I suppose that’s correct – or more precisely stated, I would argue that the strong default position is that everyone’s wealth is presumed to be their own, and taking any of it from he who created it requires and extraordinarily compelling justification.
You may not like the assumption, but if you actually look at rich people there are a lot of common traits and they do earn their money.
#1. They are educated
#2. They spend less than they earn
#3. They invest consistently
#4. They plan ahead
The average rich person *isn’t *Buffet or Soros. The average rich person *does *earn their money. The average rich person does come about their money honestly.
The average rich person *does not *manipulate the market. How do I know this? The average rich person doesn’t have enough money or influence to do so. a million bucks isn’t gonna move most markets at all.
I’ve posted info about this before, but apparently, no one actually gives a damned when it comes to this subject. Their preconceived ideas and ideology are more important than actual facts.
Instead of promoting ideals that will actually gain people money, like getting educated, investing, spending less than one makes, waiting until the financial resources are there before having a kid*, the emphasis is ‘Those dirty rich people are doing *something *and it is all their fault’. Of course, most of the time, the *something *that they are doing cannot be identified. The finger is pointed at a few bad actors and they are presented as representative of all rich people. Which, of course, is not true.
What I see, having been very poor and having made a bunch of bad decisions myself, is that most poor people make bad choices consistently. The poor folk I know aren’t the salt of the earth types eeking out an existence despite the evil rich people who try to screw them. Quite the opposite. The poor folk I know pretty much all do the same thing. They spend more than they earn, buy luxury items before investing if they invest at all and do not work on their education. I did this for a long time until I decided that I disliked being poor.
Of course, there are poor people who got that way after getting hit by bad luck. However, they are a minority.
I am not rich, presently I am solidly middle class. However, I am going to retire at 55 and will be rich at that point unless there is a huge emergency (think full economic melt down). My coworkers, who make the roughly the same amount of money that I do, will not be rich. They will not retire at 55. They will work until at least 65 and then worry about money.
The difference is that I invest and plan. They buy the latest toys. I watch the stock market, my accounts, look for sales. They gamble and eat out consistently. I eat at home and rarely blow money on anything. They buy new cars every few years. I plan on a new car every 10 years at the worst. 15 if I can get away with it.
And then they do not understand how I can do things that they cannot. They wonder how I could put 25% down on a house. They wonder how I can plan on buying my next car without a loan. They wonder how I can afford to pay for school.
Slee
*My fiancee has a daughter, I’ll call her T. T is pregnant, 21, no high school degree and works for minimum wage. The father of Ts child has 3 kids by 2 women already. I know about these issues and how hard it is to convince someone to choose the right path.
If there are two people in the world, how much wealthier can one be than the other? What about 100? 6000? 6 million? At what point can one become extremely wealthy providing commodities like automobiles and snack cakes? Let’s suppose, hypothetically, that until a society has something like 6 million people it is just impossible to mass produce automobiles, because the broad level of specialization and large market simply isn’t available.
Now, prior to the introduction of mass-produced automobiles, these people were already there. Perhaps, charitably, underutilized. Then the entrepreneur comes along and realizes mass-production, sells automobiles at a profit, and collects this profit. Each consumer that buys a car individually judges that there is a matter of net benefit or at a minimum indifference. All have voluntarily purchased a car. Net profit here flows to the owner (or shareholders, depending on how much we wish to complicate the example needlessly).
If you tell me, “Most of the benefits in fact flow to the consumers, because they are paying less for an automobile than their indifference level. So while a few may get very rich here, most of the benefits accrue to most of the people,” I’d say you have an interesting point and this, AFAIK, is standard economic theory on commodities. But that’s not what you’re telling me. What you’re telling me is that whatever the guys at the top get, it’s theirs by virtue of no fact other than voluntary transaction. And that argument applies outside of commodity markets where businesses attempt, with varying degrees of success, to capture the consumer surplus. So not only do they get the benefits of their own scarcity—say, for the sake of argument, innate talent or excellent teeth—they get the benefits of population. But they were not parties to the transactions involved in making the population.
But even at this level, there are many who don’t get their wealth honestly. There are lawyers who make piles of cash suing people who haven’t done anything wrong, lobbyists, influence peddlers like Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi, poverty pimps and hate mongers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, artists who sell crap to rich suckers, outright crooks like the execs at Enron, mediocre or downright incompetent CEOs who still get tens of millions of dollars for running their companies into the ground, TV preachers, etc. etc. Hell, most of 'em make pornographers and dope peddlers look like respectable, upstanding citizens. You don’t have to be on the Buffet or Soros level to be a parasite or a power monger.
- Plenty of educated people who aren’t rich. In fact these days newly educated people are having a hard time getting jobs.
- Rich people, by definition, have a hard time spending what they earn, with rare exceptions like Michael Jackson. Hell, I’m not rich and I spend nowhere near what I earn and I don’t have to try hard to do that. Saying that someone making $500K a year has money left over implies that someone making $20K a year should have money left over is kind of odd.
- Of course, because, as mentioned, they have money left over and generally don’t have big enough mattresses to hide it under. A lot of people seem to read “investment” as money supporting a startup or a new factory or something. Money invested in the market doesn’t lead to a lot of new jobs. A few years ago there was a tremendous demand for high return mortgage securities, which encourage the mortgage companies to write bad mortgages to keep up the supply. That investment hurt the economy.
- So do people who aren’t rich. BTW, planning is easier with more money. A person having to take into consideration unexpected expenses like cars breaking down or health problems has to plan a lot better than someone who has enough money in the bank to handle these things.
But you left out one characteristic of the rich.
5. Luck, either being born to wealth or born with genetic advantages which can lead to wealth. Is the woman born with a 150 IQ who breezes through school and lands a great job which makes her if not rich at least well off better than the guy with a 95 IQ who struggles through high school and then gets a mediocre job? The first person will get more money, sure, because she gives more to society, but do we really need to condemn the second one for being lazy? Especially if he isn’t?
You forgot two more
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Karma: those born into poverty did something wrong in their past life and are stuck within the wheel of samsāra.
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God: the meek shall inherit the Earth, until they need to pray harder.
Most of you guys, including dude in the OP are looking at the problem wrong. You are trying to figure out a way to pay more for the same job, so this guy can have the life he wants.
Instead, you should figure out how to get the guy a job that provides the life he wants.
The job he has will continue to pay $8/hour, and more that likely will be gradually automated until it hits $7.25 or gets eliminated. There is no way around it, no matter how much you bitch and complain. There is simply no way to make that job more valuable.
About a decade ago I left engineering to become a cook, going from about $30/hour to $11/hour. I knew before hand my lifestyle would have to match my new salary. After a few months at my first job I made the offhand comment to my boss (the owner), “how do I make more money.” Her reply, “Don’t be a cook.” A few months after that I became catering manager and worked my way back up to and over the $30/hour range.
Instead of wasting all your time trying to come up with moral reasons why that job should be worth more than $8/hour, start working on ways to get the dude in the OP to be worth more than $8/hour. Even at that company there are jobs paying more, why isn’t he doing one of those? Seriously, what is wrong with this guy that he can work his way up. He doesn’t even have to move that far. Get a supervisor-type position, with a bit more responsibility, earn $15/hour and stop bitching about how the world owes you something.
And for all the insistence that it’s “luck” what the hell did this guy do with his life that put himself in that position? It’s not as if he didn’t have access to free public school up through highschool. Followed by subsidized community and local colleges. I don’t care if he wasn’t born to the wealthy elite. The US doesn’t have a caste system, and is heavily socialist. This guy had plenty of opportunities.
If all of that is too much to ask for, there is always the military, like it or not, which pays reasonably well and will pay for education (as well as training and all the other stuff on the commercials).
And if all of that fails, he’s still working at place where he could have said to his boss (hopefully without wearing an intentionally antagonistic t-shirt), “I’d like to move up, can I get some on the job training?”
It’s childish to think that doing the same job over and over for decades should mean it’s some how worth more. This comes up every time there is a transit strike, and the bus drivers want more money for driving the same route. That’s not how it works. And will never work. Trying to make it work will simply raise the cost of living for everyone, and cause you to repeat the whole process again. Only now, over paid domestic workers will have to compete globally against people who are happy to live on much less than $7.25/hour.
And so what if there have been improvements in efficiency? The people working on those improvements make more that a living wage.
So many of you on this board have been listening to the same set of liberal propaganda for so long I worry you’re starting to believe it. Sure they guy in the OP should make a living wage, but not at that job. That job is worth what it pays, and is a living wage for someone. If he wants more money he needs to do something else.
Property is a social convention. So yes, we, as a society, do decide who owns what. We also decide what is right and wrong. So who owns something as well as if they should own something are decided communally. Or to put it another way, your perception that phrases like this represent an unjustified sense of entitlement is caused by your unjustified sense of of entitlement.
As I said before in the thread, this move requires some fairly heavy justification. What makes it permissible to assume that someone who does not work his way up has something wrong with him?
You said he should at least get a supervisory position–as though such positions are just out there to be had by whoever is willing to work for them.
How many supervisors are there at his workplace per worker?
What are the qualifications to be a supervisor?
How are those qualifications within the range of possiblity for him?
You seem to know alot about this guy, in order to make all the assumptions you do in your post. So why not tell us more about him? All we have to go on is the text of the OP. You seem to have some further source of information?
Pretty much this. People act like property rights are a matter of natural law. They’re not. They’re conventional through and through.
I’m all for education. So where should we get the money to educate people?
Maybe he’s just stupid, as suggested upthread. How hard do you want to beat him up for that?
I tend to be mostly a lefty, but I choked on this story a bit and don’t find the protagonist very sympathetic. Yeah, his company’s managers sound like jerks, but so what?
I’d be a lot more sympathetic if the guy hadn’t flat-out said he was unwilling to work harder to earn another $45 – which I am pretty sure buys a lot of Chef Boyardee. Also, If you’re making $8/hr at job that takes you $50/week and 45 minutes each way to commute, take a McJob around the corner at $7.25. After a 40-hour week you’d have lost $30 in wages, but saved $50 in gas (and have an extra 7.5 extra hours to work – or go to basketball practice). He says he “needs something he can live on,” but doesn’t even do the basics to head in the right direction.
He is a caricature of the “entitled OWS types" so unsympathetic that I would have guessed he was a strawman of right wingers. The problem is that there really are a people stuck in a paycheck-to-paycheck life through no fault of their own. Many people are an illness, a car crash, a walked-out spouse away from disaster. I strongly recommend Barbara Ehrenbach’s “Nickel and Dimed” as an insight into the working poor with lives one hiccup from desperation.
But I think the larger, more important, questions are whether it’s true that the bigger share of the pie is now going to the richest in our society, and if so, how that came to be, and finally whether the current system is either “better” or more “fair”?
It seems clear that the share of the pie going to the richest has indeed gotten bigger. What caused the shift, and were those forces fair? Certainly free trade and lower tariffs put huge stress on low-skill manufacturing jobs. Just a few decades ago, workers with lower end skills who worked hard at modestly profitable manufacturing concerns were paid “living wages.” But those same factories can be EVEN MORE profitable in today’s globalized markets by moving overseas. Meanwhile, other significant policy shifts happened - top marginal tax brackets dropped precipitously, the estate tax went away (for a while anyway), unions came under attack in more and more places, and capital gains taxes dropped. These benefits to the rich were supposed to trickle down.
So I’d ask – if it was different 30 years ago (when the rich/poor divide was smaller; when C-level employees made a mere 20 or 50 times the lowest paid, etc.), Was it unfair then? What political forces drove the changes that have demonstrably shifted the distribution of spoils to the rich – and were those changes fair? Perhaps most importantly – Have these changes made our society better or worse? If they’ve made it worse, how do we change course?
Like welfare queens, Cathys are a figment of the imagination. They exist only in the minds of liberals and poor people. But I repeat myself. As I said, we’re not aiming for the Oval Office here; we’re aiming for the board room.
[quote=“erislover, post:210, topic:612306”]
And if you were somehow able to measure skills, I’d say your conclusion would be sound. But that is not what your metric is. Your metric is economic success. Now we need dig a little further, because with two adjectives (‘skilled’ and ‘successful’) there are the following four cases:
[ul][li]skilled and successful []skilled and unsuccessful []unskilled and successful [*]unskilled and unsuccessful[/ul]Apparently, a priori, you have ruled out “unskilled and successful” and “skilled and unsuccessful” and I would appreciate hearing why this is plausibly so.[/li][/QUOTE]
We can measure skills. A skill is something someone else is willing to pay for. Ergo, a lowly paid person either has no skills or is not utilizing them. Since the guy in our OP can’t find a job elsewhere, it must be the former. For reference, retirees are an example of those who have skills but aren’t paid for them.
I’m not going to dig up cites showing how much more money college graduates make than the GED crowd. You know it’s true. I know it’s true. Skills=money. That’s the investigation I conducted.
First of all, if you’ve ever bought a house before, you know that all the information about payments is provided to you in detail. You get amortization schedules and tax estimates and everything else. No home buyer is blindsided by the cost of a home. So let’s not pretend this guy did anything other than fail to budget.
Second, since when is it a salesman’s job to talk people out of purchases? And since when do poor buying decisions get excused with a “he made me do it”?
May I scream “Socialism” now, or will the SDMB flip shit?
Ya hear that, Kimmy? LP just said you make dope peddlers look respectable. You gonna take that from her?
LP, quit peddling your welfare queen fantasies, OK? Those types of people are few and far between. Most rich people are just smarter and harder working than poor people. It’s not a mystery; it’s statistics.
Harder than the uneducated are having?
Are you joking? There’s money gushing out of the public coffers for education. Hell, the first 13 years are automatically free!
A HS diploma has basically become worthless in today’s employment market. Those free 13 years are worth what they cost. Pushing everyone towards college has caused the cost of college to skyrocket while simultaneously devaluing Bachelor’s because so many more people have them. There isn’t nearly as much money for education as you seem to think, especially in light of the rising cost. It is extremely difficult for poor people to afford higher education to get the skills they need for today’s jobs excepting maybe the most outstanding students, given that students from poor families go to shitty public schools in poor neighborhoods.
So in other words, there is a material biconnective between the two qualities “skilled” and “successful.” That’s… certainly an interesting position to take. Still not sure why you take it. I can’t say I’ve ever read anything which supports such a conclusion, but I don’t see why that would mean you can’t define them so. Normally, price—which also theoretically includes wages—is driven by scarcity, not skill. Some skills may be scarce, but scarcity is relative to the conditions of the time, and skills have no such direct relationship… that is, when most people are discussing such things. This is why you could see, for instance, a huge increase in the salaries of IT professionals. They were just as skilled—or unskilled, to hear some tell it—as the year before, but the demand changed. This is why I suggested that there are two axes, not one.
Yes, if and only if. At least, I hope that is what you are suggesting, because otherwise your position is based on the fallacy of denying the antecedent. “If a person is paid well, he must have skills (and is utilizing them). He isn’t paid well, therefore he has no skills (or isn’t utilizing them).” Of course the matter is not repaired by pointing the implication the other way, but given your next comment I’d guess you’d not accept that implication.
So you do agree there is a meaningful distinction here. That is perplexing.
This is an amazingly baldfaced, faith-based, reality-shunning statement. I have honestly never encountered its like in any conversation I have ever participated in.
I do know people well enough to know that if I try to argue with this, I will be no-true-scotsmanned to death, so I will not bother. (ETA: I see Erislover has rather ably explained why your position is extremely implausible, without falling into the trap of attempting to name actual scotsmen only to be told they’re not true. I applaud that, and confess I wish I’d done it instead of shunting off the task. Ah well, poor me.)
My best friend and his wife earn about triple what my household brings in. Yet they are broke. Can you think of a reason that might be? Hint, he does not have any extenuating circumstances that eat up money, no medical emergencies, etc.
Where did I mention income level? I didn’t. Many rich people do not make huge salaries. They get rich by spending less than they earn and investing the rest. I do not make a huge salary but I will be rich. I also know people who make a lot of money yet are poor. Wonder why that is…
I have money left over because I planned it that way. For example, when I bought my house a couple years ago the mortgage company offered me double of what I wanted to spend. I went with the house I felt I could afford while still meeting my investment goals. That is planning ahead.
Planning is easier with more money. However, most people I know could, with a little effort, get to a point where a broken car isn’t an emergency. The first thing to do is get at least 3 months full expenses in the bank. And keep the money there for emergencies. It may take a while but it is easily doable for most people. Yet most people I know rather buy the latest toy instead of save some money.
This last is at least partially bullshit. Compound interest is not luck. If you are so stupid that you cannot understand compound interest, well that is unlucky.
The problem is that many people a) don’t invest b )spend more than they make c) use credit stupidly and d) don’t know jack about money.
Slee
Its funny though - those companies aren’t “more profitable.” Companies are generally speaking, less profitable than they used to be. There is an “acceptable margin” and unless you are in a monopolistic position, if you charge much more than that margin, someone is going to figure out how to match or beat your cost of goods sold and undersell you.
Executive compensation HAS skyrocketed, but its really only a handful of people who are seeing those gains in each company. And they aren’t doing it completely on the backs of the working class. Shareholders are seeing less in dividends, white collar workers have also seen wage erosion. But mostly, they are doing it via stock options - changing the per share valuation of the company over time by releasing more stock to pay execs - which hurts shareholders more than it hurts workers (blue or white collar).
I’m going to turn this post around as only I can:
What if people with more difficult jobs will tend to develop better skills and people with better skills will…? I believe the thread is instead about what you should look like in the system. But, then, remember Neo’s phone call at the end of The Matrix, “a world without you”.