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Old 03-20-2009, 10:02 AM
 
Location: In My Own Little World. . .
3,238 posts, read 8,772,422 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chuck22b View Post
Hi colleeng47,
Kudos to you. But the point isn't that you can't make it if you really try. The point is that it's become increasingly harder and that you shouldn't have had to make your own clothes, grow your own garden, wear rags or use rags, and scrimp every penny, take the bus, etc. in this modern society to barely scrape up a bare resemblance of a middle class life style. And, not to mention it's soooo much easier to lose it all at a blink of an eye.

Meanwhile, some CEO guy has 5-10 different houses around the world. Millions in exclusive preferred stocks and other investment instruments, and his wife doesn't even have to work and argues about 53k a week lifestyle.

And while everybody else in the world is losing money, falling off the cliff from the economic crisis... their lawyers, paid off government officials, etc. are able to find ways to keep their riches while they swindle millions more from everybody else.

There really is something wrong with this picture. NO human being is grossly worth that much more than anybody else. We are a democracy aren't we? Where "all men are created equal"? Or in actuality we're an oligarchy.

-chuck22b
<sigh> Y'all kind of missed my point also. We lived like that for a year so we could save enough money for a down payment on a house . We were living on one salary because we wanted a house, and we wanted me to be home with the kids. It was a challenge and we met it.

We never lived like that after that year.
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Old 03-20-2009, 10:22 AM
 
Location: Under a bridge.
3,196 posts, read 5,382,570 times
Reputation: 982
Quote:
Originally Posted by colleeng47 View Post
<sigh> Y'all kind of missed my point also. We lived like that for a year so we could save enough money for a down payment on a house . We were living on one salary because we wanted a house, and we wanted me to be home with the kids. It was a challenge and we met it.

We never lived like that after that year.
You set a goal and attained it. I am soooo proud to even talk to you on a message forum....It is nice to meet you.
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Old 03-20-2009, 10:38 AM
 
14,990 posts, read 23,799,586 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomdude View Post
Where did all that money go? Well, it went to men like Bill Gates, the Walton family, Warren Buffet. That massive pile of money they are sitting on has erased the "American Dream" for THOUSANDS of people.
Be careful about blaming people like them. Bill Gates? He almost single handedly created an industry along with tens of thousands of jobs for Americans. All these people, like was said, are self-made millionaires, enterpreauneurs. Those are the people that create wealth for the country and it's people, took risks, made the right decisions, and because of that they deserve to be millionaires. And most of these types live modestly and gave to causes generously.

Now - I think your anger should be at those CEO's and CFO's that make millions just because they graduated from the right Ivy League family and made the right family connections, or the old elitest rich who are simply living off family fortunes (and usually pick a worthless occupation like politics). Those are the sleazebags that erased the american dream.

One thing however that I am concerned about this new-found anger against the wealthy. I share that anger against these sleazebag CEO's. But the usual result of income redistribution are government policies that create not more middle class and less rich class, but more poor class and less rich class. As more of the recepients of these entitlement programs and tax benifits are the poor, not the middle class. Anything that punishes a person for being rich also rewards a person for being poor. The american dream is to not be a fat happy poor person, but to develop yourself and in turn become rich (and, as a result of these efforts, create wealth and jobs for the nation) - lets not punish that.
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Old 03-20-2009, 11:18 AM
 
Location: Virginia Beach, VA
5,522 posts, read 10,174,115 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dcashley View Post
The rich people you use for comparison happened to all make their wealth themselves. They were not rich when they started. They built their own fortunes.

Actually, most wealthy people came from an upper middle class upbringing

Gates- father was a lawyer, mother was well connected.
Buffet- father owned a grocery store and had a college degree
Walton- Came from a bit earlier era, before "Walmart" effectively barred entry for 75% of businesses to the market. Still, Dad was a mortgage broker.

In fact, there are very few who came from nothing in the billionaires listings. In fact, a great deal of them are actually wielding family fortunes, or grabbed chunks of privatized mining or utility operations from the goverment.

Meanwhile, those "self made billionaires", largely created huge technology, retail and utility monopolies, that routinely crush any attempts at competition. They screw employees, provide worthless wages far below cost of living, no benefits, union bust, etc., but because of their monopolies, smash entrepreneurship amongst the lower classes, and low skilled, and keep them dependent on the low wage crap jobs they create, and dependent on the prices/and or lack of options while theyre at it.

The most outstanding beautiful thing about it is, they have managed to make the fools depending on the wage, fully believe that its their fault they arent economically successful, unions are the enemy, and if they work just a little harder, or spend themselves in debt just a little further in college, they might actually make it.

Then, because they are monopolies, or oligopolies, they are able to use the government as an ATM. It reminds me of Goodfellas when Paulie became partner in the restaurant.....You want me to build a store, pay me. You want me to hire a person, pay me. You want me participate in the community, pay me. You dont want me to go out of business and create a massive sucking black hole because I destroyed the micro economy of every market I entered, pay me.

Last edited by Randomdude; 03-20-2009 at 12:07 PM..
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Old 03-20-2009, 11:32 AM
 
20,608 posts, read 19,261,971 times
Reputation: 8204
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dd714 View Post
Be careful about blaming people like them. Bill Gates? He almost single handedly created an industry along with tens of thousands of jobs for Americans. All these people, like was said, are self-made millionaires, enterpreauneurs. Those are the people that create wealth for the country and it's people, took risks, made the right decisions, and because of that they deserve to be millionaires. And most of these types live modestly and gave to causes generously.
Hi Dd714,

You don't even want to begin this conversation with me. I am an insider for this industry and Gates did no such thing. He began by taking public domain BASIC and making crappy changes to the BASIC interpreter and then charging people money for most of which he did not create. They did the same with the Berkly TCP stack to make winsock to get on the internet which MS had absolutely nothing to do with. Yes they have created proprietary DOC format that costs $500 dollars to read every 3 years. Word perfect was text markup based thus MS sucked in Word Perfect formats and spewed out binary proprietary formats with "embrace and extent" . So he at best added marketing for Basic without compensating its creators.


Then on basically an insider deal, IBM needed someone to make PC software because anti-trust laws kept IBM at bay for making DOS. To take down Apple they went with open hardware standards that allowed IBM compatible commodity hardware to compete with proprietary Apple . However the software that propelled Windows was also proprietary ridding on commodity open standards hardware. It was the open PC standard that made the PC and Windows leeches from it.


They also cleverly made a per PC license instead of per software license which meant OEMs had to pay for windows whether they loaded a box with DRDOS(a superior product side by side),OS/2, FreeBSD, BEOS or Linux.
Microsoft has bribed, bought up and monopolized its way to where it is from double space rip offs, Java corruption(personally experience on IDE Java 1.0) , Blue Mountain Arts, Doc format and on and on.

This is why my user-agent is thus and I run MS tax free since 1996.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070920 Firefox/2.0.0.6

Linux localhost 2.6.22-gentoo-r5

People have no idea they are surrounded by monopolistic interests. Free markets don't stay free unless monopolistic capital is dealt with on a daily basis. Gates is a scum bag beyond any ordinary qualification. Following the Rockefeller formula, he set up a tax free trust to avoid taxation for pennies on the dollar of its philanthropy.
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Old 03-20-2009, 12:00 PM
 
1,960 posts, read 4,649,283 times
Reputation: 5416
I finally got my boomer parents to acknowledge that my fiance's at-will employment with no retirement benefits coupled with my 401K-laden employment will not be sufficient to compete with their 75% pensions when adjusted for [inflation and] the fact that both generations are college educated and both generations hold masters degrees. Further, my household will not be able to provide college funding to my children the way my parents were able to afford me; I'll be too busy saving like a monk my whole productive life to hedge agains't two people's [me and the wife] financial destitution in 30 years to help my kids get ahead by providing them with a debt-free start to their working lives. Boomers 2 , gen Y and kids... 0.

In essence, I'm falling behind my parents by virtue of nothing else but TIME. That's the textbook definition of a dwindling middle class, I'm worse off than my parents and my kids will be worse off than me. Spare me the "attitude determines your altitude" mantra of hard work, the supposition that everybody can be Lebron James [economic statistical outliers] in an oligarchic dominated wage slavery farm [the US], is so preposterous is actually warrants the capital owner class to laugh in our face [as they do]. There's quite literally no worse slave than he who thinks he's actually free. Middle class hard work mantra of the 20th century, in that regard, works quite against the middle class, how's that for a paradox. You want to see what the american socio-economic dynamic is gonna look like for Gen Y and company in 30 years? Google BRAZIL.

The rich don't hoarde wealth and instead create prosperity for the poor, what a gem, thanks for the laugh...
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Old 03-20-2009, 12:06 PM
 
Location: Virginia Beach, VA
5,522 posts, read 10,174,115 times
Reputation: 2572
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dd714 View Post
Be careful about blaming people like them. Bill Gates? He almost single handedly created an industry along with tens of thousands of jobs for Americans. All these people, like was said, are self-made millionaires, enterpreauneurs. Those are the people that create wealth for the country and it's people, took risks, made the right decisions, and because of that they deserve to be millionaires. And most of these types live modestly and gave to causes generously.
1. Yeah, anyone who was on Gates tailcoats became wealthy men/women. Its great that he uses a whole lot of his money on globe trotting causes, and Im sure theyre happy......but, who did he trample?

- Apple, who he largely stole Windows from, went from dominating the market, to less then 10% of the market share
- The countless software companies that made competing software that they stomped through anti trust practices, or software that Microsoft hijacked and used for their own practices, and then they hung most of the lawsuits out and drained the plaintiff companies out of resources.
- Microsoft is the source for the term "perma temp". Microsoft went out of their way to creatively avoid paying benefits or market wages for work.
- Microsoft makes prominent use of outsourcing, which costs Americans work


Quote:
Originally Posted by TnHilltopper View Post
Now - I think your anger should be at those CEO's and CFO's that make millions just because they graduated from the right Ivy League family and made the right family connections, or the old elitest rich who are simply living off family fortunes (and usually pick a worthless occupation like politics). Those are the sleazebags that erased the american dream.
Yeah a person that fell in to it annoys me more then a person who put in the elbow grease, but I dont think they are any less or more responsible. Both are snatching wealth from the lower classes, keeping them poor, and sitting on the wealth by careful avoidance of taxes, and increased anti trust, global and monopolisitic practices meant to drive down wages and exterminate any hope to compete.


Quote:
Originally Posted by TnHilltopper View Post
One thing however that I am concerned about this new-found anger against the wealthy. I share that anger against these sleazebag CEO's. But the usual result of income redistribution are government policies that create not more middle class and less rich class, but more poor class and less rich class. As more of the recepients of these entitlement programs and tax benifits are the poor, not the middle class. Anything that punishes a person for being rich also rewards a person for being poor.
Welfare states are absolutely the wrong way to go. The point is not to "punish" the wealthy, but make it impossible for them to get that way in the first place without their own labor.



Quote:
Originally Posted by TnHilltopper View Post
The american dream is to not be a fat happy poor person, but to develop yourself and in turn become rich (and, as a result of these efforts, create wealth and jobs for the nation) - lets not punish that.
Jobs are not created by wealthy people, they are created by demand.

Getting rid of the variable of population growth, society demands 100 hamburgers. That is not going to change much no matter how many new stands you create, youre just diluting the sales.

So, when the point is reached when that supply is so divided that all stands cannot be profitable, 1 will go out of business, and every new stand will go out of business, or cause another to go out of business. Not everyone can be the entreprenuer.

That means, if 5 stands are the max that can operate profitable, and there are 20 people, 15 of them must be workers, correct? If one of those comes up with a better burger (and has accumulated the capital to start competition), 1 of the original entrepreneurs is now a worker.

These workers are forced to work for whatever wage the entrepreneur wants to pay them, because of no other options.

Now here is what is increasingly happening in the USA.

- 1 or 2 stands have taken control of the market, and have made it almost impossible to compete.
- There are 2 management jobs requiring degrees (instead of the 5 that would have existed with more firms), but 13 of the workers have college degrees. These 13 degrees, not only drove the cost of education up for all of them, but have simutaneously drove the wage down for the management jobs. The other 11 who dont get hired for management jobs, have the option of working for regular employee wages, not working, or attempting to start their own firm, which will surely fail.
- Two of those college grads left. One invented an automated system which does the job of 4 workers, and the other installs them. They have outsourced their manufacturing to China. They created 2 new US jobs.
- The two stands, who used to employ 18 people, now only need 10. All of the sudden, the stands can afford to only keep the college degreed people, and lay off all of the high school grads. Now, it takes a college degree to even be considered for flipping burgers
- 1 college grads was also laid off, and trid to start a better automated system, but has his technology stolen by the original system, and because he didnt have much capital, couldnt fight the case in court, and was crushed.
- The two original managers at the stands retire, and since all the workers have bachelors degrees, now its going to take a masters degree to be a manager, and work for the same wage the original managers worked for.
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Old 03-20-2009, 12:20 PM
 
14,990 posts, read 23,799,586 times
Reputation: 26493
Quote:
Originally Posted by gwynedd1 View Post
You don't even want to begin this conversation with me. I am an insider for this industry and Gates did no such thing. He began by taking public domain BASIC and making crappy changes to the BASIC interpreter...
Yeah yeah yeah. I curse Bill Gates name everytime I turn on windows. But come on guys this thread nor my post is not about Bill Gates and we don't need two posts giving a detailed essay on the history of the PC. No offense but I and probably everyone stopped reading your post after the third sentence. Lets stay on topic.
My point still stands - lets not punish entrepenuers who create wealth in this economy.
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Old 03-20-2009, 12:31 PM
 
Location: Virginia Beach, VA
5,522 posts, read 10,174,115 times
Reputation: 2572
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dd714 View Post
Yeah yeah yeah. I curse Bill Gates name everytime I turn on windows. But come on guys this thread nor my post is not about Bill Gates and we don't need two posts giving a detailed essay on the history of the PC. No offense but I and probably everyone stopped reading your post after the third sentence. Lets stay on topic.
My point still stands - lets not punish entrepenuers who create wealth in this economy.

Wealth is not created, just transfered.
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Old 03-20-2009, 12:39 PM
 
Location: In My Own Little World. . .
3,238 posts, read 8,772,422 times
Reputation: 1614
Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomdude View Post
Wealth is not created, just transfered.
Finally, something I can agree with you on.
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