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So be it. You hate poor people and minorities. Business as usual with authoritarian "free-market" fundamentalists. Now we're even.
Wow. Very typical. You didn't come out and say the word "racist". close enough. Of course, that is the only thing you guys have. Don't agree? Use the race card. Sweet.
Oh, and this free market you lefties hate has created the most successful civilization in the history of the world. The liberal policies are doing their best to screw it up though. Kudos for that.
One accumulates wealth by not spending every penny you make. Watch those around you who party every weekend and those who spend time in libraries and parks and volunteering. Their bank accounts will show it.
Wow. Very typical. You didn't come out and say the word "racist". close enough. Of course, that is the only thing you guys have. Don't agree? Use the race card. Sweet.
Oh, and this free market you lefties hate has created the most successful civilization in the history of the world. The liberal policies are doing their best to screw it up though. Kudos for that.
The thing is lots of minorities and new immigrants are thriving. Many who come from humble backgrounds succeed more than native-born middle class Americans. It says what privilege does to people and what hardwork does to people. Liberal whites are throwing themselves to the side.
The irony of your "takers vs. makers" argument is that as much as the producers look down on the so-called "takers," without those worthless parasites spending money and buying their products and making the CEOs and shareholders profits, there would be no reason to produce anything.
Exactly. You outsmart yourself. That's why businesses count on the labor and consumer markets of emerging economies like China and India. In the past, we made things there and sold/consumed them in the U.S. Now, we actually sell more in China and India, which makes all the more sense to place things over there. Little by little, the workers in China are becoming middle class. They already buy more cars than Americans, which says the importance of China over the U.S.
So, don't worry about no one buying things. There has never been a greater reason to produce things. There are actually more consumers globally. This is why a lot of businesses are looking for top notch engineers to design the next generation of products. The potential is enormous.
Wow. Very typical. You didn't come out and say the word "racist". close enough. Of course, that is the only thing you guys have. Don't agree? Use the race card. Sweet.
Oh, and this free market you lefties hate has created the most successful civilization in the history of the world. The liberal policies are doing their best to screw it up though. Kudos for that.
You used dog whistle phrases such as "ghetto baby mommas" and "dregs of society."
Typical conservative tactic; use loaded phrases to mask thinly veiled prejudices against certain groups and then act indignant and accuse others of pulling the "race card" and "class envy" when someone exposes said bigotry and classism.
Oh yeah liberal boogeyman are totally the bane of this civilization.....never mind that it was unfettered free markets that collapsed our country not once, but twice (2008 Financial Crisis and Great Depression ring a bell?). In both instances it took massive government spending (New Deal, World War II, and the recent emergency bailouts) to save capitalism from destroying itself.
But don't let history get in the way of your so-called facts.
Here is a good summation of the top .5% by an investment manager.
Getting a good education, working hard, and saving money from income is not going to get you to the top where these guys are.
Membership in this elite group is likely to come from being involved in some aspect of the financial services or banking industry, real estate development involved with those industries, or government contracting. Some hard working and clever physicians and attorneys can acquire as much as $15M-$20M before retirement but they are rare.They are much more likely to have built their net worth from stock options and capital gains in stocks and real estate and private business sales, not from income which is taxed at a much higher rate. These opportunities are largely unavailable to the bottom 99.5%.
The picture is clear; entry into the top 0.5% and, particularly, the top 0.1% is usually the result of some association with the financial industry and its creations. I find it questionable as to whether the majority in this group actually adds value or simply diverts value from the US economy and business into its pockets and the pockets of the uber-wealthy who hire them. They are, of course, doing nothing illegal.
I think it's important to emphasize one of the dangers of wealth concentration: irresponsibility about the wider economic consequences of their actions by those at the top. Wall Street created the investment products that produced gross economic imbalances and the 2008 credit crisis. It wasn't the hard-working 99.5%.
Average people could only destroy themselves financially, not the economic system. There's plenty of blame to go around, but the collapse was primarily due to the failure of complex mortgage derivatives, CDS credit swaps, cheap Fed money, lax regulation, compromised ratings agencies, government involvement in the mortgage market, the end of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, and insufficient bank capital. Only Wall Street could put the economy at risk and it had an excellent reason to do so: profit.
It made huge profits in the build-up to the credit crisis and huge profits when it sold itself as "too big to fail" and received massive government and Federal Reserve bailouts. Most of the serious economic damage the U.S. is struggling with today was done by the top 0.1% and they benefited greatly from it.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: A highly complex set of laws and exemptions from laws and taxes has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth.
Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.
They did not get there via a "Free Market" either, but by cozying up to politicians to tailor the markets to their whims.
Having worked for several successful small business owners, I agree this applies to them, especially if we define "success" as people who net between $250-750K after taxes, deductions, and expenses. It is not necessarily applicable to families who have generations of super-wealthy people like the Hiltons, Rockerfellers, and Rothschilds. The first family patriarch may well have employed those qualities to grow their fortunes but their heirs in subsequent generations may not have. That's worth checking out to see where the wealth goes, how it grows, and why.
Exactly.. the Millionaire Next-Door types, who are the vast majority of the top 1%.. and some of remaining minority are the old money elites as you've mentioned.
Excellent link, but its wisdom will be lost upon the freepers of C-D whose veneration of the super wealthy inversely increases the farther they become distant specks in the rear-view mirrors of those they idolize.
Quote:
Originally Posted by J746NEW
For those that have not read it yet:
Here is a good summation of the top .5% by an investment manager.
Getting a good education, working hard, and saving money from income is not going to get you to the top where these guys are.
With all due respect to the labor and ingenuity of the persons cited in the quoted post, these are not wealthy people. They are not corporate raiders, masters of quantitative finance, tech billionaires. The behaviors described in the quoted post are those of middle-class people who persevere (despite occasionally making unwise life-choices) and who attain a solidly successful outcome. But they're far from the genuine elite. For example, the genuine elite would not themselves flip individual houses. They would be partners in a discrete enterprise that owns or otherwise controls vast real estate holdings, from millions of rural acres to some of the toniest skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan, or Hong Kong, or Tokyo. They would neither know, nor care, which house or condo or rental-unit produces what income, or sells for what price; this is all handled by armies of intermediaries.
Well, if you're comparing them to Bill Gates & Oprah, perhaps so. Perhaps I didn't state their current wealth strongly enough & focused more on their beginnings. Middle class? None of them. All, save the 1 who was recently bankrupted in his never ending divorce (of hundreds of millions) make many millions per yr, two of them being part owners in companies with household names. Do they own skyscrapers, not to my knowledge... but 2 of them own all the bldgs in the blocks around them. If that's not tony enough for you, so be it. They have more 0's in their passbooks than you or I will ever see.
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