Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

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Pretty much what I thought it was.

So?

I would've guessed pretty close to the actual, as the bottom 40% (and especially the bottom 20%) have little, zero, or negative net worth.

The "ideals" are a laugh. Does anyone seriously think it's reasonable that the top 20% would have a net worth just 3x that of the bottom 20%? Common sense should tell you that can't be the case...

In any event, this is just propaganda to make people feel more at ease with stealing money from those who have more.

Not to worry. All that money is going to be worthless once all these stimuli gets printed out and handed to unions.

Everything in this country is so fundamentally tainted and/or broken, that absent outright naked sociopathy, or swallowing vast gallons of propaganda bullshit, I genuinely wonder how anyone is able to be at ease with anything....

Then burn the world.

We could do it, you know. It'd be so simple.

But then, who would run the factories? Who would grow the food? Who would sew buttons on small teddy bears?

Nah, I'm sure someone will come up with a brilliant philosophical construct to make me feel absolutely peachy about existence.

If Paladin can't manage it, no one can.

*Looks expectantly, and taps foot*

Typical lefty puritan! /vague and uninformed rant.

I suddenly understand why they call it trickle down economics. The rich get the large share and the poor get the left over, or trickle down.

Peachy? No, my aim is much more modest: to chip just a little of that cynicism away and allow some optimism to burst forth every now and again!

None of us, including and especially the government have the right to other peoples money.

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This is one of the arguments I use when people complain that the wealthy pay a disproportionate amount of taxes... Well, they also have a similar disproportionate amount of income.

People with disproportionate incomes would pay disproportionate taxes just by being taxed at the same rate as lower earners. But the rates people with higher incomes pay are higher besides, making their fraction of income paid to taxes higher.

Ah, so the goal is to reward bad behavior and punish success!

Everyone has the same opportunities, legally. So if someone works their ass off stresses, and dies early in order to get ahead, we need to take from them to give to someone who wastes their money and fucks off.

But in practice, not really at all.


Didn't you used to be the one complaining about folks using "weasel words?"

Here's one: Your life sucks. Does it suck more now that you've read the chart, or less? *flips a lens* Better? Or worse? *flips another lens purely at random* Better? Or worse?

Chris (or anybody else), how would you like to see wealth distributed?

Not asking the means of redistribution just asking what the graph "should" look like.

It wasn't always that skewed. It's been trending that way for about 30 years and is getting worse.
It is of course, not irreversible. If the rich were not bailed out when they stand to lose money, for instance, things would be somewhat different.

How about "life is a series of bad decisions until you finally find the one that kills you"?

Or "life meets, or exceeds, a pessimists expectations, whereas it can only ever meet an optimists, hence they are doomed to a life of disappointments"

Those are my two mantras

Complete. Horse. Shit.

First, the very goal of trade is to get everything where it is most valued. Most of what the rich own consists of stocks and other investments that people in the poorest quintiles would simply sell. And the poor would sell them for far less money than the rich would sell them for, which is how they ended up in the hands of the people who value them the most in the first place. So when you go to value the distribution of property in the context of how unfair it is to "the poor," you need to discount it to reflect the fact that it's worth a lot less to people who couldn't care enough to buy it on their own.

Second, the dollar value of one good doesn't directly translate into an equivalent dollar value of another. In my first economics class the choice was pizzas or robots. You can trade a million dollars worth of rich men's robots to buy more pizza for poor people, but if those robots were being used to make pizza the net result could be more expensive pizza.

If your goal is to give a million more people a dollar's worth of bread, you're not going to do it by parting out a million-dollar bakery. This is common sense to anyone who actually looks at the wealth involved, but not as obvious to people who are simply obsessing over the measurement.

Finally, the only metric that really counts is consumption. Nobody cares that poor people don't own bakery stocks. What matters is whether poor people have bread to eat. Anytime you see that "the rich keep getting richer," it means they're not consuming their fair share -- they're saving it. Lending it to poorer people, or investing it in jobs. Letting other people benefit from it.

You should give thanks that the rich don't suddenly decide to cash in their wealth and consume it out of spite, because then you'd likely be out of a job -- and pretty fucking hungry yourself.

It's just amazing how stupid liberals are. Even more so when you consider people like Yglesias, who supposedly has an actual education.

Lenin had it right, about our liberals: useful idiots.

LOL...

I think I've read this discussion a thousand times on WF. It's an evergreen!

Play the wealth envy card and get voted in. That's the way to get the worse rulers.
And people wonder why manufacturing jobs flee to China.

You think Lenin was speaking of American liberals when he said that?

Yes. By all means, punish people who've worked hard, invented, innovated, invested, and saved. Those cocksuckers don't deserve to keep all that money, and you and everyone else deserve a bigger slice of their pie.

Don't like it? Get more education and get a better job. Get a second job. Invent something. Take some of the risks which made the evil rich people rich to begin with. Once you're rich, you can use that filthy lucre to fix all the problems that keep your little Irish heart aching.

If you have no desire to do any of those things, quit your bitching.

The rich don't show up at my door and take my money at gunpoint. That's what the government does.

Of the two, who do you think I should be more upset at?

Yeah, that one.

And when they die early, tax what they would've left to the family or other beneficiary of their choice.