially a wealth transfer from the politically unconnected (including the poor) to the politically connected (I can elaborate on the economics of how this works if you'd like).

In a true free market (which is probably an ideal that can only be approximated in reality), in which nobody gets any special favors, the only way to get rich is to produce wealth and satisfy others' demands with that newly produced wealth. In this way society as a whole gets richer. The rich get richer but so do the middle class and the poor, because there's more "stuff" (i.e. wealth) to go around.

Our current system in which corporations and central banks control the government, which can loosely be called fascism, does indeed make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

My reason for posting is people often take an observation like the one in the OP and conclude that the solution is communism. And I think this is what "they" want you to think, because communism, in factual reality (ignoring the flowery rhetoric and just looking at how the system works), is actually the system we have now taken to its logical extreme. In factual reality it means one person or group controls all the wealth, and everybody else is a slave. Communism is in fact the ultimate monopoly.

I actually think the people at the top are intentionally trying to stoke class warfare because they already have a strategy of how they will come out on top should a communist revolution erupt.

I know you were not necessarily advocating communism in the OP, but I often see threads like this go that way so I thought I would throw in my $.02 of caution in advance.

My reason for posting is people often take an observation like the one in the OP and conclude that the solution is communism. And I think this is what "they" want you to think, because communism, in factual reality (ignoring the flowery rhetoric and just looking at how the system works), is actually the system we have now taken to its logical extreme. In factual reality it means one person or group controls all the wealth, and everybody else is a slave. Communism is in fact the ultimate monopoly.

That's complete BS. Communism is a class-less society where the state controls everything. I'm sure a capitalist might see this as monopoly, but this is to ensure that nobody creates a monopoly of their own.

The US is most certainly not communist. The US government does not control the economy; its corporations do and the corporations control the US government (this is fascism). US is more of a plutocratic empire than anything else.

And communism is not necessarily the solution, but it would be much more beneficial to the 80% or so of Americans who aren't rich and actually live on subsistence-wages which makes them nothing more than slaves to the system. Though if you want an example of a real Marxist situation, then look up the Paris Commune of 1871.

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi
That's complete BS. Communism is a class-less society where the state controls everything.

And who controls the state?

Class-less my arse.

Originally posted by NewlyAwakened

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi
That's complete BS. Communism is a class-less society where the state controls everything.

And who controls the state?

Class-less my arse.

The state is controlled by the people. Is this so hard to understand?

Communism is by definition pure democracy. And what is communism? It is a collective of communes. Do you know what a commune is? It is society of people that all work in various yet necessary roles for the betterment of the commune. Communism is this but on a national scale, and it requires a vanguard party/politburo to lead its directives. Class has nothing to do with leadership, class is all about financial worth. In a true communist society, people care more about living then making money to live.

Like I said, the only real communist example that I can think of is the Paris Commune of 1871. The workers took over Paris and turned it into a large commune. They were attempting to turn Paris into its own country but the revolution occurred right when Prussian troops surrounded Paris, which doomed the experiment to only lasting two months before all the communards were shot.

Because we operate under a pyramid or triangle structure, the top of the triangle will always be richer than the bottom. All systems in life are this.

The sooner man realizes this we can change to a cubed structure where the top or elite are all level at the top and the general public will be even with the bottom. Then like a dice when things change, the bottom can claim the top and vis versa. We will always have leaders!

reply to post by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi


I think what NewlyAwakened meant by Communism, he was alluding to Marx (a big government socialist). But you can be a communist without a state (though it's hard to do), just as you can have capitalism without a state (even harder to do), but it is possible.

I don't really want to derail the thread with a discussion of anarchy, but I will say this:

Communism and Capitalism pretty much demand a state. Reasons:

Communism needs control over who will produce what within each commune (or syndicate). That control is usually a direct democracy electing an over seer of production. The instant you have someone with the control over central planning, you get authority, thus, you are no longer anarchist, thus you inevitably will create a state.

Capitalism needs control over who can and can't own the means of production (private ownership of land, minerals, lakes, streams, forests, etc). In order to 'keep the peace' different groups hire other groups for protection, each then negating all anarchistic validity, and those despots now become states.

The goal is to not jump to an extreme, but to stay squarely in the center, within a Mutualist Commune (where everything is so decentralized, everyone gets to determine within each commune what is and isn't property by right of written contract (not this crazy unwritten social contract we're born into now [cough: Constitution :cough]). That way, the commune can grant property to an individual or company of individuals (who also will not OWN, but merely have rights to produce using that property), if and only if, they meet the needs of that commune.

So Communism isn't a monopoly, but it can very quickly get authoritarian, as does Capitalism. We've seen both versions, and both are horrible. And when you add to that a state (a monopoly who controls the money supply, wealth, power, and property), things get dire.

But back to the OP:

Yeah, the rich will always get richer because they don't keep their money in the bank. They don't need their money, so they invest in REAL items like property (real estate, gold, silver, patents, etc). All of which are products of the state. So statist favoritism to a minority of tyrants are what is causing this gap. Same thing happened in the late 19th century. Only now, I believe it is much worse since we have a central bank that forces us 'tax payers' to pay off the interest they accumulate when they print themselves free money. It's disgusting.

What is really strange is I never really cared much about communism, I guess seeing how it worked in the past really turned me off, but when you look at lets say China or Cuba they are doing well, from what I heard Cuba's people apparently are amongst some of the happiest in the world, but that was a few years ago.

Here's an update from the Guardian (UK) news site:

www.guardian.co.uk...

The income of the upper 1% of "wage earners" is still increasing!

Need we scratch our heads further about where to look for the cause of our economic problems?

Just at a cursory glance, it looks like we're being stolen from, and look who's doing the stealing!

I don't usually like to go after high-producers, because the world needs people like that.

But this top1% is living in a totally different universe. Any little qualms of guilt amongst them? I doubt it.

This is why Islam prevents the usage of interest rates. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. That is why the US wants war with the middle eastern countries because they want to get even richer. Interest rates and not using money backed by gold is the evil of the world.