Originally posted by Twilly
You are forgetting 1 important point. The Government made all of your money for you.

In the late 90's, your tech company did well because of the tech boom, that was created by government regulations. And the real estate boom was directly caused by Big Willie and the Dems in Congress. Barney Frank in particular, passed a law forcing the banks to give loans to people who they KNEW couldn't pay it back. That caused a shortage of real estate, which caused prices to sky-rocket... Making you alot of money. If the Government had kept their hands out of both issues, There would have been no bubbles, and the free market would still be doing its thing. Please dont tell me Capitalism does not work... It works great when left alone.

The bottom line of capitalism is Risk and Reward. If I only have $100, and I risk it, chances are I will receive a reward. Those who refuse to risk anything, will get no reward.

your wrong about the tech boom it wasn't due to govt regulations...although i am sure it helped. the tech boom was due to innovation and the further development of the personal computer in the internet world that had just opened. remember it was called the dot com bubble. the tech boom is still going...is it iphone 4 now?

My good sir I respect you for what you have said. Although I doubt you are what we consider the1%. Unless you make muti-billions a year, your just a small fish like us. As George Carlin said " it's a big club and you and I ain't in it."

so you say your in the top 1 % eh??

so are you married?, just curious, not that I'm an interested female, I mean Im a girl in all, and Im just well you know curious if ya got yourself a girlfriend for research purposes only that is, yeah that's it, research, I'm just doing a poll on the relationship status of the top 1 percent, um....lol Im kidding

I am quite certain that there are several of us here that fit firmly into the "1%" or even the ".5%". If we have the same goals of decent humanity, then I fail to see why others here feel the need to attack us for not being poor. Some people here need to really look at WHY they are angry. Are you angry because you truly care about others and the condition of humanity? Or, are you angry simply because you are not in the 1%? I feel safe is saying that a great deal of you would fall into the latter............

You are not the problem, and the amount of money you make should not have any value in your opinion / contribution. The people saying you should do things such as pay the weeder across the street 10k a day is rubbish as a solution - although, would make someones life. This problem is with criminals who are not prosecuted, and private bankers tweaking the knobs. As someone with bearly enough money to get by, I say arrest the criminals, block the fed, and cut military spending.

Too many people with the OWS focus instead on how much money someone brings home, and not how they are actually getting the money. This will accomplish nothing besides a (somehow) larger disconnect between the wealthy and the poor. All your other points I agree with fully, thank you for posting this thread.

I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to comment and discuss. I had no idea this topic was going to get so much attention; I'm blown away, thanks so much.

I guess there is a lot more I could say but I don't really have time to address every point. I'll touch on a very few things and maybe come back later if I have the time. First of all. I got a lot of interesting U2Us as well as responses in this thread. I guess I should have expected people would ask for something, be it information or "something else." But the answer is no, for reasons that should be logical to most of you. Ahd all of you should know its not a good idea to ask for anything or give anything to complete strangers over the internet. Don't take candy from strangers. Be that as it may, I wish everyone good luck.

I do give money to various causes...and I have given money to two different OWS groups. I like to both give money and invest money in my local area. I encourage everyone to support their local area, in what ever way they can, rich or poor or otherwise. That's a great way to combat the virus of "globalism" (outsourcing/offshoring) that is rotting the US industrial sector like leprosy.

An interesting thing - I got a lot of criticism from the "left" that I wasn't expecting and hadn't really thought about. My own bais is showing in that I'm used to defending my position to skeptical conservatives; I guess as a conservative myself, interacting with the "hard left" is just a clash of worldviews and we really aren't going to agree on a whole lot. That's a battle I'll let others fight if they want; its too vast a gulf to be really all that interesting to me, personally. But left or right, I hope we can all -- or almost all -- agree that the financial system is corrupt and needs a total overhaul. Mobs of angry people is as good a way as any to force the sociopaths in the finance world to take things a little more seriously. Believe it or not, I think its got a lot of people rattled.

I'd also like to ask anyone who is not in finance but considers themselves a good businessman -- sales guys, real estate, tech, manufacturing, small business owners -- How long are you going to put up with these D-bags on Wall Street eating your lunch? They are taxing you to hell and back, giving themselves bonuses with it, and then turning around and convincing you to put your cash in a stock market where they can rip you off again! These guys are picking your pockets...What happend to all the non-finance businessmen that used to be the backbone of the US economy??

What else...This thing is still taking shape and some aspects are now starting to disturb me a little...developments in the last few days, even. There is an undercurrent of really ugly feeling now, a sense that the gloves might be coming off soon. If the movement goes violent or chaotic, I'm probably going to have to temper my enthusiasm or even drop support. As noted in the original post, I maintain skepticism.

One person asked whether I'd support a debt reset. One of the ideas I've been playing around with is the idea of forgiving some debt PLUS giving people who have non-negative net worths additional cash. Example: Compare a person with student debt of 100K vs. a small businessman with 200K assets. Assuming a closed system for argument's sake, the student debt is wiped out, and the businessman also gets a gift of 100K, giving him a new net worth of 300K. The student is back to zero, but at least he's not in debt, and can begin to perhaps build wealth rather than trying to dig out of an endless hole and shoveling money to banking gangsters. It's not a perfect idea, I'm sure some of you smart people can find holes in it. For one, it inflates the money supply a bit...but I would argue that it couldn't possibly be worse than the insane credit creation the Fed is engaged in today. Think on it...

Thanks again for reading, and please keep on discussing...

For the record, I don't believe any of the previous socio-economic systems (capitalism, socialism, communism or fascism) is the answer to our fundamental economic problems. IMO those systems have worn out their welcome. Those systems were designed hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago and it's time for a new design. We have exponentially more scientific and technical knowledge now then we did even just 200 years ago, but yet we are still using a blueprint that represents extremely old values based on a very limited scientific perspective.There is no way our founding fathers could have predicted what a healthy society would need today.

That being said, I appreciate the honesty you have given about being in the right place at the right time. However, you didn't address the issue with the rich, spoiled kids thriving off of daddy's money.

There is less social mobility in America than anywhere else in the world. It seems that it's less about being in the right place at the right time as it is about being in the right WOMB. What environment you are born into has more to do with where you end up on the social totem pole than anything else.

Being a Ron Paul supporter I would imagine that you believe we need more capitalism and less regulation, but aren't all of these problems just manifestations inherent in capitalism. If one has money to begin with, they don't need to work, their money works for them which gains them even more money to work for them to gain even more money to infinity. And all of their money comes from everyone else being in more and more perpetual debt,

Everything is for sale including the government. You touched on corporate welfare. The reason corporate welfare exists is because the government is OWNED by the very corporations it supports.

Hard works aside, capitalism will always favor those with money over those who create. What one creates is less important than what one owns because even creation is bought by the ones that have capital to begin with.

IMO, more and more capitalism, like what we've continued to get since Regan took office, is just going to expose more and more of its intrinsic flaws, which will lead to less progress, a bigger gap between the rich and poor and less social mobility.

I am part of the 1% too!

# all you broke bitches! muah, auh, auh!