Things get better? How do you think that's going to happen? Inflation isn't decreasing. We're not creating new jobs while more and more adults graduate college. Old people are living longer. This was already slowly happening in the 50s (minus the debt), but we were at least "controlled" as far as the dollar/gold cover clause. Nothing like that exists anymore so what you're seeing now, nothing is going to be scaled back.
Originally posted by psmith81992
Things get better? How do you think that's going to happen? Inflation isn't decreasing. We're not creating new jobs while more and more adults graduate college. Old people are living longer. This was already slowly happening in the 50s (minus the debt), but we were at least "controlled" as far as the dollar/gold cover clause. Nothing like that exists anymore so what you're seeing now, nothing is going to be scaled back.
1. Things will get better when the younger generation becomes more politically active and initiates change to benefit themselves. The older generation had their shot. They ****ed up. Now they are the majority of the voters and all they do is watch Fox News and be afraid of gay marriage and brown people.
2. Inflation isn't going to be easily controlled. But living wages ought to be given. People shouldn't work 40 hours a week and be in virtual poverty because they didn't have skills to get into a white collar job or move imaginary numbers around in the stock market to gain wealth.
3. We'll have more jobs when we crack down on outsourcing. Companies need to stop showing profits by removing American workers and keeping the difference to themselves, meanwhile enriching China who abuses its own workforce.
4. Old people are going to live longer. This is a new thing. We need to figure out how to keep them financially stable without busting the dam for the rest of us. The number of people over 60 is higher now than it ever has been, proportionately.
Now they are the majority of the voters and all they do is watch Fox News and be afraid of gay marriage and brown people.
2. Inflation isn't going to be easily controlled. But living wages ought to be given. People shouldn't work 40 hours a week and be in virtual poverty because they didn't have skills to get into a white collar job or move imaginary numbers around in the stock market to gain wealth.
3. We'll have more jobs when we crack down on outsourcing. Companies need to stop showing profits by removing American workers and keeping the difference to themselves, meanwhile enriching China who abuses its own workforce.
4. Old people are going to live longer. This is a new thing. We need to figure out how to keep them financially stable without busting the dam for the rest of us. The number of people over 60 is higher now than it ever has been, proportionately.
1. The older generation prospered in an environment where their forefathers, who fought in or lived through WWII, created. America emerged from that conflict as a true superpower, because of the collective effort of said generation. To be more specific, baby boomers ****ed things for the next generation. Instead of leaving a booming economy with room for opportunity, they let the jobs go abroad. Instead of voting on responsible legislature to keep America solvent with social security and manage her debt, they played as though kids with credit cards. They hungrily snatched up homes and cars for themselves and let the market go to shit. A good sum of them got jobs out of high school without degrees which they could eventually retire from; it's unlikely any of us will enjoy such priviledges. And again, what did they leave? Crippling debt, a shit job market, and several following generations with entirely uncertain futures.
2. Every time I've spoken of change, it has been strongly implied to be change for the better. Not just change for the hell of it.
3. A hedge fund manager makes enough to take care of a dozen families and then some. A good broker or corporate lawyer can make hundreds of thousands a year. Yet none of these are vital positions of society. Necessarily cogs in the wheel make barely enough to get by; people with very specific skills take advantage of the system and hoard the wealth. And you seem to not think this bad somehow.
1. The older generation prospered in an environment where their forefathers, who fought in or lived through WWII, created. America emerged from that conflict as a true superpower, because of the collective effort of said generation. To be more specific, baby boomers ****ed things for the next generation. Instead of leaving a booming economy with room for opportunity, they let the jobs go abroad. Instead of voting on responsible legislature to keep America solvent with social security and manage her debt, they played as though kids with credit cards. They hungrily snatched up homes and cars for themselves and let the market go to shit. A good sum of them got jobs out of high school without degrees which they could eventually retire from; it's unlikely any of us will enjoy such priviledges. And again, what did they leave? Crippling debt, a shit job market, and several following generations with entirely uncertain futures.
3. A hedge fund manager makes enough to take care of a dozen families and then some. A good broker or corporate lawyer can make hundreds of thousands a year. Yet none of these are vital positions of society. Necessarily cogs in the wheel make barely enough to get by; people with very specific skills take advantage of the system and hoard the wealth. And you seem to not think this bad somehow
I've always wondered why we do import certain things from other countries. I understand that obviously certain things are available in certain parts of the planet. But for electronics, for example, why don't we just create these things here instead of relying on other countries to build them and then importing them? Why do I find shit with "made in China" on it that could of easily been made here?
Originally posted by Surtur
I've always wondered why we do import certain things from other countries. I understand that obviously certain things are available in certain parts of the planet. But for electronics, for example, why don't we just create these things here instead of relying on other countries to build them and then importing them? Why do I find shit with "made in China" on it that could of easily been made here?
Globalisation has led to a disconnect between wealthy companies and communities. During the industrial revolution a factory owner's wealth was tied directly to a local workforce and so many paid back to the same community with direct philanthropy with creation of public parks and such like. Now companies source materials, labour etc from across the globe. They headquarter in tax havens, have administrative jobs in one country, customer service centres in another and manufacturing in yet another. There's no connection to any community and so no sense of loyalty to anyone other than shareholders. I read an article today that sums up the corporate mindset perfectly.
There’s a lot of projection among our elites. Perhaps they have to imagine the people they prey on as having their own worst qualities, so currently we hear a lot about scroungers and parasites and frauds, as a class of yacht-owning, show jumping, off-piste-skiing, incestuous monsters projects the shame it feels at its own greed on to a population whose idea of decadence is probably bath bombs.
George Osborne has already achieved a lot as chancellor – for example, dystopian sci-fi now only has to be set 18 months in the future. To us he seems to be firmly House Lannister, if you overlook his terrible record on debt, but the true horror of Osborne is that he is actually one of the more human faces in the Conservative parliamentary party. He doesn’t even have that penetrating delivery that upperclass English people evolved to make themselves heard over musket fire and the screams of dying foreigners. His strained voice is more like the one you’d use to try to book tickets on an automated phone line, or in the final six months of a relationship
Yet it’s important not to respond with our own projection and imagine humanity in people who feel none. Your ruling class don’t care about what happens to you. What seems like some enormous upset in your community is undetectable from a helicopter or a speeding motorcade. They are pitiless. Sitting down and trying to make a moral argument against austerity to our elites is like addressing global warming by opening negotiations with the sea. They don’t care about things like education. They feel there needs to be enough provision so that prostitutes are numerate enough to find hotel rooms, and that’s it..
The Tories are obviously attuned to word choice, which is why they gave us a couple of months’ notice of their emergency budget. So why do they feel so sanguine about the ubiquity of “austerity”? This isn’t austerity; it’s a transfer of assets from public to private ownership. One of the main advantages of the word “austerity” is that it suggests a gradual process, when, in reality, we are caught under the wheels of a chariot.
We live in a society that doesn’t even care to address the fact that the planet is dying. Establishment attitudes cover a narrow spectrum from survival being less important than growth to climate change being a hoax. Suggesting what? That the crafty international scientific community has got together to talk down the value of beachfront property? This is a budget that will result in people with disabilities dying, not as an unfortunate side-effect, but as a direct consequence of a system that is empirically indifferent to life.
Our ruling class are largely unaware of the struggles of unknowable muggle lives, but our desiccated culture has probably left us alienated enough to be able to empathise with theirs a little. I want you to try something. Imagine that you become a member of our elite. You have every success you’ve ever wanted but have to spend your time surrounded by the worst people on earth. It’s like being a Chelsea fan. You start to take cocaine, partly because you now socialise exclusively with people it wouldn’t be safe to fall asleep around. You buy a yacht.
Being on a yacht is, at best, like being in a Premier Inn during an earthquake. So why is it an entrance requirement for the super-rich? Because it provides a floating crime scene. You and your jaded friends can now take your parties into international waters. You can stop off at the Channel Islands and take onboard a consignment of orphans who will afterwards be thrown into the giant beak-like mouths of the blasphemous undersea deities that you all worship.
And then one day you find yourself sitting in the ruins of some charmless party, an arms dealer slurring at you that he’s made more money out of Africa than Bob Geldof, a couple of members of the Illuminati in a corner debating whether hinting at their existence on banknotes might be counterproductive. You suggest that the central bankers have Greece in a chokehold. “Stranglehold!” corrects a humourless former member of the KGB, a point that he insists on demonstrating on a resigned-looking waiter. Later, the boat rocks slightly and you assume that the body has been dropped overboard and something has risen to feed on it.
You step out on to the deck, where there is an eery, humid calm. There is a thought in the heart of every addict. It is universal, but we all think it’s unique to just us. It is: “I am no damn good.” Every rich person has a secret thought at their centre too, and now that I think about it the two must be related. You reach for it here for comfort. It is: “The next thing I get will make me happy.”
Beneath the boat, and stretching out for miles on every side, there floats the monstrous eye of Ry’lleth, the Great UnMaker. The eye is obscene, unblinking, and the unique black of arterial blood. You would have said, if you didn’t know better, that it regarded you with something like pity.
Originally posted by Flyattractor
Bull Crap. I if you fail to pay your taxes. The Government (of any country the U.S included) will take LITERALLY every ting you own. And there aint a DAMN thing you can do about it.Unless your really rich and can pay them off.
😮💨
And this applies everywhere worth living.
Keep in mind, the reason you have stuff, is because you use infrastructure that was built, and constantly maintained, by the people of the country you're part of over decades or centuries.
It's not like you're not getting something out of the deal. Roads, power, food-inspected-to-not-be-poisoned, police preventing your stuff from being yoinked, firefighters preventing it all from igniting, trade networks that ship you all the stuff you're buying and ship anything you're selling, etc..
Originally posted by Surtur
Speaking of taxes, I think we should bring back tariffs. Don't other countries tax us for doing the same?
Ah, it's best to be limited in the use of tariffs, they cut down on trade and we get mucho money from trade, which still results in taxes.
Most countries we trade with, similarly, don't use tariffs very much. It's just not good business. Most tariffs are on select goods the specific governments want to limit.
One of the things that made the Great Depression so bad was everyone went tariff happy and that gave the economies a second punch in the gut.
Originally posted by Stealth Moose
[B]Our manufacturing industry is a mere fraction of what it was fifty years ago.
That's not exactly the case. We've outsourced production of many smaller items, but still engage in a lot of large-scale industrial production.
We did have a setback recently, but we've also bounced back.
38 percent up since the recession ended
Sure, regular people pay less for goods and they become more common. But what about all those jobs? What about disposable income? Money needs to stay here more than it needs to go to a barely-ally such as China.
Note that China buys a fairly impressive amount of stuff from us. If we stopped trading with China so much, then they'd stop buying so much.
We do profit from the arrangement too. And, interestingly, it makes China somewhat reliant on us, making it in their best interest to make sure we're doing all right.
Also, the famously low Chinese wages... are rising. As China grows, the pay increases.
China's rising regardless, it's better to be a partner than an enemy when it's more profitable to work with them, and when it gives them a practical interest for them to see us economically healthy.
Originally posted by psmith81992
Consumption based economy ftw! I miss the 50s, minus the racism. I will note however that business (specifically s corp) taxes are quite favorable.
It'd be nice if we had our tax rates up at 1950s level. Then we could get infrastructure spending down.
For all the complaints people have about taxes now, I don't think most realize we're still on a low end.
Originally posted by Stealth Moose
I
The problem is that the country is shifting in favor of those up top. Just before 2008, Forbes reported the numbers of millionaires and billionaires increasing, almost exponentially. This trend is still on the rise, because the mechanisms are in place to create untold wealth for people who already don't have to worry about wealth.
Right, the number of billionaires went up during the recession. How messed up is that?
CEO wages are a hundred times what they were in the 50s- adjusting for inflation- and companies sure aren't getting much benefit from it.
The US has kinda gotten this weird mindset of, 'if you're rich, you must deserve it,' when all the inflated executive pay has gotten us is companies with a bit less to pay it's other employers or to infest in expansion.
It'd be nice if we had our tax rates up at 1950s level. Then we could get infrastructure spending down.For all the complaints people have about taxes now, I don't think most realize we're still on a low end.
The US has kinda gotten this weird mindset of, 'if you're rich, you must deserve it,' when all the inflated executive pay has gotten us is companies with a bit less to pay it's other employers or to infest in expansion.
Originally posted by psmith81992
What people don't understand is that even at the 1950s 90% tax rate, when you adjust for inflation, they were still making more than we are today.
Yes. 50s and 60s we were better off. We had higher taxes, but more infrastructure spending, and all in all it worked out.
We also had more unions, which are good for income equality.
I'm not sure if that's the mindset. I find people have a general disdain for the rich. "If you're rich you must have cheated or gotten lucky" seems to be the mindset.
There's definitely some idolization, even if there's some backhanded side.
Think about celebs who are famous for being rich and famous, like the Kardashians, who had a tv show about 'em because they were rich. People complained about them, but they're still idolized.
Think about all the people who don't want to tax the rich/give them more tax breaks under the idea that when they eventually get rich they won't want to be taxed (or something), and don't forget the push to label the rich in general 'job creators' even when granting tax breaks to rich individuals doesn't actually help job growth (past a certain point, a point around the middle class, more money in people's hands is more likely to be sat on than used. A billionaire is, after all, someone not spending a billion dollars). All the more so when compared to actually spending the money on stuff that involved jobs.
Think about Donald Trump, and how his business strategy basically revolves around selling himself as rich, therefore a good investment, therefore people give him money to use, and that's how he's gotten rich- even though he had to declare bankruptcy four times and really isn't all that good at business.
There is normally some amount of luck involved in being rich. Some of it is in landing the right position- as mentioned, executive pay gives massively more than it used to. Some of it is having enough seed money at the right time. Sometimes it's even the minor luck of being selected for that job you worked really hard for over the people who *also* worked hard enough to earn the slot. After all, increasing the number of skilled candidates doesn't increase the number of high-paying jobs.
I'm not in bad shape, and I can definitely say a good amount of it is luck of what family I was born into. There are plenty of people who work harder than me but are poorer- and it's not their fault, and it's not my fault, it's just how the chips fell.
It's not that being rich is bad, but some people definitely treat being rich as sacrosanct and something not to be meddled with, and overlook how much the super-high money totals are because things are set up to be better at funneling money into the few than things were in the past when we were actually more prosperous.
Think about celebs who are famous for being rich and famous, like the Kardashians, who had a tv show about 'em because they were rich. People complained about them, but they're still idolized.
Think about celebs who are famous for being rich and famous, like the Kardashians, who had a tv show about 'em because they were rich. People complained about them, but they're still idolized.Think about all the people who don't want to tax the rich/give them more tax breaks under the idea that when they eventually get rich they won't want to be taxed (or something), and don't forget the push to label the rich in general 'job creators' even when granting tax breaks to rich individuals doesn't actually help job growth (past a certain point, a point around the middle class, more money in people's hands is more likely to be sat on than used. A billionaire is, after all, someone not spending a billion dollars). All the more so when compared to actually spending the money on stuff that involved jobs.
Think about Donald Trump, and how his business strategy basically revolves around selling himself as rich, therefore a good investment, therefore people give him money to use, and that's how he's gotten rich- even though he had to declare bankruptcy four times and really isn't all that good at business.
There is normally some amount of luck involved in being rich. Some of it is in landing the right position- as mentioned, executive pay gives massively more than it used to. Some of it is having enough seed money at the right time. Sometimes it's even the minor luck of being selected for that job you worked really hard for over the people who *also* worked hard enough to earn the slot. After all, increasing the number of skilled candidates doesn't increase the number of high-paying jobs.I'm not in bad shape, and I can definitely say a good amount of it is luck of what family I was born into. There are plenty of people who work harder than me but are poorer- and it's not their fault, and it's not my fault, it's just how the chips fell.
It's not that being rich is bad, but some people definitely treat being rich as sacrosanct and something not to be meddled with, and overlook how much the super-high money totals are because things are set up to be better at funneling money into the few than things were in the past when we were actually more prosperous
Originally posted by Q99
Ah, it's best to be limited in the use of tariffs, they cut down on trade and we get mucho money from trade, which still results in taxes.Most countries we trade with, similarly, don't use tariffs very much. It's just not good business. Most tariffs are on select goods the specific governments want to limit.
One of the things that made the Great Depression so bad was everyone went tariff happy and that gave the economies a second punch in the gut.
Okay, but then we should just not use tariffs when dealing with the countries that also don't use tariffs. But I find it insane to not use a tariff on a country who uses them on us. Fair is fair after all.