Whine & Cheese

You could always outsource the actual killing if you are not willing to do that job yourself. I hear some of these foreign guys will do anything for a price.Oh wait.... Isn't that where your rant started Phat - Are you drunk?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Yes, I cant blame the immigrants. Ernesto, our floorboy at the store, works as hard as any of us and makes half as much. He seems like a likeable guy. I blame the capitalists who hire him and pay him half his worth. The whole problem is that the wealthy know how to play the divide and conquer game as they exploit poor and middle class alike.Again, I agree with Frako except that morality wont let me kill any wealthy.Which means im still losing.

What you need to do is emmigrate.Then your work ethic will displace the indigins and you can clean up!(No pun intended).

Was the middle class fleeced?Wasn't it the US Middle Class that elected politicians that dismantled the safeguards?You have often told me that you refused to study history because it didn't interest you, but it might be a worthwhile effort to see if you could learn from what has happened in the past. the last time we saw an income disparity comparable to the present time was during the Edwardian and post Edwardian era.What could be learned from what happened then?

My take on this is that as soon and the monied class saw the middle class doing well they became a viable target for fleecing.Once they were in the monied classes sights it was pretty much a slow game over.With all the 'aspirational goods' marketed the middle class wanted more and more.Like unto a junky.Now this 'aspiration' seems to have infected the young 'uns without the ability to aquire such goods....

That would be close to what actually happened initially and lead to the Parliament Act of 1911 IIRC.

Because the secret american motto is "work hard enough and you can be the 1%". The american dream is built on selling the masses that if they aren't yet rich, they will be if they work hard and long enough. Why would the rest of us want to harm what we aspire to be? See that businessman over there making 6 or 7 figures a year? Work hard enough and you can be just like him. See those rock stars on MTV cribs? Work hard enough and you can have that too.

John Steinbeck put it best:

quote:

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Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

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What the hard workers often forget is that for the majority of them they will be putting in that hard work for the one with the 6-7 figure wages.

How are we not already a second or third class country? We have among the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The amount of homeless is not that of a first world nation. We have how many unemployed people? How can you still feel as though you are owed something just because you are an american? If we aren't already, we are becoming a laughing stock the world over.{abe}
That's not to mention SOPA, ACTA, and PIPA. First rate countries don't stifle free speech.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.

Phat, it has been the capitalist American dream that has prospered, both the wealthy and the middle class. The wealthy and upper middle class have afforded taxes for welfare, etc and jobs for the poor as well from the rich who have paid the lion's share of the taxes and who have had the capital for technology, enterprising corporations etc capable of hiring the middle class and poor, paying the highest wages on the planet.My son and his wife just embarked on a new business in a Southern city which has many wealthy citizens. It is these wealthy business people who made it possible for my son and sub-contractors who work with him to open this new business, less than a year old, already having more wanting his services than he is able to take on. He's good at what he does and is trustworthy. The word has gotten around among the elitist wealthy who are already waiting in line for his services.Phat, take a look around your house and your work place. Note all of the techy goodies like your computer, phones, etc and ask yourself, " Did the capitalist wealthy, the middle class or the poor make the establishment (I say establishment) of these enterprises possible?"It is the wealthy and middle class who have purchased initial offering of stocks which have financed the establishment of business enterprises..

Hi Buz, I think that we're all aware of capitalism's strengths. We all know that capitalism is good at running a marketplace and providing opportunities. The major complaint is that unfettered capitalism doesn't do these things well enough.Capitalism is very good indeed at making the rich richer. It's just that it has proven itself very bad at making the poor richer. Those "highest wages on the planet" that you mention are scant comfort to the hundreds of millions who will never have a hope of such decadence.I don't think that there are many people who want to dispense with capitalism entirely. It has proven itself to be a useful system. But I don't think that means that we can't try to create a fairer, more equal, more opportunity-based capitalism that doesn't leave such a massive underclass as the current set-up.Mutate and Survive

More whine from me.Today the Torries vote cap spending on benefit for disabled people and not to cap any egregious pay out for bumbling big business fat cats.They really are the Nasty Party and no mistake. Bastards.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.

Just as an aside - a large part of the problem isn;t even capitalism per se, regulated or otherwise. A very large part of the problem of wealth disparity is taxation - specifically unfair taxation rates.Just about every nation operates using a progressive taxation system, where the percentage of income tax scales along with the income itself. This means that the very poor in theory pay very little in income tax (yet pay a disproportionately large portion of their income through sales taxes, but that's another topic), while the wealthy pay the highest tax brackets.Unfortunately this breaks down when you reach the upper class, those who begin to receive a significant portion of their income through investments rather than a paycheck.Capital gains through investment are taxed at a far, far lower rate than "normal" income. This means that $1000 of income from investment will be taxed far lower than $1000 of income from a place of employment. The wealthy are rewarded for being wealthy at a rate significantly different from the reward everyone else receives from employment.Investment as a form of primary income is of course only available to those who are sufficiently wealthy - a poor person cannot invest enough money to receive a reasonable living on a return from investment. Even comfortably middle-class individuals cannot invest sufficient wealth to make a living on investment. Combined with the difference in taxation, we end up with a system that by far disproportionately rewards the wealthy simply for possessing wealth, even if they actually do little or nothing, while disproportionally taxing everyone else who receives their living wage from a paycheck for performing services to an employer.The more wealth you have, the more the disparity grows. Wealth generates more wealth through investment and receives an absurdly low tax rate.This isn't a purely capitalist problem - its a problem caused by unequal taxation for an income source predisposed to a single class of individual because the barrier to entry is far too great for the average citizen to surpass. It's absurd that, as Warren Buffet likes to point out, that he should pay a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary. It is absurd that Mitt Romney should pay a percentage of his income that is around half of what most middle-class Americans pay.Unfortunately, while income from investment is impractical for all but the very wealthy, investment is used as a primary source of income for retirement savings. This means that any effort to increase capital gains taxes to level the playing field for the wealthy will disproportionally hurt the middle class in their retirement savings as well - making capital gains tax reform politically unpopular.My suggestion would be a very progressive tax rate on capital gains. If you make only a few thousand (or even tens of thousands) dollars in a year from interest on investments, your tax rate should be very low - you're saving for retirement, this should be encouraged, and the barrier to saving in this manner should be as low as possible. If you make millions each year on interest from investments alone, you are clearly using investment interest as your primary form of income, and should be taxed accordingly at a rate more consistent with regular income tax in the same amounts.The wealthy will still invest heavily because the sort of wealth generation possible though investment, even with higher tax rates, far exceeds the potential income one can achieve through other forms of income, like a day job (not to mention the fact that one can hire an account manager to handle one's investments and so generate wealth without actually working for the money at all, ever, which is a distinct advantage over the way the rest of us have to make money).

Do you have numbers to support this assertion? I'd like to see evidence that the wealthy actually pay more tax dollars than the middle and lower classes.It sounds like "common sense," but as with most "common sense" ideas, I don't think it's actually true. The tax bracket may be highest for the wealthy, but they don't generate most of their income through normal income, they do so through investments. Meanwhile the middle and lower classes pay disproportionately more of their income in sales taxes, as the wealthy don't use nearly as much of their income for consumption of taxable goods and services.