My parents aren’t wealthy, nor were my grandparents, but I am. There was no rigging the system. I worked my ass off in school. Obtained scholarships and grants to get a college education. Obtained a great job out of college based upon my academic and leadership qualifications that I developed in school. Worked my ass off at my first job and continued to do so, took risks with different opportunities, succeeded based upon my qualifications. Invested my earnings well. I make seven figures a year. I pay more taxes than 99% of the other taxpayers in this country, which I’m okay with, because I pay my fair share. Yet there is a growing number of people in this country that believe I should pay even more.
Why? Because they weren’t as “lucky” as me? Because they weren’t willing to take the risks I was willing to take? Because they weren’t as ambitious as me? Because they see themselves as victims, and rationalize that I’m part of the cause of their victimhood?
The wealthy and the non wealthy are living in the same society. If the society is the same for both then that must mean there is something different about the wealthy and non wealthy and that wealth is not just a product of society.
If the goal is a wealthy society then it makes sense to have resources in the hands of those who will use them to create wealth. The wealthy have shown they can do that and the non wealthy have not then it makes sense to have more resources in the hands of the wealthy is good for wealth creation.
You can’t say that at all. Let’s take an example of someone I know. One of their grandfathers took out a loan in like 1920 and bought a several hundred acre farm outside of town. He lived out the remainder of his life as a not particularly well off farmer. Eventually the city grew outward, and not long after he had died, parts of the farm were sold. Eventually the whole place ended up being sold by his children. Now the children and grandchildren are slightly wealthy with the cash gained through selling the farmland.
How exactly did they rig the system? How is that unfair to anyone else? Why should anyone else deserve any of their wealth?
Or let’s use another- a grandparent starts out in the 1930s as a bank teller in a mid-sized city(~60-70k), and over the following 5 decades, ends up as a senior VP of the bank (the days before college was required) through hard work and competence. In such an exalted position, he’s paid fairly well. He invests a lot of it conservatively. After he passes away, his widow has a higher tolerance for risk, and over the next 30 years, manages to grow that initial investment stake into something in the low six figures- such that when she passed away, her children got upwards of a million each, and the grandchildren and spouses of the children got in the high five figures. How did she rig the system? How is anyone’s wealth ill-begotten?
It’s a fundamental difference in the way of looking at wealth- poor people and liberals tend to view it as an individual thing, while in my experience, wealthy people look at it as much more of a collective family thing- the goal is to concentrate and pass on wealth to their descendants.
I would agree that the super-rich, the Jerry Joneses and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world shouldn’t be as wealthy as they are. But a lot of the time, what we see is a lot of animosity toward the low end of the wealth spectrum, or toward people who just make high paychecks without even necessarily being ‘wealthy’. Like doctors making $250k a year. Those people aren’t necessarily gaming anything- that’s usually a combination of smarts, hard work and a degree of luck.
There’s also the notion of fairness- I think that it’s being perceived differently. One side says “this guy has next to nothing and this guy has a lot. This is unfair.”, while the other guy says “This guy wasn’t successful in school and has nothing and this guy was successful and has a lot. This IS fair.”. Both are equally valid from their own perspectives, and illustrate a lot of the left/right wing differences in thought. Of course, things aren’t so cut and dried in reality.
Serious question: has the modern Conservative Movement (circa 1975-Present) been right about anything? Anything at all? Their entire world view is about creating a society where there are a small number of elite Billionaires that concentrate nearly all the wealth and power, a tiny middle class that provides that elite professional services and vast number poor serfs that work for just enough to keep working until they die. Every policy they support (not what they say they support but what they actually support and pass as policy) is an arrow aimed at this outcome.
Now they are in the Authoritarian stage of this transition because the racists they had been courting for decades for votes have taken over the levers of the Party.
bump, I think the best argument for “sharing the wealth” (aka taking from one guy to give to another) is that “bad” choices increase when the “have nots” have absolutely nothing, and those bad choices negatively impact everyone…including the virtuous folks who always do the right thing.
To me, it is not about society punishing winners to reward losers. It is about keeping the losers from being so demoralized and desperate that they punish the winners. Also, social science has been able to show that everyone does better when there is less of a gap between rich and poor. The poor of course enjoy benefits, but so do the more well-to-do. For one thing, the middle class is not as anxious about failure and " keeping up with the Jones’s’". And when poverty is dignified (you have guaranteed housing, food, and healthcare but no, you may not have a car or the nicest pair of shoes), it becomes okay to take respectable risks, like starting your own business or going back to school.
You have a great story. It’s the embodiment of the American ideal, and I say that with no snark intended.
This might not pertain to you, but quite often people with stories like yours tend to believe that everyone who is similarly wealthy achieved that wealth with similar work ethic and ambition – and that people who have not achieved that level of wealth must have inferior work ethic and ambition. That, in short, everyone deserves what they get.
But that’s obviously not true. Plenty of wealthy people have mediocre work ethics and ambitions, and lots of people work their asses off and do everything “right” but do not achieve much wealth. Life isn’t fair. Shit happens. Luck also happens. That doesn’t make less wealthy people “victims.” They’re just, in many cases, less fortunate (and I mean that literally).
Please provide a cite for the roughly 35-40% of Americans that identify themselves as Conservative believe as you have stated. You won’t because what you state are not conservative beliefs.
I’m not sure how this statement reconciles with the large number of conservatives who live modest lives in rural areas of the country.
Then again, I’m also not sure why rural, working class people feel so closely aligned with billionaires and Wall Street types when it comes to conservative values.
I believe a recent study suggested that only 20% of millionaires in the US inherited their wealth, and the approx. 80% are like me, and grew their wealth over time through their own devices. Did some of that 80% do it dishonestly, probably yes, but I highly doubt it was significant.
How come the argument that wealthy people don’t deserve their wealth, is based upon the assumption that they must have had it given to them or they must have earned it using unethical means?
I don’t believe that less wealthy people are victims, but a large number of people on the left portray the less wealthy as victims of a rigged system. Establishing victimhood has been a political ploy of both sides since politics began.
I think the left would do well to separate out the people who want to dignify poverty (as Monstro put it so well), and those who basically have sour grapes that they’re not as successful.
A LOT of the noise on these boards is very sour-grapish and negative- there’s little acknowledgement that someone might just end up wealthy with a lot of hard work and a bit of luck. It’s always got to be that it was ill-begotten wealth, and that they don’t deserve it.
I think a lot of people with lower levels of wealth (the majority of wealthy people, if not the majority of wealth) might actually be on board with some of this, if it wasn’t seemingly always couched in rhetoric implying that they’re assholes and bastards merely for being wealthy, and that they necessarily stole it from someone or made it on the backs of some poor workers. That kind of bullshit does nothing but alienate people.
I’m not arguing that wealthy people don’t deserve their wealth. You do. And even if you had inherited it, you could make the argument that your parents (or grandparents, etc.), by being hard-working and ambitious, deserved the right to have comfortable children.
But proposals to raise taxes to pay for progressive policies don’t have to be based on a belief that the wealthy don’t deserve their wealth or that the less wealthy are victims of rigged system. To vastly oversimplify, they’re based on the idea that the system as it currently exists does not offer enough potential for more people like you to succeed, and penalizes people whose ambitions are set back by circumstances beyond their control.
It’s about how much taxes people are paying. If you decry taxes in total, then that is where your argument really lives, not in some argument against putative people who are going to take your savings away when you earned it.
If you have an absolutist view of the sacred ownership of ones own income (Which republicans, libertarians, and gadflys do) in a democracy then you are having an argument about taxes, not wealth redistribution.
And we already have taxes. And we need them to have our freedom. This is where you argument starts. What level is unfair in a democracy?
I don’t believe you didn’t get favors on your way to riches.
There are a lot of different conservative beliefs and ideals, and a lot of different liberal beliefs and ideals. and not all people who identify as one or the other will hold with every single one of them. So there is a danger about making gross generalizations, but here goes. In general, conservatism is about resisting change, about either slowing change, keeping things as they are, or (in the extreme), yearning for days past (egs. Reactionaries, Neonazis, and White supremacists . The left is the opposite of that, where they don’t see the past as all rosy, they see flaws in current systems, and they want to reform or change them. In the most extreme case, they may want to wipe out everything and start with a clean slate (egs. anarchists, and revolutionaries).
All that said, the one absolute is change. Not everything changes equally, and not everything changes at the same time. And some changes are fast, some are slow. There’s changes to the environment, to religious views, to moral views, to morees, to culture, to technology. And this happens both globally and locally, and everywhere in between.
Some changes should be resisted. I’d be very unhappy if in 30 years, my community was under water. I’d be very unhappy if my home, the US that is, fell behind economically because it couldn’t educate it’s masses to be able to deal with changes to technology and the economic consequences. I’d be very unhappy if changes to our society meant that my life would be in increased danger by virtue of the increasing acceptance of white nationalism and antisemitism in my country. That’s the kind of change that I want to resist. Ironically, that makes me a liberal. So as I said, broad statements like the above are dangerous.
But back to the OP, the reason why I see reality as having a liberal bias is that change is inevitable, and if you don’t react by changing yourself, you are not dealing with reality. You don’t HAVE to deal with everything. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle either. So the more people decide to stand up for themselves (And the more those people standing up for themselves are not part of the entrenched power structure of the US), the more we have to adapt. And that is a decidedly liberal standpoint.
But sometimes–dare I say even most of the times–the truth is alienating.
A lot of Millennials are sick and tired of being lectured to by self-righteous Boomers on the virtues of hard work and making the right “choices”. They say stuff like “Why, when I was your age, I already owned my own my home! And here you are, living with roommates and dicking around in low-wage jobs like a loser!”
These Boomers don’t like to be reminded of how cheap college tuition was for them. They get defensive when they are reminded that homes in the 1970s were affordable even for the minimum wage earner, while that is not the case now. They feel bad when they are reminded that they were able to get a job right out of college, but now a college degree has the same gravitas as a high school diploma. In a word, they feel “alienated” when their kids remind them that they had got breaks. Perhaps if these people don’t want to deal with alienation, they need to stop being so judgy of others less fortunate than them.
Top 1% of earners in the US pay approx. 37% of total taxes collected in the US.
Top 10% of earners in the US pay approx. 70% of total taxes collected in the US.
What level of tax burden should be born by this group? Closer to 80%? 90%?
Please tell me what sort of favors I received, since you are all knowing.
You said you took risks. What about people who did the same, and took the same risks, but those risks did not pay off?
There are plenty of people out there that work just as hard or even harder as you. Do they deserve to make as much or more than you?
You also make more than 99% of the people in this country. Do you work harder than 99% of the people of the country?
What do you mean by “even more”? Do you mean 100% of your earnings? Then I’m with you. If we are debating whether the top marginal rate should be 35%, 39%, or 45% or something then that’s really just asking you to pay your fair share.
If it is looked at that people even above you should be paying even more, up to even 70%, is that people thinking that you should pay even more?
That’s one. Is is someone’s fault that due to genetic or environmental factors, they have less intelligence than you? Is it their fault if you were brought up with more of a emphasis on education and advancement?
Or they did, and the risks didn’t work out as well for them as for you.
Maybe, but unlikely.
No.
Because there are services, that when provided to the general public, improve the lives of everyone, rich and poor, and you have more resources to spare to pay into taxes to provide those services.
That’s what I said. That’s why improving the lives of the poor improves the lives of the wealthy.
And what difference are you proposing this is?
Which includes consumers of goods and services, without which, there would be no possibility of wealth creation.
Some have. Some have demonstrated that they can take wealth that others have created, and transfer that wealth to their pockets.You are describing Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos here, but the complaint is people like Martin Shkreli. What wealth exactly is he creating? For that matter, that person who just won the nearly billion dollar mega millions in SC recently, has that person shown the ability to create wealth? Or was it just luck?
If all the wealthy people were Warren Buffets, then you would have a point. As some of the wealthy is Bernie Madoffs, it stands to reason to question whether everyone is getting what they “deserve”.
Neither did the wealthy, until they did. If you don’t give the non-wealthy a chance to create wealth, then it is a self fulfilling prophecy that the non-wealthy do not create wealth.
I’m not wealthy, but I opened a business that currently pushes almost a million in sales a year, with most of that going out in payroll. Is that creating wealth? I created a service that did not exist 6 years ago, and have created a dozen jobs over those six years that did not exist.
Being that I am not wealthy, but have demonstrated that I can and do create wealth, that pretty much negates the entirety of the premise that your thesis is based upon.
It involves a crazy amount of hard work and hours, but if I had started from a point of wealth, rather than with just about nothing, then it would have been much, much easier.
I disagree with the premise, so I also disagree with the conclusion. Once you have wealthy, you use money to gain more money. You do not necessarily use the money to create wealth. Also, you can create wealth even if you are not wealthy, so to concentrate the resources in the hands of the few means that you are taking away the ability for the vast majority to find ways of creating wealth.
Well, for instance would a black person have had that opportunity?
If that farm had turned out to be a poor investment, like many of the other people who did the same thing, would his kids had that slightly increased wealth?
If he had not been wealthy enough to qualify for that loan, would he have been able to pass that on?
It’s not rigged, and it’s not even unfair, but that doesn’t mean that everyone actually got what they “deserved”. Different people did the same things, and got different results. To look back at your fortunes, and be dismissive of the work that others have put in that did not end up being as lucrative is what gets annoying sometimes.
Once again, harder to do if you are not a white male. Would you at least agree that the system was rigged against anyone who was not a white male who could at least present as being a straight christian until fairly recently?
Fortunately, her greater tolerance to risk did not mean that she got wiped out, as many of her peers did by following the same game plan.
No one has said the wealth is ill begotten, nor that it is rigged, so your question cannot be answered.
However, her neighbor, who had a husband at a competing bank who left her an investment nest egg, took the same level of risk, but it didn’t pan out too well. She invested in microprose, rather than microsoft. Just because it was not rigged or ill gotten doesn’t mean that she didn’t get more than she deserved, while someone who followed the same path got less.
Well, that’s the thing. Concentration of wealth is inherently a bad thing for society, it means fewer opportunities for others to create wealth. Especially when so much of it is based on luck and chance. Wealth is created when there are more people in the business of creating wealth, not when there are fewer people with more wealth.
Your goal is directly contrary to the goal of having a wealthy society.
I don’t know. Some of these people have contributed greatly to our society. Would we be having this conversation if it were not for Bill Gates? How much is that worth?
Others have a great deal of money, but have not contributed to the wealth of our society. One thing that I think confuses people, is that wealthy people have money, and therefore, people think that wealth is money. But it’s not, money is just a means of exchange, it is not wealth.
Wealth is not created by adding a zero to your bank account. Wealth is created when you provide a product or service to a public that is willing and able to consume it. You are not creating wealth when you deposit your profits, you create wealth when you engage in a transaction where everyone comes out ahead. Dave Thomas created wealth when he built an international restaurant chain from nothing, but you also create wealth when you buy a Spicy Chicken Sandwich.
If you engage in a transaction that benefits you at the expense of another, then you are destroying wealth. If you take over a company, cut the wages, raise the prices and lower the quality, you can pocket a decent chunk of change, but you are depositing a fraction of the wealth that you have destroyed. You get wealthier, while society gets poorer.
I don’t really see the animosity. I do see a reaction when those people of higher wealth complain about not having enough. I do agree with some of the resentment towards those wealthy that hold those who are less fortunate in contempt.
But just the fact of having wealthy people, not really. You don’t get mad when you are at the beach and you see a yacht go by. But you do get mad when that yacht pulls up and inundates you in its wake.
I do consider it to be unfair in a country with more food than we can consume, and more empty houses than we have homeless people, that there are people without food or shelter.
That one has more than another is not unfair, but that one lives in luxury while their neighbor suffers in poverty is.
It is you that is lumping them together when you talk about resentment against the wealthy. I am sure that there are some people out there who are resentful towards wealthy people simply due to the wealth, but they a small minority.
However, whenever anyone talks about poverty and the negative consequences that all of society suffers as a result of it, it is those who defend the wealth inequality who conflate the arguments.
If you would like to see those arguments separated, then it is on you to not conflate them, not on us to “seperate” them, whatever that means.
See, like right here, you are doing it right now. Can you actually give me an example of this? I’m not saying that no one has said this, but I do not agree at all that it is a common sentiment.
I do agree, however, that any criticism of the wealth disparity in our country is treated as very sour grapish and negative, but that is because you are defensive about your wealth, and don’t want to be reminded that for the grace of god, you too could be living in a cardboard box, no matter how hard you worked.
Yeah, well, then stop telling them that the rhetoric used in criticising wealth disparity is implying that they are assholes and bastards for being wealthy. It is you and the defenders of wealth inequality who fabricate these implications, if you think that that bullshit does nothing but alienate people, then stop doing it.
I get it, if my wealthy friend tells me that the poor are all resentful towards us wealthy people due to thinking that we are assholes and bastards due to our wealth, then I would probably treat them rather contemptuously. But if I knew the truth, that almost no one is actually saying anything like that, then I would be more inclined to share my wealth to improve their situation.
It means I’m better at evaluating risks than they are. It means that I am able to create more value for my employer than they are.
Not unless they are able to create as much value as I do. Your worth to an employer, isn’t how hard you work, but how much value you create.
Again, the amount of money you earn is more correlated to how much value you create, not how hard you work. There is a difference.
What’s a determination of fair share? I pay a higher % of my income in taxes than most Americans. Yet, you say asking me to pay a 9% increase in my marginal tax rate is asking me to pay my fair share. I disagree with you. I argue that we as a society have allowed our federal government to bloom out of control, and programs should be cut to a more reasonable size of government. As someone who pays the lion’s share of taxes, my opinion on waste and mismanagement is just as valid as those seeking to fund their pet projects from Washington.
Okay, I suppose if you insist that you are able to tell the turn of the die better than the bettor next to you, who am I to argue? Arguing with gamblers never gets anywhere.
If you are better at evaluating risk, then you didn’t take risks. If you took risks, it means that there was a chance that you could fail. If there is a chance that you could fail, then there is someone who did the same thing that you did, but failed. If there was no chance that you could fail, then you certainly had some favors going for you, didn’t you?
Well, earlier you were saying that you deserved what you had because of your hard work, now you are saying that you deserve it because of the position that you found yourself in. As long as you realize that your criticisms of others not working as hard, or taking risks, or being ambitious are negated, then sure, now you deserve more because you are in a position to be more valuable.
This is not true. Not at all. There are many who do not create any value, and yet earn tons of money, and there are those who create quite a bit of value, and have no rewards. It is not as automatic a system as you seem to think it is.
So, what benefits did you have that put you in a position to be so valuable to your employer? Why would 100,000 other people not be able to provide the same value?
And yet, what you have left over is still more income than most americans. When your employer evaluates your value, he takes into account the taxes that you will have to pay. He knows that you would not take the job for 39% less than you get paid, so he increases the pay to compensate for those taxes. Those taxes that you pay are built into your income. Who ultimately pays those taxes, well, whoever your clients or customers are that value your skill so greatly.
I am asking you to do your part in funding the society that has rewarded you so richly.
I get that, and by the same token, I disagree that you are “paying your fair share” in exchange the being one of the wealthiest people in the wealthiest nation in history.
You have the opportunities to do pretty much anything you could want to do, so you spend it all complaining that you have to give back to support that system.
I hear this often, but when it comes to the actual specifics, exactly what it is that you want to cut, it ends up being pennies on the dollar that you want to save, and those things that you want to cut are the things that allowed the creation of the wealth that our nation currently enjoys.
The greatest economic gains were achieved while we had over a 70% marginal tax rate. Now that it is barely half of that, you want to complain about what you are missing out on.
You are correct that your opinion is exactly as valid as the next voter, no matter their wealth.
BTW, what pet projects are you talking about here, and if they were to be cut, how much would that translate into tax cuts for you? Keep in mind that currently, your tax cut is being funded by our children and grandchildren, as we fall trillions of dollars further into debt due to giving you that tax cut that you so needed to spur the economic activity that you have not spurred.