I don't believe economics is as complex as the wealthy, the media, the politicians and world leaders would like us to believe.

When we transfer money from the rich to the "lower classes" (eg via tax changes) they generally spend a large proportion of it locally, boosting their local economies, creating jobs and keeping businesses running. This has the additional bonus of boosting the quality of life of the lower classes.

When we transfer money from the lower classes to the rich, the rich consistently try to get as much of it into their own pockets as possible, finding various ways to avoid paying taxes such as storing it in foreign tax havens. They also spend a large proportion of it on luxuries abroad and invest it in multi-national corporations which contribute very little, if anything to the local economies that the money was taken out of. As this is money that has been directly taken out of the local and national economies, this can only have a detrimental effect on said economies.

What has happened around the world is that the rich have accumulated a massive proportion of the wealth. This wealth is being traded back and forth between themselves while tax breaks allow them to keep the vast majority of this wealth without having to put anything back into the economies they took it out of resulting in the poor ending up with very little to spend. The knock on effect of this is that local economies are starved of the cash needed to sustain themselves and so businesses fail, people lose their jobs, worker salaries freeze or fall while the cost of living rises, trade ceases, the media and politicians call for austerity and the people become poor while only the very richest get a bigger slice of the pie.

The problem the worlds economies have is that the ultra-rich (eg Koch brothers, Murdoch's etc) own the media, they own the businesses, they own the politicians, they own the worlds leaders and they own you.

I'm not a socialist, I agree with rewarding success with more wealth, I just believe that anybody who becomes (or is born) rich enough that they take a large amount out of any economy for themselves should have to put a fair proportion of that money back into whatever economy they extracted it from. With all the tax breaks that the rich have around the world at the moment, that isn't happening and it's causing the collapse of the worlds economies that we are witnessing.

ok, Im still an econ newb, esp as far as macro is concerned, since most of what I read is public choice/behavioral econ and Im tired, but.....

You really sound like one, mainly because you don't understand that the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed. Wealth is created by people in order to be able to profit from it.

Do you think Steve Jobs should have paid more taxes to "compensate for his profit"? He created an incredible amount of wealth. Same goes for lots of people that might not risked their capital if your socialist ideas were in place, having a poorer world as a result.

Your first sentence is correct, economics is not that complex. Especially not as much as the wealthy, the media, the politicians and world leaders would like us to believe.

However, from that sentence on, you go on to propose precisely the views that the wealthy, the media, the politicians and world leaders want us to believe.

Multinational corporations greatly benefit the local economies. Many towns are nothing more than a gas station and a McDonalds, 2 mnc's.

It is not the greed of the rich, it is the greed of the government that is the problem. Government is always the problem. Who bailed out the banks? the government! Who backstops the fractional-reserve lending at banks? The government. Who allows the fed to print money and backtop the banks? The government. Who creates massives deficits and inflation? The government.

Who forces renters to pay for rich peoples homes? The government. Who allows doctors to charge $500 for an office visit raising the cost of health care? Medicare and the government.

Did the government bail out GM? No they gave them a tax cut.

It may take re-wiring of your brain, but when you realize this, you will see the whole picture. You can always change the channel from CNN.

The government takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

The rich are greedy but the poor are greedy too. 90% of the calls to tax the rich are not motivated by a genuine concern for the economy and equality backed up by critical thinking, they are motivated by GIMME GIMME GIMME! As long as that is the case, there can be no good solution to the problem. I don't think I mind that much if you tax the rich, but I don't think it will solve the problem either.

And like Krax said, don't forget that most of the money that the rich have, does not go into their personal consumption, otherwise they would stop being rich. Most of their wealth must be allocated into profitable investments, otherwise they would stop being rich. Allocating money into profitable investments is something that the society wants, and something that would happen to a lesser degree if huge amounts of money was taken from the rich and given to the poor. I would agree with taxing strictly the consumption of the rich, but hardly anyone gets the difference, which leads to things like the corporate income tax, which in the end is just a tax on the bulk of people.

Your "taken abroad" rhetoric seems iffy to me.

The rich have always been greedy and politicians have always been corrupt. I think what's causing the "collapse of world economies" is the aging of the population, something that has not happened to this degree ever before, and wich means that continuing economic growth and welfare at previous pace is just not possible. Yet, instead of accepting it and moving on, the electorate is voting for policies that try to prolong the delusion, meaning that the inevitable eventual collision with the good old rock hard truth will only be more painful.

Im just spitballing here

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It's not that easy. Of course there are plenty of horribly run businesses that abuse this lobby-capitalism to the fullest. Both deserve our disgust.

Silly overaggregation but it's a pretty odd thing:
Somehow "the left" tends to focus on the evil business side (while praising all of government) and "the right" tends to focus on the evil government (while praising all businesses)

I'm less likely to blame the beggar than the thug. But they do work hand in hand. Especially when everyone else is using that thug to their advantage and he will be at a disadvantage if he doesn't do the same. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

oh damn those bastards for preventing global ****ing apocalypse. - They want to you to believe the prevented apocalypse. The reality is they made a problem and fixed their own problem, setting up a bigger problem to fix in the future.

That is backed by any sensible economist. - at least Milton Friedman and Irving Fisher. Irving fisher wrote his last book on it. 100% money. Krugman is nothing more than a school teachers and government workers union lobbiest, no one even listens to him anymore.

http://fisher-100money.blogspot.fr/ - 100% money read the introduction. By requiring full-reserve checking all depressions and panics could have been eliminated. If you have a stock mutual fund and lose 50% of it, do you expect the government to pay your losses? Definitely not. When you put your money in a bank, it should be viewed as a mutual fund investment, if not you should have full reserve checking. Remove the link between JPM, GS, BAC and the government.

The government did not dsave anything. They took peoples that money that they earned digging ditches at $1 per hour and gave it to pay $50,000 salaries at GS.

you are arguing for limiting free politics market, and modelling new regime on your personal, uneducated, ideological beliefs, you're not arguing against franctional reserve banking.

A lot of it does get spent with these companies and this isn't a problem, the problem is that these large corporations avoid paying taxes back into the economy, instead the excess profits are siphoned off by the shareholders.

The economy often doesn't get anything in return other than a pie that some guy eats, if the companies were taxed adequately then the economy would get a slice of (the monetary value of) that pie back whether it was eaten or not.

Because everybody else gets poorer, so while the rich manage to maintain most of their wealth by not investing and hoarding cash which sucks the money out of the system, the poor can't earn a living and so although they don't necessarily have more money they do have a much bigger share of the wealth because they still have their cash while much of the population doesn't even have a job.

I'm not suggesting to give all the money to the poor, I'm suggesting that there's a healthy balance and that this balance has been thrown out because the rich (generally the investors) have taken too much and now the poor (generally the consumers) have too little. An extreme example of this happening recently was in Zimbabwe under Mugabe.


I don't think you fully understand how wealth creation works. Steve Jobs didn't create any wealth, he simply created products that people were prepared to exchange their wealth for. The banks create the wealth through fractional reserve banking (look it up) or quantitative easing (In essence, printing money).

I don't know how much tax Steve Jobs paid but if he paid as much as other people who earn that much did then he probably paid very little as a percentage of his total income, if he paid less than say ~40% of his total earnings in tax then yes, I think he should have contributed more. I don't think it's fair that those who take the most out of economies contribute less as a percentage of their income in taxes, do you?

The wealthy want us to believe that they should pay more in taxes?

Stupid ****

Yup. Most do anyway. Ever heard of Warren Buffet?

They don't actually want to pay more of course, if they did, they would just donate the money to the State. What they want is for others to pay more, while they don't. And to be perceived as generous and caring, when they're anything but.

When I pay for insurance on something and suffer a loss, sure as hell I expect to be compensated, as that's why I was paying for the insurance.

To get closer to your analogy, if I buy a put to lock in profit on a stock and the stock price falls, I certainly expect to be able to exercise the option.

This argument (the mercantilist doctrine) was thoroughly destroyed, like, 400 years ago.

Where were you indoctrinated to believe this stuff?

This seems pretty circular. You have to accumulate massive wealth in order to be "the rich" in the first place.

Ignoring that, its a statement based on a false premise. There is no "proportion" of wealth, as wealth is not some finite pie to be sliced up and divvied out.

At the roots, wealth is created through voluntary exchange. Your OP advocates for systemic involuntary exchange, and the unrelenting destruction of wealth.

You need to reevaluate what is causing the collapse of European economies.

A lot of the reason for people like Buffet is they can personally benefit greatly from the government and by taxing the other rich people, he knows he can benefit greatly from it.

Well of course, who doesn't? I want to rule the world.

The position "a group of people I belong to should be paying more" however, isn't invalidated by my refusal to pay more when no one else does. Just like refusing to unilaterally get rid of nukes doesn't mean you're against nuclear disarmament.

That's factually incorrect, albeit a very common misconception. There really is a finite amount of money in the world and no wealth is created through exchange. like I said in my previous post, people like Steve Jobs do not create wealth, they just create products that people are prepared to exchange their own wealth for. Steve Jobs never created a dime of wealth in his life, only the banks and governments can do that by essentially creating money out of nothing through methods such as fractional reserve banking and "quantatitive easing".


I think you've misunderstood my argument, I'm not advocating any kind of mercantilism, I'm just saying that those that take money out of an economy should put a fair share of the profits back into it. This is how it is supposed to work anyway, the only reason it doesn't work like this is because the rich have lobbied the governments into giving them all kinds of tax breaks which mean that they often end up paying nothing back in taxes. Everyone else has to pay their share of taxes except for the ultra rich who need the money the least. This is not how a healthy economy that is supposed to benefit the majority should work.
I wasn't really indoctrinated into any of it, I read the mainstream media from a young age and found that I disagreed with a lot of it so I looked into various different sources and came to a conclusion that made sense to me.

So if they don't want to pay more, why would they want everybody to believe that they should pay more?
Yep, I'm very familiar with Warren Buffet and the proposed Buffet rule that the rich and those in power have been avoiding like the plague.
Unfortunately Warren Buffet is the exception to the rule, there are other rich people that side with him on the matter but they are a small minority. The Buffet rule was named after him precisely because it's so rare for rich people to come out and admit "Actually yeah, we are paying far too little in taxes" The majority of wealthy people are happy with the tax breaks that they receive because it means that they can have more money and generally, the rich man's greed will overpower the rich man's conscience.
Your argument that the rich generally want us to believe that they should pay more taxes doesn't really make any sense when you think about it rationally.

If value isnt created through exchange, then why would exchange ever happen?

Taxes, wealth distribution, etc are political questions that involve tradeoffs but you are approaching them from a really flawed base of reasoning. Saying that wealth is created by governments and banks printing money is really, really wrong.

If you you pool alllll the money in the world together, you'd still only buy a tiny portion of the world's "wealth".

Just because you say that doesn't make it true.

To boil down how Jobs created wealth he simply took inanimate objects and turned them into this:


Each tiny transitor and piece of glass and computer chip, each less valuable than the sum of the parts, the iPhone itself.

That is what wealth is. Creating value (utility). Jobs created wealth. As did Gates, the Waltons, Dell, etc. Created something that was more valuable. That is how wealth is created.

Even simpler:
Granny knits you a green sweater.
This:

Into this:


Wealth has been created.

I basically agree with the op. can you spot my influences or determine my specific indoctrination?