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Old 02-21-2014, 09:05 PM
 
Location: The Land of Reason
13,221 posts, read 12,286,574 times
Reputation: 3554

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Quote:
Originally Posted by ringwise View Post
You apparently don't know much about Romney then. He didn't have access to a million at the start. He donated his inherited wealth and started on his own. Yes, he had the benefit of a good education and connections, but that may have happened regardless of his father's wealth.

I'm not downplaying Oprah's success, but we were discussing "hard work". There is no difference between becoming successful the way Romney did and Oprah. She didn't work any harder than he did.

Really? So you actually believ that Mitt worked harder for his wealth than Oprah? She started with absolutely NOTHING while Mitt contrary to what you believ had ahead start with daddy's money. If you really believe that he gave his money away and started from nothing I have some swamp land in Utah that I want to sell you.

Apparently you are the one that does not know your hero Mitt
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Old 02-26-2014, 06:34 PM
 
41,111 posts, read 25,632,392 times
Reputation: 13868
Quote:
Originally Posted by Huckleberry3911948 View Post
People into money would never never post longer opinion posts about how they plan to get rich during work hours on a work day
They would be working
These are the people that argue with you when you say how you did it
Most envy what I have
None what I had to do to get it

Quote:
Originally Posted by markg91359 View Post
I acknowledge that many people who are rich earned their money.

Nevertheless, what I wonder about you--having seen your posts--is do you think its beyond anyone's right to question how someone became wealthy?

You seem to feel it is wrong to even ask. I do not agree with that.

There are situations where it is done illegally and immorally. Are you capable of conceding that?
I do not think he questioned anyones right. And yes it is true that people will argue with the very people who they are asking how they got rich. I don't think they like the answer... that there is no magic. People usually give many excuses too.
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Old 02-26-2014, 06:38 PM
 
41,111 posts, read 25,632,392 times
Reputation: 13868
First you have to figure out how to make money, then you have to learn how to keep it.
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Old 02-27-2014, 05:37 AM
 
4,749 posts, read 4,308,763 times
Reputation: 4965
Quote:
Originally Posted by petch751 View Post
First you have to figure out how to make money, then you have to learn how to keep it.
Lol, well obviously. I know how to make money. I just don't know how to make a lot of it.
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Old 02-27-2014, 06:47 AM
 
1,488 posts, read 1,956,621 times
Reputation: 3249
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rambler123 View Post
2) Money makes money: The more you have, the easier it is to get more. Nothing good or evil about this - it is a simple fact.

3) Exploiting the law - technically it's legal: The rich have far more options to get huge amounts of money while paying low taxes than the rest of us. It's a dirty system, but since it's built by the rich, what can you expect?
Very true. The more money I have earned the more my options opened up in terms of how I can use all the excess income to make more money.

And there are literally thousands of legal loopholes you can exploit to make money. I have used a few that has no consequences on anyone else's lives. And the only reason they were even available or conceivable to be is because of where I was in terms of income. I can only imagine how far ahead someone can get if they were willing to use any and all of them without regard to other people's lives.

I'm not rich, not even close but higher up I get in the percentile ladder of income, the more blatantly I can see from those around me how its possible for an ethically corrupt man to get ahead using money.
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Old 02-27-2014, 06:49 AM
 
1,488 posts, read 1,956,621 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PhotoProIP View Post

If the masses would act like the French, and HOLD THEIR GOV ACCOUNTABLE FOR DESTROYING THEIR LIVES, the 1% would have never existed, and "wealth" would be distributed evenly, and people would be paid based on their jobs difficulty and performance.
I'm sorry but this one sentence made me LOL really hard. Funniest thing I have read this year.........
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Old 02-27-2014, 06:52 AM
 
Location: Miami, FL
8,087 posts, read 9,798,618 times
Reputation: 6650
Quote:
Originally Posted by bmw335xi View Post
People who became wealthy worked hard and were smarter than the average person. However, a lot of the wealthy people today inherited their wealth and now continue to maintain their wealth through investments. Tax has very little to do with it in my opinion.

This answer. Folks I know who are wealthy, as in millionaires, focused on making money throughout their lives.
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Old 02-27-2014, 07:16 AM
 
Location: NNJ
15,049 posts, read 10,028,625 times
Reputation: 17208
There are plenty of people who are smart and work hard (do well in life) but hardly wealthy. Much is still up for debate but many studies seem to point out that IQ has strong ties with income but not necessarily wealth. Take Nikola Tesla and Benjamin Franklin. Both are some of the brightest minds of their time. Franklin is considered the father of electricity even though alternating current, an invention of Tesla, is more widely used today. Tesla died poor. Franklin died wealthy. Franklin not only had intelligence but also the charisma, well spoken, sociable, and managed to work his way into Political, Business, and Academic circles.

If you ask me, the wealthy are wealthy because they were able to derive the majority of their income from capital rather than labor more quickly than the typical person. Then establish a cycle in which capital investments feeds into more wealth creation. Labor has a hard limit on how much can be offered thus turned into capital. Labor is not the path to wealth.. capital investments are the key. The sky's the limit with capital.

How a particular individual achieved it is varied. Some through tremendous fortune of circumstances (inheritance, lottery, gentrification of property etc). Some through talent (entertainers, sport figures). Some through mindshare (inventors, technologists). Some through sheer hard work.
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Old 02-27-2014, 08:06 AM
 
1,488 posts, read 1,956,621 times
Reputation: 3249
Quote:
Originally Posted by usayit View Post
There are plenty of people who are smart and work hard (do well in life) but hardly wealthy. Much is still up for debate but many studies seem to point out that IQ has strong ties with income but not necessarily wealth. Take Nikola Tesla and Benjamin Franklin. Both are some of the brightest minds of their time. Franklin is considered the father of electricity even though alternating current, an invention of Tesla, is more widely used today. Tesla died poor. Franklin died wealthy. Franklin not only had intelligence but also the charisma, well spoken, sociable, and managed to work his way into Political, Business, and Academic circles.
Exactly

So if we are speaking solely about an individual who was born not wealthy; then working hard and smart does not equate to having a high probability of becoming wealthy.

You can be a chemist with a doctorates, who works extremely hard in his profession and is very intelligent. But most likely you will only get to middle/upper middle class by doing so.

Someone would have to work hard and smart in the right areas and have to be lucky to end up wealthy if they weren't born in a wealthy family.
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Old 02-28-2014, 09:34 AM
 
41,111 posts, read 25,632,392 times
Reputation: 13868
Quote:
Originally Posted by AmFest View Post
I don't know if this is a reading comprehension error or a social structure misunderstanding, but you are talking about a very different thing from "perceived value"



What is perceived value? When you are willing to pay $200 to go to a Kanye concert, then the concert is worth $200 to you. If you are willing to pay 2 bucks to get a McDonald's burger, the burger is worth 2 bucks to you. This is perceived value.

Let's take a homeless person for another example. How much is he willing to pay for a Kanye concert? Let's say a buck. So the perceived value of the concert to him is a buck. Perceived value is an individualistic judgement.

Taken as a whole, society values Kanye more than a McDonald's worker, why you ask? Because there is only one artist like Kanye, there is no replacement for him. Even if he serves only 1% of the population, the aggregate of the perceived value is quite large, and therefore he makes a boatload of money. He doesn't have to have any value to the rest of the population.

A McDonald's worker, though he makes food for people, is easily replaceable. There are millions of people like him that don't have special skills. Even though he nominally serves the entire population, the number of people that actually get food from him is small, and if his product is perceived to only be worth 2 bucks, when you add up all the value he adds, it's not even as much as the value of one Kanye concert.

If it sounds illogical to you that society perceives entertainment as more valuable than food or other necessities, it usually comes down to one of two cases. Either it's a supply thing, where someone has such unique skills that people have no option but to pay for his service or product, or it's a demand thing, where something is so necessary that people have no option but to pay a premium for it.

For Kanye, it's a supply thing; there is only one Kanye, and he serves millions of people in multiple countries. For a McD worker, it's a supply thing: there are so many McD workers out there that there is no supply constraint. Even when McD as a whole is worth more than Kanye, because you have to divide the value over all the workers, each worker is worth only a tiny fraction of the corporation. For a nurse, it's a supply thing and a demand thing working in opposite directions: a nurse's service is very much demanded, but there are so many nurses out there that the perceived value of each individual nurse is inevitably lower than that of Kanye.
This is why Democrats wanting to open the borders is not a good thing. There will be even more McD workers vying for the job yet their supporters don't see they are supporting something that will hurt them. I understand they want to come here for good reason and they have an excellent reputation of being hard workers but I say take care of our own first. Then again, conscientious workers who appreciate having a job is a good thing. hmm
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