One of the things I mention in threads about resumes, interviews, and even investing is that the entire goal is to add value, i.e., show how you added more value to the company than what they paid you in return. Once you figure out how to do that regularly, and you learn how to pitch it properly, wealth will flow your way.
Great first post, Caboken.
What’s your opinion on the whole tax issue, pa? doesn’t actually know
My parents were quite wealthy for a while - $100K a year in Montana - and I’m sorry to say, they have little to show for it these days. When they sold their business, my father couldn’t seem to learn to ramp down his spending. He still hasn’t learned.
My in-laws are very comfortably well-off. I’m not sure how much so, and I don’t ask, but MIL thinks nothing (as far as I can tell) of dropping $125 a week to take the grandkids (mine and BIL’s kids) out to lunch, and then swimming. I’m very grateful for the swimming, as the kids love it, but the lunch always makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Because I can make sandwiches at home, or whatever. But it makes her happy, or she wouldn’t invite. She’s been unhappy since other appointments have interfered with the weekly lunch now for weeks, and asking me when we can do it again.
But I think she forgets that not everybody has quite so much disposable income. In asking about a trip to rainy Victoria BC, she said “They’ll need their raincoats.” They didn’t have any. I said I’d get some. She said “And of course the kids will also need to take their extra shoes, to change into after walking in the rain.” But they didn’t have 2 pairs of shoes, and I said so. Then she said “Well then, their rainboots.” And I said “They don’t have rainboots.” Because we just use umbrellas for our quick house-to-car and car-to-store/other destination quick trips, and it’s sufficient.
Now I began feeling quite uncomfortable. Because even if I get coats at $5 each in a thrift store, and boots at $4-5 a pair…it was still about $50 for all this stuff, after taxes. Some months I don’t have a spare $50 to drop on stuff we’ll use just once, particularly when I know we’ll end up paying for other things, like gas, ferry, meals out, visits to museums and other points of interest). Yes, sometimes I do have that kind of spending money. But not always. I didn’t want to say this to her, because then she’d volunteer to pay for it, but I didn’t want her to feel obligated to offer - after all, they’d already offered to pay our lodging on the trip.
I found the money somewhere, mostly at the expense of things I might ordinarily have purchased otherwise. Like non-staple food items. But it’s a bit frustrating, because it’s difficult to do that kind of budget juggling, and it would not have occurred to me to “need” rain coats and rubber boots otherwise. Once mentioned, they were “needed” and unavoidable.
I know my in-laws, and my parents also, lived very poor as young marrieds, but my parents appear to have lost their ability to “live poor” even though they probably would be better off if they did. My in-laws are very generous with their money, so I feel bad when I can’t simply do things they wouldn’t think twice about.
So maybe there’s “rich” and “Rich” and “RICH”, and maybe there’s a difference between each of these. But one of those steps has to be “Comfortable disposable income” to the point that you forget that not everybody has it.
Another thing to note, is where I’m coming from. My family was relatively wealthy since I can remember, but I grew up in a very rural setting. My friends hunted for their own food, and chopped down their own trees to live through the winter (with their family), etc. because their family needed to do that.
So while there may be a lot of talk in this thread about superficiality or expectations of some base-minimum “things” that people should have. When I say that I don’t see much difference between wealthy people and “normal” people, I’m saying that based on seeing the same amount of superficiality among the “normal” people once you move from somewhere like where I lived, to the city. I don’t see any reason to believe that there’s any particular difference between “how people are” when distinguishing between people making $X a year or $Y or $Y and $Z, when regardless of what numbers you put in there, the group making the higher number will react similarly to the group with the lower, and the lower to the higher.
Certainly, if you make it to the top 3% or 10% of income in the nation, there’s probably something different about you that enabled you to do that. But that pretty much just comes down to having a strong work ethic, being creative, and being able to coordinate things well. Anyone can have those, it’s just a question of in what proportions. The people who get in the top percent are to some extent just the ones born with the right mix to enable them to make more money. But the ability to make money is, of all the possible traits a person can have, pretty much not all that important of one.
You might as well say that “teachers” or “mechanics” are different from everyone else. They have traits which led them to ending up in a certain position in life as well.
What endless rants? Disagreeing with an attempt at hagiography does not constitute a rant.
I’ll never be Prom King? ::
:: Your’e just being silly here. Don’t make me get silly, too. You won’t like me when I’m … silly.
I ain’t your daddy, but I can certainly take a stab at the below.
Depends. This process is entirely political. Funds can be used to support local pork or used to pay our foreign or intragovernmental debt. The latter, when pursued in the right measure, defends the dollar and improves our long term debt service prospects.
Maybe. They could just buy tons of securities and pervert corporate incentives.
I am dubious as to the level of empirical support you have for these claims.
I do not know if you are thinking about this in a helpful way. The price of a company’s stock “affects” it only insofar as it is a measure of the value shareholders expect to receive in the future. This value is typically delivered by means of buybacks or dividends. I am not sure how this is relevant to your contention.
Well, when you put things in THOSE terms, it all sounds so nice. But I think we can manage to motivate people without making them go without medical insurance, or having a place to live, or enough food to eat. I mean, there are working people in America who can’t afford a place to live. This isn’t being competitive, this isn’t first-class seats vs. second-class seats, this is a shame and a disgrace. I really don’t care about the perks the rich get, I just don’t like seeing the poor ground up like hamburger meat to make us all feel more competitive.
So what I’m saying is, keep your luxuries and so forth, enjoy the heck out of them, but not when they come at the expense of a safety net for the poor. We got a decent safety net, party your heart out, I don’t care.
And who is it who typically decides who’ll sit on the board of directors? Help me out here … Sure wish I could decide who determines my compensation. I bet I’d be doing a LOT better financially.
Even a lot of business analysts will tell you that the relentless focus on increasing profits every quarter has resulted in a short-sighted system that can lose sight of long-term goals. And sometimes, the humanity of their employees and their customers.
Well, some companies have succeeded by increasing productivity. They have been able to create more product while simultaneously laying people off. Now, this may come as a shock to you, but being laid off and without income can be bad for people. They can lose their savings, their homes, etc. They can lose their very lives, if they can’t find another job with medical insurance and they have medical needs that require expensive treatment, and they’re too young to qualify for Medicare. That’s bad. Plus, the employees who remain can wind up working 60 to 80 hours a week to keep their jobs. That’s bad, too. Lots of companies lay people off all the time. Most of them find jobs eventually, I’m sure. But maybe not such good jobs. That can be bad, too. Sometimes people find better jobs, or they find a lower-paying, less stressful job is what they need. That’s good. But I don’t think it happens so often.
Lotta badness out there, if you ask me.
You’re just another guy/gal on a message board, like me. Just say what you think.
Well, here’s my feeling about corporations: they are fictional legal entities designed to make it easier to run a business without being personally liable if things go horribly wrong. They are not actual, flesh and blood human beings. And in my value system, sick and depraved as it may be, actual human beings are more important than fictional legal entities. So, when the needs of fictional legal entities are given more weight than that of actual human beings in society, I think that’s a bad thing, and that the corporation that’s getting that benefit has in some way become ‘evil.’
Rich people are just human beings like me, who have a lot of money. Some evil, some good, some smart, some dumb. I don’t give them any more or less respect than I give anyone else. Some earned their money, some inherited, a lot more than you would think are just lucky in various ways.
Your analogy is wrong because it assumes that all people start at the same place in life. Most start at home plate. But most really rich people start at second or third base. There are a lot of people who worked their asses off all their lives and got nowhere for it. It’s a lot more of a crapshoot than you’d like to believe.
Oh, capitalism works, no doubt about it. Best system out there for generating wealth. But I think it has to be managed in conjunction with a decent social safety net, strong human values and an awareness that the wealthy will always use their economic power to game the system to their advantage (causing long term problems). I also think that a strong middle class with the wealth and leisure time needed to innovate is the key to a strong economy. If you let the wealthy devour the middle class economically – and they will, if not prevented from doing so – then eventually you wind up with a Third World kinda country with lots of poor people and a few very wealthy owners, with the middle class being a small group of professionals and tradesmen catering to the needs of the wealthy.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen you write anything like this before. All of your past posts on the topic that I’ve seen have come off as blind class envy with a dose of prejudice against the rich. This new reasonable side is a very welcome change.
You’re right that there are serious problems today, but I wonder if it’s as bad as it seems. In 1936, Huey Long warned the US senate of the vanishing middle class in support of his Share The Wealth program. Has the middle class really been vanishing ever since then? I doubt it. If history is any guide, we’re about 10-15 years away from the same point in the generational cycle that we were in back then, so it’s not unreasonable to expect some similarity.
We’re not alone, though; there are a lot of businesspeople in favor of the triple bottom line, which does attempt to account for a company’s social and environmental impact as well as its finances. It’s still early, but this seems to work.
But we’re not faced with a situation where we have to select either the government or wealthy individuals to spend X dollars to improve the economy. We’re faced with a situation where we either borrow X dollars from the budget to give to wealthy people to improve the economy and hope the improvements outweight the deficit, or we don’t. So the question is: will the wealthy people having that money improve the economy enough to be worth the deficit? And if so, how?
It’s my belief that the vast majority of tax cuts to individuals in the highest income brackets ends up invested in established companies and savings vehicles like bonds. I’d like to understand how, if at all, such investment helps the economy.
I don’t see how a bump in the stock price gives a company more money, but even if a company is able to directly profit from a higher stock price, why would this translate into more jobs? Presumably, the company isn’t making any more widgets – why would it hire more people?
Mind you, I’m not arguing that we should tax the rich at 99%, that capitalism is bad, or that those in the highest tax brackets don’t affect economic growth. I’d just like to logic/evidence behind the understand the argument that cutting the upper tax brackets will cause economic growth, because I don’t currently see how it would work.
Typically, the ability of a company to borrow is somewhat dependent on the company’s market cap. Larger companies can borrow more.
Employees with stock options profit when the stock goes up.
Since the total market capitalization of a firm is (in theory) the net worth of the company, that is, assets less liabilities and whatnot, a bump in the stock price is reflecting the fact that the markets think the firm is now worth more. This may or may not have anything to do with what the company does for operations. e.g. as of this morning, General Motors Co. is worth $19bn in market cap, which means that the General Motors Corporation as a whole is worth slightly less that Porsche AG ($20bn), even though GM is a much “larger” operation in common sense terms than Porsche.
Not quite.
Assets - Liabilities = stockholders equity.
But stockholders equity is made up of Stock at Par, Retained Earnings (profit kept and not distributed as dividends) and Additional Paid in Capital.
Additional Paid in Capital is tied to the stock price at the time the stock is struck. However, fluctuations in a companies stock prices will not impact their balance sheet - unless they issue more stock or buy back treasury stock.
…and that would be covered under the “whatnot” section of my explanation. 
My personal guess would be that most flat taxers or lower-taxerers are basing their stance on what they feel is a reasonable fixed value to set tax at. Urging a specific number doesn’t equate to trying to get rid of welfare, social security or whatever. Dependent on the person doing the advocating and the specific value they’ve chosen, it may end up as that they’re trying to abolish welfare and social security and whatnot, but as yet I’ve not seen anything indicating that anyone is trying for that, nor that the majority of any one group is.
Your contention was that: Trickle down doesn’t work because giving rich people money just means that money ends up somewhere that garners profit for only the rich person.
My response was that: I don’t think that lowering taxes gives rich people more money, so I think it’s unrealistic to assume that.
But assuming it to be true regardless, I can’t think of any way in which money can generate profit except by expanding the economy. Now, I’m not an economist; I can’t trace out how investment actually grows the money. But it seems to take more faith to believe that money can grow without it coming from increased profit/productivity somewhere, than to assume that it is. So again, I get the feeling that your contention is making an assumption that isn’t realistic.
To again, though, give the benefit of the doubt and assume both your statements to be true–i.e. that rich people will get more money, and that they will be the only ones to profit from it–that still leaves us with asking why are we to assume that the government, having the same money, wouldn’t end up against the same wall whereby they have no way to invest the money without it just growing profit for themselves? It’s not like there’s anything a government can invest in that a bank couldn’t. So if we’re to assume a bank can’t invest in a way to improve the economy, I don’t see how the government can.
Now saying that it isn’t a binary issue of giving money to the government or wealthy people is ignoring that your original question is binary. The original question was whether giving money to the rich ends up adding to the economy. The only thing I can compare that to is the case where you don’t give the money to the rich. So unless I’m missing something in my reading of your question, those are the only situations we can possibly face.
But I can’t personally say that I’m willing to argue over the last point. I don’t think the assumptions that wealthy people will receive more money by lowered taxes (in a self-correcting system like the free market), nor that they will profit off air are realistic. So arguing for or against anything making those assumptions just doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
That I can think of (off the top of my head, right now), there are only three real world reasons to give X percent of money to the government.
Only item #1 is somewhere where the government, in particular, can do something to promote growth and productivity that a regular corporation couldn’t do. But each of those is fine to set a fixed number to. I don’t think it’s reasonable to argue that a number 4 exists:
Taxing industry to promote industry, just doesn’t strike me as making sense. At base minimum, all you’re doing is increasing the running cost for a company. True, that cost comes right back in, assuming the government can put it right back where it was, or even encourage growth if it does things right. But a bank can do that too. It is in fact precisely what banks do. And I can’t think of any financial or actuarial math that the government would be able to do that a bank couldn’t. While as I can think of reasons why a bank would be more prone to being fair to all clients (due to their being less politics), and seek for their clients to profit as much as possible as they have a vested interest.
Profit is profit. Regardless of whether a company makes a profit from having sold more widgets, or having done an IPO, or somehow gotten “stock profit” however it works, it’s profitting. If your profit grows, you expand the company.
Say, for instance, that you are the CEO of a company, and that stock can directly be turned into money, and that stock value is based on people’s belief in the growth of your company.
In this situation, I as the CEO might come up with a plan to, for instance, start selling widgets in Australia. So I announce that I am looking to expand operations into Australia. My stock rises, I cash in, giving me the money to start a widget factory in Sidney. I didn’t make more widgets, and yet I did hire more people. Point in fact, my stock rose based on the expectation that I would hire people.
Evil Captor:
Great comments. You’ve got me thinking…
The medical care system is a confusing mess. My guess is that this will be a huge issue over the next few years, and that something simpler will emerge. Personally I don’t see insurance as the solution. What is needed is for the American government to say “Americans need some minimum level of healthcare, and the government must provide it.” Insurance companies are “for profit” enterprises. I’m not opposed to them, but it feels like a distraction from the real issue, which is “Should any American citizen be refused basic healthcare because they can’t afford it?” I think the answer here is clearly no. Where it gets muddy for me is in the areas of elective health care, or premium health care. I like the idea of establishing a floor which is free healthcare, paid for by tax dollars, with an option, for those who can afford it, to pay for premium services. To put this in clearer words, if someone can afford a private suite at the hospital, or to go to a private hospital, then why should this be forbidden? If someone wants cosmetic surgery, and can afford it, this is fine. But, this has nothing to do with the floor (minimum taxpayer supported health care level) that should (and, I believe will) be established.
As to providing everyone a place to live and food to eat, isn’t that accomplished by welfare? I honestly don’t know much about the welfare system, but my understanding is that there are government programs which help those who cannot find work. Are there Americans who have no place to sleep, and nothing to eat, who have no government program available to help them? Perhaps, but I don’t think so.
My only objection to the government offering housing and food to the poor, is that you need to have a scenario in which people are incentivised to work, or some percentage will not work. If someone can make $600 a month while staying home, or $800 a month by working, there is a percentage who could be working, but suddenly think of their job as really only earning them $200 per month. I’ve spent much of my life living in France, where a considerable percentage of the population is unemployed, and receives free housing, health care and government funding. When life gets too cushy without a job, the willingness to “do what it takes” to find a job declines, and you have a rising percentage of the population which is consuming taxpayer dollars without paying taxes. Time will tell, but I suspect France is destined for serious economic crisis if this trend is not reversed. This is easier said than done.
Even if I wanted to, how I could I enjoy a luxury at the expense of the poor? How would I go about doing that? The only thing I can think of would be to stop spending money. When people spend money, it is usually on a product, or a service. In both cases, there are jobs involved. Spending money creates jobs. Spending more money creates more jobs.
I do not understand how anyone can think that the wealthy want to steal the poor’s “safety net.” Where does this kind of thought come from? I know hundreds of wealthy people, and can’t remember one ever saying “let’s go steal from the poor,” or “how do I take away money from the employees so that I can make more for me?” That isn’t how the system works. When successful people get together, it is often to raise money for one charity or another (trust me – attending fund raising dinners, is a common part of my life).
There are certainly times when successful people strategize how to deliver their product at a lower price, which is sometimes seen by employees as conspiring against them. However, a reality of business, in many industries, is that if someone else can deliver the same product cheaper, or a better product at a lower price – then you either find a way to compete, or send everyone home. I don’t know of a solution to this issue. As a business person, I would have loved the government decreeing that no one could sell widgets below some set price that allowed me a guaranteed profit margin. This actually does occur in some monopolies, such as electricity. However, I never had that luxury, and most businesses don’t. In most businesses, you are at the mercy of what the competition does to you, and what your customers do to you – and, if your product isn’t moving as projected, some employees have to go, or all employees may wind up going. Those are your only two options. I like to think of it as “I laid off hundreds and hired thousands.” Lay-offs (or, as I prefer to think of it “conforming staff size to revenue”) are an inevitable fact of life, in companies that can not afford to sustain losses, which represents most companies in America. No one wins in a lay-off, neither the company, nor the employee. Great CEOs manage to avoid lay-offs, but if someone tells you they are 100% avoidable, in a non-monopoly enterprise (that wants to be in business 100 years from now), they are very likely fibbing.
You determine your compensation. There are books, and websites, that can tell you what the pay is for different professions. Hint: Doctors make more than cab drivers. There are very few careers that are off-limits for anyone in America. Or, are you saying that you think the pay for your particular job should be higher? If you believe your job is not being properly valued by your company, switch employers. I know this sounds flippant, but I am dead serious. If you are a solid employee, and darn good at your job, and you look at the surveys, and find you are not being properly valued, find a company that will pay you what you are worth. A huge percentage of the time, if you walk into your current employer and say “The Acme Widget company just offered to pay me an extra $200 a month, I am giving my 30 day notice”, the employer will match or better the offer. It is sad that employees have to do this, but it is a fact of life.
It may help to give a brief description of how the payroll process works at companies, and if you have a suggestion as to how it should be different, I hope it is a good one, and you can get the word out – but, here’s how the system works today: Each year, a revenue forecast was done. We knew our gross profit, and we knew which hard costs would be rising (things like rents and materials), we also knew what profitability we needed to show the street (shareholders). We also knew how our average pay by position ranked against the bell curve for each position, and how we felt the quality of our workforce compared to other companies. We also knew what our needs were for new staff, and had a sense of what price we’d need to pay to hire the needed employees. All of this went into a spreadsheet, and 100s, or 1,000s of hours of work went into trying to create a spreadsheet that made sense for everyone. As bizarre as it sounds, my focus as the CEO was not on trying to maximize profits, but on trying to build a plan that had the smallest possible profit that the banks and shareholders would buy off on without firing me. Planning was an iterative process, with a goal of making everyone happy, plus setting up the company for survival and long-term growth. At this end of this exercise, we would usually arrive at a percentage of existing payroll that could be granted in raises. For our company, this usually came in between 3 and 5%. This number spanned all employees, and was pushed down by division into the company. Departmental managers were then expected to look at performance to see how to distribute the money. My goal was that poorly performing employees would get as little an increase as possible, and top performing employees would get the maximum.
There are exceptions to the above. Profitability is not a part of the equation when determining teacher’s salaries, fireman’s salaries, police salaries, or any taxpayer employee. It is also somewhat true for the salaries of many employees of unions, although ultimately, for these people, if salaries do not yield profitable companies, then jobs shift overseas, or go away. I haven’t the vaguest idea how disconnecting salaries from profitability could ever be successfully accomplished within the private sector, without adversely impacting competition and capitalism – but, it sounds great to me. If there were a way I could have doubled everyone’s salary, and still kept the banks and shareholders happy, as well as not compromising the short-term AND long-term business prospects of the company, I would have been the first in line to do so.
I agree completely. It’s actually worse than that. Stocks trade every hour, even every minute, of virtually every business day. Great leaders try to ignore this, and make decisions based on a 100 year view of the company. However, it is impossible not to be affected by very real impact of your stock price on employees, banking relationships, customer relationships, and even personal job security (remember: CEOs work for the board, and the board works for the shareholders, and who are the shareholders? You are! – and I’m assuming you bought stock wanting to see its value INCREASE). I did what I could to not base decisions on the stock price, but did I ever rush a product out the door to make a quarter? Sure. Did I regret it later? Sure. Short-term thinking is usually bad for business in the long-run.
You could not be more wrong. Companies are comprised of people. Without companies there would be no jobs, and without jobs there is no economy. Cuba has very little capitalism, and a great focus on people (free education, free healthcare, free housing, etc.) I would encourage you to research whether or not there are more Americans fleeing America to immigrate to Cuba, or Cubans fleeing Cuba for America. There are few people working at companies that are not “actual human beings”, and all decisions are made by “actual human beings.” No fictional legal entity has ever made a business decision as far as I know.
OK. I’m listening. You’re now CEO of a company. Your sales force forecast that you would sell one million widgets next year. You built 800,000 widgets last year, and business is booming. The estimate feels right. It takes months to recruit and train widget-makers. You start hiring, and training, and ramp up production. Mid-way through the year a Chinese widget is launched into the market for a price 20% lower than yours. Your options are: a) Conform staff-size to your new revenue forecast, b) Pretend people like you so much they will overpay for your widgets, c) Keep the excess staff, and hope the bank won’t pull your line of credit when you turn in losses, or d) ??? What do you do? Yes. Lay-offs are bad. There are lots of bad things that happen every day that I do not have an answer for. This is on the list.
There are certainly those who lucked their way into a lot of money, but generally speaking, everyone gets luck of some sort, both good and bad. It’s like poker. To some extent the cards you are dealt limit your options. However, over the long haul, a good poker player always beats a bad poker player. I’d say: whatever cards you are dealt, make the best of them, and over the long haul, you are very likely to win. Specifically, get up early, start studying, give thought to your choice of career, and if you don’t like the upside potential, learn a new career. Use 10 hours for working, and 8 for studying. I had a fair amount of luck, but I also was ready for the breaks when they came. While doing a paper route, at 16, I was reading accounting text books in my spare time. While picking up diapers in the parking lot at a drive in movie, I was reading books on management. When opportunities came, I fought for them. Perhaps no opportunities would have ever come, and I would have wasted all that time – but, I don’t think life works like that. If you hustle, America is a great country for presenting opportunities.
It is absolutely true that children of the wealthy are more likely to go to private schools, and to get into top colleges. They are also more likely to have parents who can help them get into good opportunities, or fund businesses. It is also true that successful people are probably better able to counsel their children and business. If it were possible for children to choose their parents, I’d suggest everyone choose being born to highly successful people who are well connected at Harvard, and in the business community. Heck – why stop there. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone were born a prince (or, princess) in some country with a monopoly on oil? Realistically speaking, I don’t think this is possible. I also don’t think it is possible to keep all households at the same economic level (although, Castro might argue differently). The honest truth is that everyone begins life with a different “head start”. Looking at this from my perspective, the answer here is not to drag down the rich, but to move up the poor. I know I sound like a broken record, but the answer to this is: jobs. Create more jobs, and create more higher-paying jobs, and guess what – fewer people are poor. My guess is that if you do some research you will find that more jobs are generated by rich people than poor people. This said, unless you shift to socialism or communism, there is always going to be someone with more money, and someone with less money (actually: who are we kidding? Even in communist countries there are people with more money than others). And, that means, children that are born to an uneven playing field. Once again, this is an issue I cannot solve, other than to say that if our country makes smart economic decisions, I am comfortable that we will reduce the number of poor faster than if we make dumb economic decisions. Disincentivising hard work, a competitive spirit, and a good work ethic, leads to economic disaster.
I certainly support capitalism, a decent social safety net, strong human values, and even world peace – but, disagree with your contention that the wealthy somehow use their economic power to game the system to their advantage. Can you give me an example of this? I really don’t understand how I could do that if I wanted to.
I work with people in financial markets so I know lots of rich people- worth $10,000,000 or more - and a few superrich people - the ones who make the Forbes 400 list.
On a superficial level there are differences. The richer the person and the longer they are rich, the more gracious and cultured they are. No doubt about it from my experience.
As you get to know them better the differences disappear. They have the exact same feelings, concerns, problems as everyone else. Read the first few pages of Bonfire of the Vanities, when Sherman is walking a stubborn dog and you’ll see what I mean.
Biggest surprise: the things money can’t buy. One of my close friends grew up in a country with socialized medicine and his parents are worth at least $100,000,000. But his elderly mom is seriously ill and she gets the same shit medical treatment as everyone else. No doctors available on weekends, etc. One would think that with their money they could just hire a doctor and a few nurses FT to sit around and read novels in their living room. But these people who have shown amazing smarts and ability in many arenas over eight decades have not been able to pull this off.
And BTW, there’s nothing funny about severe anxiety. It’s not funny when a working class mom can’t leave her home and it’s not funny when a 33 year old Princeton grad making $1,000,000 at a hedge fund loses a big chunk of money on Monday and gets called into the boss’s office onTuesday.
Of course the rich are different. It is a different culture just like any culture. And like any cultural differences, the things that make us human- and our overall level of happiness- is pretty much the same.
For example, the rich use their money differently. There is more to being rich than “spend less than you earn”. There are millions of working class people who do exactly that, get plenty of money, and never become “rich.” Why? The rich invest their money and are willing to take risks, whereas the working class saves for retirement and choses low risk investments. This may sound like a simple difference in habits, but really it’s a different worldview.
I’ve known a lot of very smart people be encouraged by their families to not go to college, to not reach for the stars, because their families valued stability and normalicy over excellence. And we get our ideas and attitudes from our families. That can be something that is very hard to overcome.
And when oppertunities do come, rich and poor people take advantage of them differently. For example, you don’t see a lot of poor kids joinging the Peace Corps. Why? Because they poor kids that make it through college are expected to do something useful (doctor, lawyer, etc.) with their education and are also encouraged to pay off their loans as soon as possible.
Anyway, there are a lot of little things like this that add up to a different culture and the different behavoirs and attitudes (but not feelings) that go with that.
I see just as many differences among the rich as I do the rest of us.
My cousin was a self-made man who began life very poor. When I met him he was almost 90 and worth $25,000,000. One of the things that I liked about him was that he wasn’t wasteful. He would buy a really fine pair of shoes, and then when the soles wore out, he would have them resoled. That makes sense to me.
Yet he would fly to Tennessee for a visit and buy an expensive car to be driven back to California.
He was a devout person, yet not very good with personal family relationships. He was so used to being in charge that he didn’t leave much room for loved ones to be in charge of their own lives. That brought him a lot of unhappiness.
Just one story among many. I’ve known other rich people that were very down-to-earth. Sometimes I would know them for a while before I knew how really wealthy they were.
Some rich people never seemed to feel “rich enough” to stop feeling insecure about losing all of it. (That was true especially of those who lived through the Great Depression.)
I just can’t make easy generalizations about them. After all, we’re all rich and most of us don’t think of ourselves as rich. Most of the people in the world would see us as extremely rich. Are we very much alike?
That’s patently ridiculous. :rolleyes:
Let’s say you make a boatload of money one year. What are you going to do with the money? Put it in the bank? Fine… the bank can use your money to provide home loans to poorer people. Build a new house? Carpenters and plumbers will get a lot of that money. Buy a big yacht? The money will go to boat builders in Maine.
Unless you stuff all your money in a mattress, most of the money you make will become someone else’s income.
I think establishing minimum taxpayer supported health care would be a LOT cheaper than the present system of letting poor uninsured people get so sick they wind up in an emergency room and then using very expensive procedures to nurse them back to health – until next time. Especially for chronic conditions that are easily treatable with inexpensive medications like high blood pressure and hypothyroidism and so forth. Good preventive care is a LOT cheaper than our present system, and better in terms of human values. But I ain’t seeing it. I think that’s because big drug companies and insurers LIKE the present system and are gaming the system (i.e., bribing lawmakers in various legal ways) to keep it as it is. Bad for poor people, bad for taxpayers generally, but hey, it works for those big, rich corporations.
No, actually, welfare doesn’t work all that well in this regard. The system was largely dismantled back in the 90s under the Clinton Administration. The only part that really remains intact is Women and Infant Child Care (WIC) because of a general feeling that kids shouldn’t be permitted to starve in America. (Also why the Reagan Administration got their little fingers burned when they went after the school lunch program.)
Most welfare programs are now welfare-to-work programs where you’re on welfare for a fixed amount of time, during which you receive training, and then you get a job and are off welfare, or dont’ get a job and are off welfare. And the thing is, most minimum wage jobs, which is what welfare recipients generally get if they get a job, pay very low wages and don’t have health benefits. So you’re working, and that’s good, I agree with that. But you’re outta luck if you get sick – I dont’ agree with that one.
I’m not sure what happens wrt housing and modern welfare programs. I suspect you have to find housing on your own once you’re employed/at the end of the string. And there are a lot of working people who can’t afford housing. Had a story just a few years ago where I live about an older waitress at IHOP who was hiding from her kids because she didn’t know that she was living in a shelter made of cardboard boxes. And that’s just wrong.
Already covered. I’m OK with incentives to work. That’s the way most welfare works now, excpet for WIC, which I do not think applies to women with school age children (see free lunches above).
Yeah, yeah, I’ve been hearing for years from libertarians of various stripes how those European fat cat socialist countries are going to collapse economically any day now. Sorry, ain’t buying it. That wolf has been cried about too often.
I can’t speak for you, but there’s a saying that goes, “It is not enough that I should win: others must lose.” I think it drives a lot more libertarian and conservative thinking than they would like to admit. In other words, part of the pleasure of the luxury is knowing others not only do not have it, but lack enough to eat.
Of course, rich people dont’ steal from the poor (or to be more exact, the middle class) on an individual basis. Typically, their managers do it for them. Frex, rich people want profits to go up X%. Manager Dibble sees this and knows the market for his goods/services is flat, but figures he can get profits up to that level by firing Y number of employees and bullying the ones still holding onto their jobs to work longer hours. The shareholders get their profits, hoorah! People lose their jobs, hoorah! Other people lose touch with their families becuase they work such long hours, hoorah! Another victory for capitalism! Champagne, waiter!
Yes, charities are all well and good and make an excellent pretext for a party. But they’re just no substitute for a well-organized social safety net. Historically, charity just doesn’t deliver the goods when it comes to solving social problems – they’re just band-aids.
Well, most theories of capitalism I’m familiar with hold that four to five percent unemployment is necessary so that there’ll be free labor to take up the slack when companies start to hire. So why not figure that as part of the cost of doing business, and see that those 4 or 5 percent don’t suffer unduly? Give them minimal housing, minimal food, minimal medical care and hey, cable TV and all the training they can stand. 'Cause being unemployed is boring.
Bullshit. The marketplace determines my compensation. Besides, I think all theories that base themselves on a theoretical wonderful person who happens to be stuck in a dead in job are bull. We need to take care of average folks, not Joe Dynamo.
More later. I’m on a limited time budget right now.
Well, I certainly learned a lot from this thread. Sorry for not keeping up with it. I got caught up in schoolwork, and work work. After a, this thread had really taken off to new heights, and it was all I could do to sit back and take in all of the different information and opinions. Great, great stuff. Consider ignorance fought.