Are you being serious here?
Wealth & Income Inequality
- Thread starter Eboue
- Start date
Are you being serious here?
okay lets print out loads of money and give everyone 500 billion dollars since it doesn't matter what anyone has
Last edited:
I'm so tired of this nonsense argument, that people pull out every time. Oh gawd, all these big companies might leave!! Oh really? So what about when you pass new laws that prevent them from operating in your home market without having a base there and paying the appropriate tax? How exactly do you think Facebook or Amazon would react if you threatened to cut off their access to US consumers unless they paid up?
And why exactly are companies allowed to base their HQ's in low tax countries to avoid tax anyway, if the bulk of their business is in higher tax markets? In what way is this at all logical or fair? All these companies need the western consumers that provide the bulk of their earnings a hell of a lot more than the countries need their particular product. It's about time governments started remembering that and stop acting like elected corporate lobbyists.
Banking is available through the postal service in Norway and it’s shite.
...
It matters a hell of a lot when people's earnings are remaining static while living costs and housing costs rise substantially, because profits are going to people at the top instead of the employees.
The key word in that sentence you quoted was "enormous". Once any one individual has accumulated £50m in personal capital (or whatever we can agree as the cut-off between "fecking loaded" and "stupidly wealthy" is) I would argue that accumulating any more is literally pointless. It's not going to make your life any better, in real terms, that's for sure. Anyway, I'm not arguing that wealth accumulation stops at that point, just that it becomes considerably harder with a much higher proportion being paid back to the country in which you live.
I've actually heard a load of very wealthy people make this same point. Because they know they're not living in a bubble. They appreciate there's feck all point having that sort of money if you're going to be living in such a divided and unequal society you'll end up with armed guards following you round every day and you're eating caviar while children starve to death on the streets. How can anyone enjoy being wealthy in that context?!
So your solution is to have a version of Chinese wall in US and start banning websites?
So your solution is to have a version of Chinese wall in US and start banning websites?
If you have massive corporations refusing to pay tax on the profits they are making from your citizens, then absolutely. Why wouldn't you?
Who said anything about not paying tax. They pay taxes for US sales.... Just no wealth cap since they are not domiciled in US. You'll just be putting US companies at a disadvantage globally.
People are not poor because someone else is rich. Wealth is not finite. Poor people can earn more and progress economically irrespective of how many billionaires are there. They are not related to each other.
This is actually something I asked my mom when I was like 6. Why don't we give these poor people one of those plastic cards that you sometimes stick into the wall so money comes out.
Money =! Wealth.
That's a pretty bad take tbf.
That's just an emotional thing. Those people having more wealth doesn't have any relationship to you having more or less wealth. Secondly, businesses don't exist to employ people and pay them loads of money, if there are no profits going to the top, there's no business.
'Enormous' is relative to the impact of a business. Example, if I start running a gym tomorrow, I can probably reach about 1,000 people maximum, but when Steve Jobs helped create the iPad/iPhone, they created a product that had the possibility of reaching billions of people, so necessarily, their margins would be far higher than mine. So creating a £50m cap is just arbitrary and pointless.
The second point is empty too. Business people, for whatever their personal qualities or lack thereof, make money from providing a certain good or service which makes peoples' lives better (ie increasing social wealth). Their actions in the market have more impact than taxing them loads (government is very bad at spending money).
Its such an incredibly dumb argument. What is wealth if not the ability to purchase goods and services? Goods and services are limited and those with more ability to purchase will take an outsized share, leaving less for those who can't. A literal child could understand it but right wingers cant.
works as well, if you give money to people who need money they can get things they need with it
Yeah, this sounds like a stellar idea. Why have no one thought of this before?
actually its good
Where did the goods and services come from?
What are you getting at?
Irrelevant. Legal convictions have nothing to do with it.
Same as EAP. They don't exist in a fixed amount. So the solution to the problem isn't just the most equitable distribution of a fixed amount. Its a dynamic problem where the rules to the distribution can also affect the production, therefore the optimum is probably not simply an equal distribution.
But a child wouldn't understand that.
jezz bezos personally invented bread, he bakes all of them and delivers it to my house on a bike (he invented delivering things too)
Every year oxfam releases this stat. Every year we rehash the same argument.
Because to them, money/wealth lost its actual, original function. It is now God. A matter of religious importance, the one true barometer of your value as a human being. It is the alpha and omega of existence. It justifies everything and is the only thing that matters in a society.
So what I'm saying is that you already lost them with the second sentence.
And every year the stats get worse and worse.
So the logical conclusion is to... do nothing and accept it?
No it's not. I'm specifically talking about the relative wealth of individuals. My point is about how much wealth for any one person could be deemed morally unacceptable in a society where a significant proportion of people live below the breadline. I don't care how they earned their money. That's irrelevant. It's not as though the state can apply some kind of arbitrary "you earned it" score based around how these individuals became stupendously rich that can be used dictate what sort of tax they should pay. The only thing that is relevant in this discussion around a personal wealth cap is, well, personal wealth.
Hehe. Also see above re "you earned it" score and deciding who made money in a worthy manner and who didn't.
The only thing I know is that we need expert economists to decide what to do. The general population, myself included, is clueless with the best ideas on how to resolve the issue of wealth inequality. The only difference is, I know I'm clueless and don't have facebook meme solutions such as "take all the rich people stuff and divide it up". Just look at that other thread about British Royalty.
It's a good thing then, that there is still a tiny bit of room between the current situation and equal distribution. Obviously these huge wealth gaps are a result of a free market economy, but instead of throwing our hands up and say, oh well, it's better than communism, we should try our hardest to work towards a solution where you don't have 25 people with enough wealth to feed most of the world's hungry population. How the feck are we some how okay with this? I personally don't believe in completely equal distribution either, but I'd take that over the current situation.
Not that I have a solution, but I'm sure there's some nerds somewhere that can think something up. We're inventive like that.
To add to that, it's funny seeing Americans or other first world countries complain about "corporate greed". The average American could probably sustain a family of 10 in a lot of countries with the amount of food they waste and long showers they take. But of course, they are quick to share a facebook post about "If the 1 percent gave up only 0.4 percent of their wealth we'd all be rich!" well how about the other 99% give up just 0.00001% of their wealth? It would help people a lot as well.
Am I the only one noticing the stylistic similarity in the posts made by Eboue and Silva? Not only do they share the same ideology, but also the same hatred of capital letters!
I don't have a problem with the essence of banking and finance. I have a problem with Dick Fuld receiving hundreds of millions in compensation through salary, bonuses and stocks.
I also have a problem with CEO-to-worker pay ratio increasing drastically in the past decades.
I also have a problem with CEO-to-worker pay ratio increasing drastically in the past decades.
Ah another corporate buzzterm, gosh it'd be terrible to see them at a global disadvantage. Much better to continue allowing them to feck over your own citizens.
I'm referring to posts like this.
The other 99% can raise 32 244 3000 if they donate just 1 dollar. That's 32 million. People bitch about the rich but we're all the fecking same.
They’re against capitalism.
This type "oh so you want communism then?" argument is so VIOLENTLY American. Capitalism, the unregulated version of it, is seemingly fetishised to a thoroughly unhealthy degree over there, based on their attitudes in arguments like this. Anyone who even implies that a single person accumulating the GDP of a medium-sized country might not be such a great thing after all is immediately shouted down with references to Stalin and Mao.