pri_dk wrote:CA renter

[CA renter]

[quote=pri_dk][quote=CA renter]Some people STILL don’t get it, even after all we’ve been through the past few decades.[/quote]

Cable TV, hybrid cars, iPhones, viagra, heart-stents, GPS, facebook, effective treatments for AIDS, and ubiquitous granite counter-tops.

The past few decades have been hell.

We even had this “internet” thing – where people anonymously argue with each other about just how the world is going to end.

Here’s a website for ya, just in case you run out of things to be hysterical about:

http://first-world-problems.com/%5B/quote%5D

Try this, instead:

“The broad facts of income inequality over the past six decades are easily summarized:

The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity.
Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s.
The income gap between those high up the income ladder and those on the middle and lower rungs — while substantial — did not change much during this period.
Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened.
Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.
The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen more than 80 years ago (during the “Roaring Twenties”).
Wealth (the value of a household’s property and financial assets net of the value of its debts) is much more highly concentrated than income, although the wealth data do not show a dramatic increase in concentration at the very top the way the income data do.
Data from a variety of sources contribute to this broad picture of strong growth and shared prosperity for the immediate postwar generation, followed by slower growth and growing inequality since the 1970s. Within these broad trends, however, different data tell slightly different parts of the story, and no single source of data is better for all purposes than the others.”

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3629
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Just to reiterate, once again, I am not opposed to the kind of “investing” that grows our economy — direct investments in businesses that create goods and/or provide services that benefit society. The things you’ve mentioned were created by companies that designed, built, and/or improved upon things. By all means, we should encourage this type of investment. That being said, buying up houses that already exist just so you can charge end-users rent and make a profit does not qualify as the type of investment that benefits society, in general.