Is your goal to continually provide information that doesn’t address the statements you quote?
Of the 400 billionaires how many of them were raised in families that fell bellow the poverty line?
Class Warfare takes away the attention on real matters. For example, the Gini index has been going up in America since the late 1960s:
But if someone instead just takes the recent announcement from the Census bureau, you might miss the fact that this is a long-term trend in America.
The good money is in work done by educated people, while manufacturing has been exported to cheaper nations. Screaming about class warfare and class separation won’t help a high school graduate make more money, and it won’t bring down the wealth level of the Silicon Valley and Wall Street millionaires and billionaires.
As of 2010 the US is still the leading nation in manufacturing.
In 2010 the US produced more manufacturing output than India, United Kingdom, France, South Korea, Brazil and Italy COMBINED.
Even though the American manufacturing sector is huge, it only represents 12.4% of the US economy.
Of course, the ones who do scream bloody murder about “class warfare” and “redistribution of wealth” also aim to gut American education, the better to replace it with exclusive private schools and voucher systems that would ensure that if you’re an ignorant fundy your kid assuredly should remain an ignant fundy as well (simplifies the speech-writing staff’s job, yeah ?) and if you ain’t already a millionaire then no, son, your kid isn’t going beyond high school either. He’ll simply need to prove his innate bootstrap-pulling skills like the rest of our sons, ho ho ho ! Get it ? Get it ?
Well, maybe it’s only funny in context.
Quick ! How large is the US compared to India, the UK, France, SK, Brazil and Italy COMBINED ?
Take two countries:
Country A has a ratio of 6.6 between the poorest and richest members of society.
Country B has a ratio of 15 between the poorest and richest members of society.
Which country would you rather live in if you were rich? Which one would you rather live in if you were poor?
This is the problem with the GINI index. It actually doesn’t tell you jack squat about the conditions of the poor.
Let me ask you a slightly different question: Would you rather be poor in a country where, in terms of purchasing power, the bottom quintile income is $18,500, or one in which the bottom quintile income is $1200?
Sales of strawmen is still a growth industry.
Wow, a substantive response. If this is the best my opponents can come up with, my ideas must be made of solid goddamn motherfucking GOLD.
Seriously.
You might want to re-research your conclusion there, Sam. Money isn’t everything. Studies show that relative income level is a better predictor of contentment than absolute income. Cite? You’re a good Googler yourself, aren’t you, Sam? Such research is no secret hidden in some corner of the Internet.
Many of America’s poorest are in despair, while the “middle-class” in low-income countries may enjoy a contented life not too dissimilar in important ways from the lives of America’s middle class. (McDonald’s may be their special treat restaurant, yet they eat cheap wholesome food at home.)
As a more extreme example, the life of England’s 16th-century nobility (or even royalty) was greatly inferior, when measured in simple materialistic ways, to that of most Americans today. They had no electronic gadgets, antibiotics or high-speed transport, obviously, but their lives were “poorer” in more mundane ways. Hot baths were a special luxury even for the rich. Yet, would they change places with one of America’s working poor?
No it goes further than that, class warfare now even means wanting the rich to pay the same proportional amount in taxes as a waiter. In fact unless you are for abolishing ALL forms of income tax on billionaires you’re engaging in class warfare.
It is almost obscene that a major political party seems to be devoted to freeing billionaires of the shackles of income tax.
You do realize that India has over a billion people and Brazil over 200 million?
So we agree, democracy is bad. Good thing we don’t have one.
That is really a stretch of the definition…I hope it that the building of the fire station benefits someone. That isn’t redistribution. When we speak of redistribution, we are talking about taking money from some citizens and giving it to other citizens.
Not quite true. You equate theft with trade. The threat of force is if you don’t do something, then something bad will happen to you. If you don’t pay your taxes, bad things happen. If you don’t enter into a voluntary trade for gasoline, nothing bad happens to you.
Dunno about you, but if I don’t enter into a voluntary trade for food, after a few days something bad happens to me.
And building a fire station does just that. The fire station itself doesn’t benefit the population equally, either. That’s what people mean when they say that tax is inherently redistributive.
Just because you need to narrow down the definition of “redistribution” to only fit the instances of it that you don’t approve of for your worldview to make sense, or you don’t feel like the benefactors of one kind of redistribution have “earned” it for some reason, doesn’t change the fact that the instances of it that you do approve of are still redistributive.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
If you don’t trade for food, that is a choice you are free to make. Still not the same as if you don’t pay your taxes, someone else will do bad things to you.
OK. Back to basics i guess. One of the reasons we created government was to do things that it would be impractical for individuals to do themselves. Like your fire station for example. This benefits everyone, so we all pay the tax and build it. No one has a problem with that. What you are trying to equate it to is taking money from one person and giving it to someone else. This doesn’t benefit everyone. It only benefits the recipient of the stolen loot.
There is a group of people who are of the opinion that the “redistribution of wealth” is wrong. It is basically stealing the fruit of one person’s labor and giving it to others who have not earned it. It isn’t my narrowing of anything to make it fit my anything. You have changed the phrase from “redistribution of wealth” to “benefactors” to mean something which is not what I’m talking about. No one who is against the redistribution of wealth is arguing against fire stations. So, your examples are not relevant to this conversation.
I personally am for localizing taxes so the beneficiaries are more closely tied to the taxes they would vote for and impose upon themselves.
But it doesnt - the people who don’t have houses don’t benefit from fire protection. The people who live outside of that precinct don’t benefit from that fire station. People who live in 40.000 dollar houses in high fire risk areas benefit more from the station than the guy who lives in a rented 1.000 dollar shack right next to the river. The act of building that fire station benefits this construction company, but not that one.
And so forth.
I’m not equating anything with anything - I was simply attempting to clarify what pseudotriton meant by the sentence "taxation is inherently redistributive", in the context he used the phrase in.
You’re the one who’s going on about the specific, distinct concept that is the idiom “redistribution of wealth” (as used by conservative commentators), that you object to and what you mean by it. This is not that.
As a matter of fact, it doesn’t - it also benefits whoever gets paid with that “stolen loot” down the line. And theoretically speaking, whoever benefits from the enterprises that the recipients of this influx of “stolen loot” might put together with it, too.
For example, if you take money for the general population and give it to a subset so that they can put their kids through college, then while the benefit to the portion of the population that doesn’t have kids or don’t get the subsidy for one reason or another is not immediately obvious or direct, they’re still better off when one of the subsidied kids invents sliced bread or whatever.
But that’s veering into a derail and honestly, I’m not really interested in debating economic or taxation policies ; nor do I give much of an airborne copulation about them. I was simply trying to resolve a miscommunication problem.
And that is a specific, narrow subset of the broader concept of wealth redistribution. It also isn’t what pseudotriton was talking about when he asserted that taxation was, by its very nature, redistributive.
I’ll just say it again in case this time it goes through: just because you, along with 99.9% of the public are personally okay with the redistribution (or re-organization, if you prefer and that makes it less confusing) of wealth that is necessarily involved in the building of a fire station (i.e. moving money from the pockets of citizens into that of the builders), doesn’t mean building a fire station using public funds does not involve a redistributive process.
It’s just that you’re okay with that one for reasons X, Y and Z ; but not okay with that other one for reasons foo, bar and zox. That’s perfectly fine and you’re most definitely entitled to that opinion, but it doesn’t change the identical underlying processes at work in both cases.
I don’t have a cite, but I believe few if any members of the 1% actually serve in the military. So I think it would be appropriate to ask the 1% to pay more of the Pentagon’s budget, which is a very large chunk of the total federal budget.