I do not know what the result of taking 20% of their wealth would be, other than that it would make little difference to the poor and would have some incremental negative effects on economic growth.

You don't seem to understand the rich aren't large consumers of output for personal use (in the grand scheme of things), and taking from the rich will achieve nothing. The poor consume nearly everything that's made - 95% of food, experiences, clothing, cars, travel, housing, lumber, minerals, etc are consumed by the poor. They're already maxing out what they can get. You seem not to understand this.

The rich are by and large rich because they are maintainers of capital, and are actually using that capital intelligently and efficiently to create those goods that the poor consume. They're very hardworking. Sure you can redistribute some of that capital, but you're not changing anything then. There's still the same amount and quality of food, lumber, minerals, housing travel, experiences, cars, clothing etc available that the world can produce per year. That's limited by physics and human skill and human work effort. All you can achieve by transferring more to the poor is juicing the output for a while, consuming your future investments in productive capital for selfish use now. That leads to worse outcomes for the poor in the long run.

Let me do it as an equation:

Global output available for the poor =
(1) The intelligent focused efficiency of current production * hours worked at that labor MINUS
(2) The output lost to investment in future capital (since you can't consume what you're building for the future - research and machinery)

If you take from the rich, you don't change (1). You can't change (1) by plundering the rich since the very rich consume personally maybe 5% of of output.

So what do you change when you take capital from the rich? The only thing you can change is the allocation of resources from future production, and move them to current consumption (since the poor consume all the resources they're given, else why give them money if they're not basic-resource poor?)

This equation is a slow growing exponential over time, where (2) drives increases in (1) year over year. And it's not easy to increase (1); only intelligent people working their ass off taking focused risks can move (1) higher.

And by the way - by far the easiest way to increase output for the poor is for the masses to work more. The able bodied poor work less than half the weekly hours of the top 10% richest. It directly plugs into the equation. Only about half of the able bodied, able minded, appropriately aged people in the US are working.
Right but it's not about consumption since the rich don't consume much of their wealth as you note (which is also one part of why they're rich). High wealth represents control of productive assets, and who better in the world to control productive assets at scale than the people who built those assets from scratch and have proven - in the real world! - that they can build and maintain these wealth generation engines? Seriously I'm curious - who else?

And a point beyond all that is there are plenty of other considerations. For example:

1. Even if you're correct and anyone could do it starting from scratch, the high-scale decades long training they've received in wealth generation and efficiency is not easily replacable. I am certain that if I gave you (or me, or bureacrats) SpaceX to run, I would not do anywhere near the job that SpaceX's founders can do. Who better to control the capital of SpaceX than the guys who built up that wealth creation engine from scratch and know it intimately? There's no other mind more precisely trained for efficiently allocating capital. You want to take it off them and give more to...you? Poor people? Bureaucrats? What do you think will come of that: more or less efficient wealth creation? Bear in mind when you answer that economy only grows 3% per year; growth is a fragile thing won with thin edges and requiring high talent.

2. The vast accumulation of wealth creates decentralized possibilities for investment and risk taking (aren't you a bitcoin guy?) on how that wealth is spent. This is an incredibly good thing. The unfair accumulation of wealth may even be the source of most human progress.

For example, if Musk didn't have $60 million illegitimate (according to you) capitalist dollars, he could not have started SpaceX; it was a crazy gamble and there were existing entrenched systems and players. Without Musk's wealth, from where does the creative shake up of the system come from? We would be stuck with a lot less than SpaceX in that case.

As another example, if Bill Gates didn't have $50 billion (illegitimate according to you) in accumulated personal wealth, he couldn't have started Africa's most effective disease eradication and nutrition program; he is succeeding where governments and well meaning but stupid/worthless/inefficient NGOs have utterly failed.

If Oprah didn't have billions amassed through illegitimate (according to you) capitalist wealth accumulation, she couldn't have started her wellness and positivity network for women.

If there wasn't accumulation of wealth in capitalist Europe, the wealthy merchant oligopoly of Venice would not have been possible, which breathed life into European architecture and art and high culture, and laid the later foundations of the industrial revolution.

If there wasn't accumulation of wealth in aristocratic Europe, science and philosophy would not have advanced; scientists required wealthy patrons for their incredibly time consuming and expensive educations and investigations; the poor populace certainty weren't going to donate for that, and if you took the wealth of the rich and gave it all to the poor, the poor would still be desperately poor.

The Green Revolution which improved crop yields and lifted a billion people out of food insecurity was done as a charity exercise arising from the extensive wealth of the Rockefellers and the Ford Foundation. Where government had failed, vast private wealth got it done, because they're intelligent allocators and far more capable than governments or NGOs. Who better to have power over as much capital as possible than the organically chosen accumulators of capital, who accumulated capital mostly by more efficiently than anyone else turning raw resources into satisfied human wants?

You're just wrong on so many levels with all this stuff. It is incredibly good for the poor for the rich to accumulate wealth. It is in fact their only path out of poverty; plundering the rich won't help a bit. The only people who have consumable output worth plundering at enough scale to help the poor are the middle and lower middle class; they need to give more of their share of the output (and lower their quality of life) to get there. Plundering the rich won't help at all as the rich have no appreciable consumption they can give up relative to the masses. You're looking in the wrong place if you want to help the poor.

^^^absolute god tier ownage!!!!

fyp

Bahbah loves to bring up Walmart, but never mentions their labor is subsidized by gov't. Others love to mention the rich pay for everything, but ignore the fact that they're supposed to pay for everything in a progressive tax code within a economy that produces the greatest return on human capital in history

I agree with a lot of what they're saying. That's not the problem. The problem is there is more to it than that

The US is a powerful economic engine. Bahbah is right, greed really has done wonders for us all...Where he is wrong is acting like the concept is the be all and end all in terms of governance and even the very economy it fuels

The US is not a small cap anymore. It's a mega cap. I get and even agree with the concepts continually repeated ad nauseam on these boards, but endless growth and the harvesting of it is not always optimal. It can lead to revolt and suboptimal returns...Or Texas' energy catastrophe, which was wholly avoidable and not at some unacceptable loss for efficiency and profit

That's a lot of words to say nothing at all of substance, TeflonDawg.

Is it your opinion that there isn't a tradeoff between growth and poor person consumption? We can just give the poor more and only the rich lose?

Do you disagree with my contention that the rich don't personally consume enough to be worth raiding; that the only thing you can do to increase the consumption of the poor is to take it from the middle classes?

People are acting like there's a free lunch here where the able bodied poor have rights to consume even more than they already do while being lazy and unproductive and we can just take it from the rich (or soar debt) without changing anything. It just doesn't work like that when you look at consumption patterns.

The wealth gap is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism

But if you don't have upward mobility, nor a stable middle class, then you absolutely should care about that gap

It isn't so much that the floor is rising and life is better for all now than ever before, it's that social media has shined a light on the fact that people still get left behind and it isn't always on merit as much as someone like ToothSayer wants to remind us. We have holes in places where there very clearly do not have to be holes, especially considering the obscene wealth we now create for others

My problem with all this isn't the obscene wealth. It's the notion that we are properly balanced here in the US (we are so very clearly not) and the concern that collapse and revolt really are within realms of possibility if people are just going to continue to act like it's a simple, trivial matter of not being lazy. That's a half-truth

I'm saying you say things like bolded and that is not always the right way to frame things

You can invest in the poor and it can be worth more to invest in them than in the rich. You didn't even answer my question about social security in my earlier post. Social security eliminated elderly poverty by something like 50% in the US, almost immediately. Is that too much of "theft of the rich" and drain on efficiency to be desired in governing a nation?

Not everything is left wing authoritarianism

I would not disagree with any of this. I would add as regards to the bolded - The concern (by some) is severely overblown. While there may be a possibility of collapse and revolt, it is currently so minuscule as to be negligible.

See you're not really saying anything here. This is why it's hard to engage with you - this is all weasel worded nonsense with no content. Here you say "that's not the way to frame things" but then you go on to engage it:

Worth more in what sense? This is a meaningless sentence. Worth more economically (all of society does better?) Worth more morally? The desirability of everyone being comfortable I don't think we disagree on, I'm trying to do a cost/benefit analysis (since that's the thing you and others are avoiding), and you're sliding past it.

It is it your contention that taking consumption from the middle class (since no one else has enough consumption to take; the rich certainly don't) and giving more to the poor will improve the economy?
It's one we've decided to take. And it has consequences: debt and lower growth. Part of the reason Japan stopped growing and had endless deflation and is declining as a society is because their corporations are hugely society minded to the point of extreme inefficiency.

We're fine with those consequences. But let's not pretend it doesn't have consequences: The US is >100% of GDP indebted entirely from medicare, welfare and war misadventures (but mostly medicare/welfare). The US wants its cake (subsidize the lazy and incompetent beyond which the economy can sustain) and eat it too, and the bill is coming due. The current levels of work done by the poor are unsustainable; increasing welfare and redistribution to the poor from the already extreme unsustainable generosity only takes it in a worse direction, no? On what basis do you justify it? If there was a budget surplus rather than trillions in deficit and $30 trillion in debt, you might have an argument for "hey, let's spend more on the poor".

The lot of the poor is ultimately improved only by increased economic activity - more entrepreneurial activity, more work hours done by poor people. Nothing else can sustainably improve it.
We're not saying it is. That's just one aspect of the analysis - the one you refuse to be drawn on is the cost/benefit analysis. Your post is just a muddle of wishful thinking, typical of the decline phase of rich societies.

I agree that the wealth gap is a great feature in any economy and without a wealth gap an economy is doomed. Upward mobility and a stable middle class is also very important and I think the US has both.

The possibility of a collapse, while a possibility in any economy, is far less likely the freer it is so I would say the US economy is one of the least likely economies to face a real collapse. The closest the US has come to serious collapse was 2008 which as most economists not paid by the government will tell you was due (at least in part) because of bad federal policy passed under Clinton which disrupted the free economy and poor solutions under Bush then Obama.

It is also possible that people start a revolt to turn the economy upside down, but it would have to be lead by a very well organized group that is very convincing and that is willing to lie and mislead their followers similar to what occupy wall street and the riots of 2020 did. However, where they failed is that they need 80+% of traditional media outlets to get on board. This would be extremely difficult to do because you almost have to market the group as a grassroots campaign with no corporate backing, but you need an immense amount of corporate backing from at least the media.

The odds of a complete collapse or a revolt are so small I don't think they are worth the time I already spent on my above thoughts.

If you're strictly talking cost/benefit, then sure there's nothing wrong there, but you refer to people as worthless scum and that implies morality. You can't just **** on people for being inefficient when the very nature of efficiency leads to segments of a population stuck in a mode of inefficiency and act like you're doing a cost/benefit analysis...The very arguments you make are what created the people you insult in the same breath. That's a bit of what I mean by "how you frame things"

Specifically, "worth more" is a bit like saying if we invest in infrastructure, then we are investing in the stability of the economy which subsequently helps the poor and middle class in terms of jobs and access to public goods...One can argue it's worth more in morality, cost/benefit, whatever, I don't think it should be that hard to figure out on your own what it means

But your response, and others, almost unequivocally, is we're taking money out of the hands of the rich and giving it to the poor and that is just bad. And then you start talking about Mao ruining China. C'mon man. I'm all for noting slippery slopes and deeply flawed thought, but you act like things are cut and dry too often despite your often-nuanced posts

Of course SS has a tradeoff. Everything has a tradeoff

My question to you is is it worth it? Because these gov't spending programs may lead to lower economic output, but would you rather have higher output and more poverty and dead...I guess I couldn't say retirees if SS isn't present. They'd have to keep working

Again, the thing about economic productivity being the be all and end all...

Your cost/benefit analysis is incomplete. I mean the trajectory of the US is a shrinking middle class. They're moving out of it and into poverty or wealth (and I believe it's more wealth than poverty, so yeah, as I've implied before that's a good thing). But you ignore that wholly in almost every post you made on the subject. Social cohesion kind of matters...

I also asked you how you felt about the infrastructure bill itself. As far as I can see, you don't want it at all based on your opinion of the OP and the rich/poor dynamic itself. Well, at what point should we address it? I'm all for economic productivity, but what's the productivity of all who depend on the Walt Whitman Bridge after it collapses? How about the productivity of dead people?

In simple, broad terms, the way you're "framing it" is like saying being the dude in the gym who doesn't do legs ever is better than the dude who does legs along w everything else. Even worse, you act like the dude who does legs and everything else is only doing legs and is too stupid to understand what a quality workout is...

The middle class has been shrinking

Upward mobility exists, sure, but there are some glaring problems that need to be addressed

Purchasing power and stagnant wages are not exactly positively conducive to the wealth gap, even if the organic nature of its widening through meritocracy is a good thing

It's leading to a distorted economy and clear divisiveness and that is not good for anyone. Trump just spent 4 years totally enamored with the stock market, meanwhile half the country owns no stock, and much of those who do own a paltry, meaningless amount. It's problem

I don't think we are as stable as we like to pretend we are

I'm not exactly worried about a revolt either, but when you have segments of the population largely ignored (and even directly insulted like the way TS does it), people begin to lose charitability, decorum, and restraint. In case you didn't notice, CHAZ happened. The LA riots only happened in LA. The Ferguson riots happened in multiple cities. The Floyd/Arbery/Taylor killings + covid led to nationwide riots and protest even globally. Politicians are now being targeted (Giffords, Scalese, those who were in the Capitol)...

It is not inconceivable that in ten years people are so fed up they just start Google Street Viewing wealthy enclaves and storming them. OWS may have been a joke, CHAZ a joke, but CHAZ in multiple cities? Murder of politicians not being taken seriously? I'm not trying to go full Shuffle mode here, just saying I don't think it's quite just negligible

Yes, the middle class is shrinking! I know most people hear this and assume it is because people are falling below the middle class, but that just isn't the case. The reason the middle class is shrinking is because of the enormous upward mobility we have seen over the last 50 years.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/yes-t...afford-a-home/

https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-cla...-become-richer

For more info on why the median income sometimes goes down and why that doesn't always mean what you think it does you may want to read this: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-e...131-story.html

How do you know purchasing power being reduced or flat & stagnant wages are more of product of trying to reduce wealth inequality than the free market?

Why are you blaming trump for some of the poor and middle class not investing in the stock market? I think you need to bash the social security administration and all those government agencies that encourage the poor and middle class to dump a bunch of money in real estate instead of the stock market.

Again, most of the riots/protests you mention are based off of lies. At some point you run out of stupid/uninformed people to convince to riot/protest.

It’s true upward mobility for all but the bottom quintile has increased (stayed steady at least) in the past few decades. But bottom quintile has been stuck.

What I don’t get in all of this is , don’t give more money to the poor because they will spend it .

Yes right but because they are poor they spend it on necessity goods , which should give better profits for corporations .
Where is the waste in that ?
It is productive right since the needs of higher production is there ...

Give more money to multi millionaires or w.e , they just props up prices on houses and financial assets , what necessity production is created in that ?

Lower to 0% taxes for corporations .
Ok put it at 0 % , someone going to pay right ?
Who’s going to pay it , consumers that will pay more taxes instead of buying goods ?

Ultimately, mis allocation of capital will happens because not enough money at the bottom will exist to continuously buy goods and services , it will all be hoarded at the top , sleeping in inflated asset prices , offshore account ,etc. doing nothing else .

And what happens then , not enough money in the hands of consumers , hence prices start to fall , corporations benefits falls , deflation comes , etc ...

Obv. Contrary to a lot of views here , I’m not advocating a 100 % one or the other solution , just saying There is a balance that is needed to make the system works .

So I don’t believe in absolute to have an efficient system in economic .

I mean aren’t we on a poker site ?
Isn’t it be proven by GTO strategy that pure strategies ( like never bluff ) aren’t working and so shouldn’t either in economics like 0% taxes , 0% regulations, etc.?

Didace:

You really believe the concern over the possibility of collapse and revolt is severely overblown?

Answer this question: Where do you think we would be right now if all those pinheads that stormed the Capitol on January 6th had actually succeeded in killing Nancy Pelosi, AOC and "hanging" Mike Pence? Once they got the taste of blood, do you think they would have been satisfied stopping there?

The one thing, the only thing, Marx and Engle were right about is the importance of a strong (thriving) middle class in a capitalist society. The real danger of this "wealth gap" is the pressure it's putting on the [shrinking] middle class. When we reach the point where there are only two classes, (i.e. the very rich and the very poor), the next set of pinheads storming the Capitol will succeed and take over. Once they seize power, the rich may find themselves with a greater worry than "... high taxes and excessive Government regulation."

Which of course does NOT mean that people in the bottom quintile are making the same amount they made 10 years ago - just that when someone on the bottom rung at a company climbs up the ladder someone else replaces them. One of the articles I posted earlier today ITT mentions this.

It is also important to point out you/we are just taking a look at the salary and not necessarily their total compensation package.

montreal, you are all over the damn place with your last post that it is hard to follow.

Think about your theory that taking money away from the rich to give to the poor is good for an economy. Why would taking money out of the hands of some of the smartest and hardest working people who got rich by making a product/service that makes millions of peoples' lives better a good thing?

Yes, poor people tend to spend a higher % of the money they earn or are given than the % the rich earns, but what do the rich tend to do with that extra money they aren't spending? They aren't digging a hole and burying it in the backyard. They are hiring another employee, buying another business, building a factory, buying a yacht, giving it to charity, leaving money in their bank account that the bank then uses to loan to someone buying a house/car/starting business and 100s of other things that are almost all good for the economy.

+1
I think it’s dead right .

What prevent extreme to take over ?
The existence of a middle ground right ?

Look at politics how crazy in can get when no centrist view can be said , centrist being condemn by both nut cases on the extreme left and extreme right without any sense of reasons ?

Same $hit in social economic class obviously.....

Yes, it is overblown. If the clowns on Jan 6 would have actually done anything close to what you suggest could happen, the hammer would have dropped very hard.

Do you really think those clowns were representative of more than an extremely small percentage of the populace?

1st paragraph :
I believe in the increase of “concentration of wealth effect “ in a capitalist economy .
Do you ?

Now , why you think taking some amount of money from rich to the poor , you think that money wouldn’t return anyway in the pocket of the rich overtime ?
It is the natural flow of money climbing to the top, is it not ?

Me i believe a productive dollar is a dollar that moves around ( called velocity of money) , being used from consumers to providers than provider to consumer multiple times ( so money at the bottom of earner climbing the chain of production multiple times through middle class ) until it reaches the bank account of a billionaires.

https://www.thebalance.com/velocity-of-money-3306130


So when you imply ( I think) , that taking money from the rich to the poor is not productive, I don’t know what you mean , poor people spend it on essential needs , giving it right back to the economy ( increasing production with higher demands) ending up in billionaires banks over time .

The alternative is , money not moving , stuck in gold bar , offshore account , inflated assets prices like stocks or houses which produce what exactly ?
What production does a house of 500k going up to 1 millions does exactly ?
It just cost more money .

Wasn’t the 2008 house bubble burst because it wasn’t producing any value to sustain those prices.
Money by itself do not produce anything if it just produce more paper money .
Kinda like 1989 Japan ...

From the link I post above about velocity of money :

. “It also shows how the expansion of the money supply has not been driving growth. That's one reason there has been little inflation in the price of goods and services. Instead, the money has gone into investments, creating asset bubbles.”

For me bubbles means mis allocation of capital ...

Production of goods and services are the key imho .
Hence money injecting at the bottom (poorest ) spends money for essentials , meaning more productions of goods and services are needed , that is true creation and production value !

Obviously there is limit and diminishing return law here that are in effect where return of investment would shrink if abused ( example try to give money to the poor so they become rich won’t work ) , like any other economic factors like the abuse of debts for example .
Little debts is fine , huge debt is bad ~> diminishing returns .

That is how I see it anyway .
What do I see from your POV ?
Simple , since 1980 , taxes gets lower and lower for the top 1% and corporations , 40 years right ?

If you what you say it’s true and it works great for a productive economy , why the results are :
Debts keep climbing up .
Gdp keep going down
Interest rates keep going down
Wealth gap keep increasing .
Velocity of money keep going down
40 years ago 1 member family was enough to provide his family , now it takes 2.
Education and health care cost getting too expensive for middle class .
Pension funds are starting to crumble ( low interest rates).

Know before going to paragraph 2 , if we can’t understand each other on that , paragraph 2 is not important ....

Now I might be wrong it’s true , im not here to win an argument , I’m just saying what data and facts I see which seem to indicate the US economy isn’t going in the right direction , meaning upward .

Didace:

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85dPyF-Wxh8

to see what a really small percentage of the populace is capable of.

I was unaware we were living in 1934 Germany. My mistake.

People who genuinely believe the poor have the power to seize the rich beyond a small few are living an exceptional delusion.

You're really confused about how economies work. I think you're getting confused by money instead of focusing on fundamentals. Consumption is a losing activity. Let me break it down a little.

In your economy, you have a choice for how to target your available time, resources and skill. You have three options and no others:

1. Create goods and services for consumption
2. Invest in capital efficiency improvements (STEM education, research)
3. Invest in future production capacity without capital efficiency improvements.

That's it. You have to choose between them.

If you increase (1), you decrease (2) and (3), which harms future output. It really is that simple. Every extra Nike shoe created because of stimulus checks is that amount of materials and human time spent on consumption rather than (2) or (3). It is a net loss to (2) and (3).

There are other complexities at the time of recession and risk/confidence levels, but this is the first order baseline reality of everything - and not just economies. Your personal life and finances as well.

There are only three ways to help the poor:

a) Increase economic output by reducing spending on future capital, OR
b) Take consumption from a richer group and give that consumption to the poorer group.
c) Change the behavior of the poor - encourage them to work or work more, encourage them to have less wasteful or destructive spending such that they can either generate more resources under their own steam, or meet their needs and wants better with fewer resources.

That's it. There are no other ways. The rich as a group consume very little of the total pie, so the only people who have output available under (b) to plunder at a scale sufficient to improve the consumption of the poor are the middle class.

Money obscures all this, and idiots get confused to the point where "take from the rich!" becomes a narrative. But the rich consume almost no economic output for themselves. That's what people don't understand. What their money represents is the power to direct how capital is deployed. The money you take from them, if you plundered the rich and gave it to the poor, doesn't increase economic output and it does no one any good since it doesn't increase output. What it does do is give the poor more buying power for the current economic output, and since the output they're competing for is mostly consumed by the middle class, taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor effectively plunders the middle class.

And to the extent it increases output, it increases output at the expense of (2) and (3). For the simple reason that there's a finite amount of available economic output that has to be split between 1, 2, and 3.

Which is a ok thing if that's what you want to do and it fits with your morality, but you're not actually taking from the rich and you're making the future worse by doing it. Plundering the rich is in effect taking from your future and the middle class. Which is why it's been a disaster everywhere they've tried it.