[jstoesz]

This is from the latest CBO report. Thought you all might find this interesting.

“The composition of income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income changed significantly from 1979 to 2007, as the shares from labor and business income increased and the share of income represented by capital income decreased. That pattern is consistent with a longer-term trend: Over the entire 20th century, labor income has become a larger share of income for high-income taxpayers, while capital income has declined as a share of their income.”

[jstoesz]

No I am not actually a cantankerous old man, I just like to play one on the internet.

[jstoesz]

no…looser. Like they are loose with their morals and hygiene.

[jstoesz]

arguing with these two or three about retirement is pointless. You mine as well play tennis with a wall.

Now if you want to hear their opinons on housing in sd they are far more spot on. Move along. No clarity or agreement will be found here.

BTW, to all who doubt moving away. MN is winning the day in my family! WIth a few more long drives to Southern California (the last one did not go well), We will never live there again! But I will miss the sailing.

[jstoesz]

Do you think politicians are any less corrupt than 100 years ago?

Read some history books, I have a feeling we are living in an era where government is way more transparent than it has ever been.

I read a book not too long ago, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles Water Supply in the Owens Valley, and it left me realizing how much more transparent and honest our politicians are today.

So whenever you are tempted to believe that we are in a far more corrupt time, I challenge you to read some history. I think time whitewashes past controversies.

The heart of the matter is, generally speaking, the government we have today is just so much more influential than the government we once had. Their corruption, just didn’t matter, but now it does.

This search for honest politicians offering altruistic outcomes sounds like a fools errand through candyland, and I am not even a cynic.

[jstoesz]

Btw, I do not have millions, I am a lowly engineer. And I doubt I will ever be an investor. Gambling freaks me out way too much.

But I do want to encourage investment. Cranking up the Cap Gains tax as some of you suggest will surely limit investment (which is your goal I fear).

I want to be the guy who has the million dollar idea that some fat cat will take as collateral.

What I find hard to swallow is the Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation, etc. What a waste of productive assets, but that is their prerogative.

[jstoesz]

Do you not acknowledge that investments make jobs. When you put money in the market, you are providing capital for business to grow with. Are banks out of control certainly, are they too large a % of our economy, for sure. But don’t use that to demonize other productive rich people. Not all investors are shysters. And many productive business owners use their surplus, and plow it into the market or other asset classes. What else would you have them do with it?

Do you know any 1%ers? I only know one couple. They built a machine shop from one machine in their garage to a 2 acre shop over 20 years. They employ a lot of people, and they made their money in business providing work for a community that has no work. They didn’t steal a dime from their employees, they provided jobs to a small foothills community which has an appalling employment rate. And I resent your posture when applied so broadly.

For all their warts, did bill gates or steve jobs make their millions/billions off the backs of their workers? Or did they provide employment for thousands?

In America someone will lend you a million dollars and your only collateral being an idea. Where did that million come from? The thieving unproductive bastardly rich 1%, who risks their money on the next Linkedin or Rackspace.

We cannot go on doing what we always did, and we need the people’s accumulated wealth to get us there. Your simple minded manual labor economy is dead, long buried, I am not even sure if it ever lived.

[jstoesz]

I think we all understand your goals jp and CAR, and they are not wrong. I think most everyone wants the middle class to be making more money, and top executive compensation to go down.

Where we disagree is how to go about having this happen. Your solutions, at least in my eyes, will corrupt society making it more dependent, not less dependent on government, entrenching an unproductive class of “workers.” We all want the middle class to have more money. But I want them to earn more because they are more productive, not because they wrangled more money out of the rich people and stuffed it into their pockets. We should think up constructs where people are encouraged to be productive.

If people learn they can make more through coercion then increasing their production, we will have a society of thieves.

[jstoesz]

I got married at an olive orchard, does that count for anything?

Side note is it an orchard, ranch, farm? Who knows…

[jstoesz]

If I were in your shoes, I would forget vegas, and go to Carson city/east shore tahoe.

Cheap, beautiful, and fun. Vegas in my estimation has little going for it, and the traffic to get back to CA is pretty crappy.

[jstoesz]

Wow…pugnacious devil aren’t you!

When I made the allusion to the founders, I was not trying to imply that the founders would disagree or find our current rates confiscatory. I was stating that they based our government on certain concepts of morality.

If you disagree with them, that is fine. I should have left that statement off as it is getting us going in a worthless direction.

I was merely trying to get to the presuppositions of the argument. If we cannot agree on a concept of right and wrong, we are not going to agree on a concept of fairness in tax policy.

To put it another way, if I assume that morality is based in humanistic, pragmatic terms (which I am assuming you do, and lots of people do. I am not criticizing your morality), then I am left believing that no tax rate is unjust as long as it fulfills some utilitarian metric or some other pragmatic accounting system. So I would have to agree with you.

But I do disagree, because I reject humanism…but that is for another day. Have a good weekend everyone. Maybe on Monday I could make the argument from a humanistic perspective. Good fun.

[jstoesz]

[quote=pri_dk][quote=jstoesz]If you steal from the rich to give to the poor, you are still a thief (even if you are blanketed in the authority of the government).[/quote]

So now the government is no longer the body that defines “theft?”

The government is not the authority that determines what is lawful and unlawful?

Then who is?

Tell me how government can steal. Tell me what distinguishes a dollar that is “stolen” by the government from one that is not.

[quote]Furthermore, even if you can show that some rich people have screwed over the lower classes, how do you then justify government confiscation and redistribution as a moral solution?[/quote]

I think you just answered your own question there.

But why the word “confiscation?” Once again, tell me the difference between a dollar that as collected through taxes vs. “confiscation.”

What percentage of the checks I send to the IRS is “confiscated?”[/quote]

You ask good questions, and I guess I would like to hear your thoughts on their answers. When is a tax rate too high?

You are asking something much bigger than tax rates. You are asking questions about what is right and wrong.

As I see it there are two prevailing schools of thought on right and wrong. One is based on humanistic, pragmatic terms. “What is best for society at this time” terms.

The other school of thought is that right and wrong are fixed with no regard for convenience or pragmatism. I have a feeling our founders were alluding to this when they said man was born with unalienable rights.

I suspect we subscribe to two different schools. From that point on, one of us will have to presume the other school of thought is correct.

[jstoesz]

[quote=davelj][quote=jstoesz]

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” You can spin a web based on selective stats, but let us deal with the real question here. There is no debating that there is a difference in the rich and poor, that much is obvious.

Why/how is it that ALL rich people have gotten all their money off the backs of the 99? Did all rich people get that way through ill gotten gains?

Furthermore, even if you can show that some rich people have screwed over the lower classes, how do you then justify government confiscation and redistribution as a moral solution? Do you not think that many rich people have provided an incredible service to their employees and deserve the money they have made, by providing gainful and productive employment for many? By what grounds do you justify confiscating money from those with proper earned gains? Because they simply have more money then you? That is hardly a moral justification. [/quote]

On the one hand I sympathize with your arguments as they are superficially compelling. But there are two big problems with your general position.

First – and we can thank Nassim Taleb for his analysis here – you assume that most wealthy people earned their wealth purely as a result of hard work, and that – conversely – most poor people ended up in their position because they were unwilling to work hard. That is, luck – or “randomness” – did not play a major role in either. This is demonstrably false. In fact, a huge part of anyone’s success (or lack thereof) can be attributed to randomness. Now, I will agree with Reagan’s observation that “the harder I worked, the luckier I got,” but luck plays a big role in anyone’s outcome. If you were to pick a group of highly successful people and write down all of the things they did to become successful, you’d be able to find a much larger group of people who did all of those same things and did NOT reach the same level of success. Again, Nassim Taleb has done the world a favor by debunking the notion that many successful people hold that they “achieved it all by working hard and taking risks.” Sure, working hard and risk-taking are critical components of success… but the economic backyard is FILLED with folks who are smart, hardworking and took risks… who are wholly unsuccessful. The difference between these two groups is – to a meaningful (although not entire, of course) extent – the result of luck.

[A thought experiment. There are 6.5 billion people on the planet. The vast majority of them were born into abject poverty. Half of the world’s population lives on less than $3/day and other than survival these folks have very few prospects in their lives. Now, look around yourself and tell me how much your “hard work” has played into your ultimate success relative to everyone else on this planet. Answer: not much. You were born into a situation in which “success” – as we define it – was achievable. Most people on the planet do not have that luxury.]

Second – What good is a world that is “morally fair” (to paraphrase your words) if that world is too dangerous to live in? That is, you don’t want to redistribute to the poor because “they don’t deserve it.” OK, fine. Let’s not quibble over morality and what folks deserve. Would you support redistribution if not doing so would result in a world in which your person is in great physical danger (because the folks that are “poor” decide to take from the rich by “pure” force). Personally, I’d rather redistribute if it keeps the masses at bay, regardless of any “moral” notions about “fairness.”

So, again, I sympathize with your (essentially) libertarian ideas here. I held similar views once myself. But I don’t think they hold up to close scrutiny or the practical realities of living in a large society with disparate economic outcomes.[/quote]

I too understand what you are saying dave. And I agree to a large extent. The world is not fair, and lady luck doesn’t shine on us all. But your quote does get to the heart of it. The more work, enginuity, risk allowance, and intelligence the greater your chances. But you are ultimately lucky to be born here to non psycho parents. Somethings are just structural. The problem is, many of the solutions to the unfairness result in greater moral hazard. The unintended consequences can be quite severe, and deleterious.

Imagine if you are born to abusive parents, is that any excuse to be abusive yourself? Certainly not. The same goes for finacially iresponsible parents, you are not excused from making poor choices like your parents. You did get the short end of the stick though.

By our bailouts for our banks created a more sound and transparent financial sector? Did they learn their lesson? Similarly, if the government instituted forced cram downs for mortgage debt on the banks, are people more or less likely to over mortgage themselves if the wind blows that way again? Or imagine forced cram downs for student loans, how many basket weaving sociology (just joking) majors would we have?

One more comment. I am not saying we should live in an extreme and cruel libertarian society. That will not foster succesful outcomes. We need mamma (nurturing) and pappa (responsibility) politics. I just think the pendulum has swung way to far to the mamma side over the last 15 years. We need to build our responsibity and accountability for once in this country (no fun). If more American took ownership and control of their lives, we would all be better off.

:climbing off my soap box:

[jstoesz]

Charity is too often a facade of scoundrels

[jstoesz]

[quote=briansd1]jstoesz and flu, those usurious charges are not fees for service to pay for the machines and infrastructure.

Those usurious “fees” are entire billion-dollar business models.

That’s where your opinions don’t reconcile with science and data.

Notwithstanding the choices, the poorest of Americans are still being nickle and dimed and extorted. A decent society does not allow that to happen.

Banks are licensed to encourage proper allocation of capital and to encourage productivity in the economy. They should not be licensed to extort money from the most vulnerable of Americans.[/quote]

I heard the Iphones 4s has a profit margin of over 50%. Is that abusive too? Can you imagine a bank with that kind of profit margin (JP morgan just quoted 17.5%)?

Brian, it is time for people (and banks) to pull up their big boy pants.

[Author]

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