Do you believe that someone could be "too rich"?

[Balthisar]

@Wesley_Clark

Since wealth is finite, too much congregated at the top means…

This is a misconception that drives a lot of people to have flawed economic perspectives. Wealth isn’t finite; it’s growing, all the time. It’s what “growth” is.

[jtur88]

@ftg

You don’t see any contradiction at all between the 2nd and 3rd points??? Wow.

Note that overseas workers are treated like garbage in most places. Basically slavery. You don’t have a healthy country when a lot of your population leaves it to become peons.

Why doesn’t the Sultan make sure everyone gets educated and skilled? Personally set up factories and offices? Etc.

One day the oil will run out (or not pay enough to keep things going like Venezuela) and we’ll see a whole different thing happen there due the awful rule of the Sultan.

The SoB is far from a good example.

Brunei is a wonderfully well-run and well-developed country, and I’d be delighted to live there. The institutions provided by the government are exemplary, and many democracies would do well to emulate them.

Do you really think democratic institutions will save an oil-rich country when its oli runs out? As Venezuela was until the US state department sent in goons to destabilize it and foment revolutions.

My 3nd and 3rd paragraphs were simple observations. What are the contraddictions you are hinting at but not stating?

And finally, I used the Sultan as an example of a person who helped himself to a great fortune from a rather limited pot, and how can you say he is not a good example of that? I passed no judgment on whether he was a “good” human being, those are your wordsl

[puddleglum]

@Quimby

Wages have barely budged since 1980 when adjusted for inflation but costs have gone up which means people have less money than they did in most income brackets. The top income brackets have prospered in the last 40 years.

Several years ago political scientists did study on congress and whenever the desires of the middle class and the wealthy diverged, Congress sided with the wealthy desires 100% of the time. Literally every single time. The only time the middle class’s needs were addressed was when they happened to coincide with wealthy needs. You can google this, It was pretty famous at the time.

The middle class is shrinking and living off debt. This isn’t natural. It’s being engineered by policy.

This is not true. If you lookat total compensation, wages have gone up 30% since 1980. If you use a more accurate way to measure inflation, then wages have gone up 50% since 1980.
The study that claim congress always sided with the wealthy has been debunked. I will be nice enough to include a linkso you don’t have to google. Scientists who looked at the study found that the middle class and the wealthy felt the same way about a bill 90% of the time. When they disagreed the rich got their way 53% of the time and the middle class 47% of the time. That is not a statistically significant difference.

[puddleglum]

@marshmallow

If the Democrats were an actual left party, it probably wouldn’t take much of a media press to make average Americans want to guillotine the Walton family. That goofy Koch kid and his dumb shirts should be easy fodder when it comes time to argue for inheritance taxes. Won’t happen, of course.

If you took all of the Walton’s wealth and distributed to the rest of the country, every one would get 457 dollars. If you are willing to kill people over $457 I think you are mistaken over who the psychopaths are.