Quote:
Originally Posted by bmw335xi
So far I haven't met a single Bernie Sanders supporter who is doing well. From the conversations I've had with them, they tend to be completely clueless about how to build wealth or how the economy works.
For example, I just had a conversation yesterday with a Bernie Sanders supporter who was talking about how Wall Street needs to be taken down. I told him I started with very little in the stock market and have been growing my account very nicely. Literally every person I know who had a nice retirement got it from the stock market using strategies any person can use. You can buy a balanced mutual fund with some stocks and bonds and add to it each year whatever you can whether it is $1,000 or $10,000. Your investment will compound year after year and within 30 years, you're looking at a huge retirement. However, the guy I was speaking with said, he would never invest anything in the market whether it's bonds, mutual funds, stocks, even if he was offered a 401k. Someone like this will never be able to build a nice retirement and it isn't the system's fault, it's his own stubbornness and lack of knowledge.
Seriously, are all Sanders supporters like this?
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Of course not. There is a wide spectrum of wealth in the 99% who are not the top 1% of the wealthy.
The question should be: What is the minimum amount needed to be in the top 1%? According to this:
The top 1% and what they pay - Apr. 4, 2014
the minimum threshold is $389,000 as of 2011. In 2007, the threshold was much higher: $426,429. The threshold goes up and down from year to year.
But that's all taxable income. The effective tax rate on the 1% was 23.5%. That has gone down since 2001, when they paid 27%. Taxable income can vary greatly when money goes into non-taxable investments and other places, and there are many ways to non-taxable avenues.
That means a person who makes $375,000 is part of the 99%. Or a person who makes $200,000, or $175,000, or $95,000. Or less. You can bet they all want to keep more of their money, and there are more of them than those in the top 1%.
The tax picture doesn't show anything much of a person's net worth. Just ask any farmer about that. A farmer can be making only $25,000 or less in net profit, and be farming on land that's worth $2 million, with another million invested in equipment.
Any crop can deliver very high profits at any time, depending on what's going on all over the world in food supply, but unless those prices stay high long enough to deliver a dependable return, a few mistakes can make even an expert farmer broke in short order. Prices have to stay high for 3-4 years at a minimum to make farming profitable enough to stay in it.
So a farmer may be in the 35% tax bracket, and pay his taxes out of a very small net income. And even more, once the state and local property taxes are included in the total tax burden. A farm may be worth millions on paper, but in life, that's often not the case.
Bernie is taking aim at the big financial institutions because they are the only ones that have been untouchable. They are the only part of the top 1% that is.
Most of the folks in the top 1% fall into 5 occupations: executives in non-financial companies, financial professionals, doctors, lawyers, and a lumped group of technical professionals (engineers, mathematicians, computer and tech professionals). Their average age is 45.
Most of the top 1%ers get their money from a windfall of some kind, and don't stay in that bracket very long. The group I mentioned above is the top .01% of the 1%. They are the only ones who make a lot and keep it consistently. All the others fall out and in to the bracket for many reasons.
The 1% do pay a bigger share of their income than the rest of us- about 35%- but only the top .01% consistently do not, and they are the ones who stay in the bracket. All the rest of the 99.9% of the top 1% stay in that bracket for 18 months to 3 years before they fall out of it.
Why go after the big banks and stock brokerages? Because they can make very risky investments that are so big they affect all of us, and when the investments fail, they fail so hugely that everyone goes broke and a recession sets in. The only way to keep the economy from bottoming out and staying there is for the government to bail them out. When the financial professionals fail, they drag everyone else down, including those in the 1%, but only they are able to escape the consequences of their failure.
That's why financial regulation exists. With no regulation, taking stupidly foolish, greedy risks has no penalty if they fail. The ones most responsible for the failure never go to prison, even though their actions result in death, destruction, and mass poverty that may not be temporary. The United States once had sound and reasonable regulation, but all those laws were chipped away steadily until they no longer exist.
And that's why a lot of wealthy people will vote for Bernie Sanders. Along with everyone else in every income level. The wealthy want to keep their money just as much as the poor want to keep theirs. Without regulation, every worker, no matter how hard he works, has no assurance he will be able to steadily prosper over the course of a lifetime.
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