Yes, we'd all like that. But the current system seem to be failing miserably in this regard.

Also, "Worthwhile work with decent pay. Affordable, safe, clean housing. Affordable medical care. Affordable education. Protection from emergencies. A decent life in old age. " These are all subjective things. What do you mean safe and clean housing? How safe and how clean? Affordable education? How much is affordable education? Decent life in old age? What does that mean? And how much is it going to cost? If life were as simple as that, this world would've been a whole new ball game. But sadly, it isn't. You'll have to be a very rich to have anything close to what you aspire to here. Most people don't have one or more of those things, and that often is in direct co-relation with their income level.
So we'd all just LOVE to have the simple "Worthwhile work with decent pay. Affordable, safe, clean housing. Affordable medical care. Affordable education. Protection from emergencies. A decent life in old age. ", but our current system has assured that, as can be observed, almost nobody gets them. Not before you hit 60 anyway, mate. Not get your ass back to work! :rofl:

Stealing is a harsh term. More like taking what's really yours.

The problem aren't the millionaires perse, but the multimillionaires. I mean, it's hard not to be a millionaire household when your house alone costs three quarter of that, and with the inflation a million isn't as much money as it used to be. But there are just way too many multimillionaires and hundred millionaires and billionaires and multibillionaires. The top 0.1% have as much money as the majority of the population. This is a very sobering fact, and one that is definitely very very bad. Redistributing their wealth for a much more equal society is absolutely necessary, whether it be through reformed taxation or something else.

Oh, the pitiable rich people! How hard it must be for them! And imagine if someone (needy) takes away some of their money! They wouldn't even need the gulags to be such miserable!

Depends on what you mean "giving". Most of the wealth is not liquid. It would take many years (in the hypothetical situation that such redistribution is actually initiated). What that would do to growth is a matter of speculation, but growth isn't everything, it's quality over quantity. More people would live more comfortable lives. In the end that's all that really counts. The stock market can go hang!

"A question for which I do not have an answer: Is it possible for a few billion people to live well (per your aspirations) without a substantial number (a few billion, give or take) being forced to provide cheap goods and services? Like, I have numerous pieces of clothing, utensils, and so forth that are affordable because somebody else lives a meager existence."


I believe it is certainly possible. We have great machines now. But the reason this isn't already the case is, profits. Corporations care about nothing but profits. So if labour is cheap, they'll ditch the machine and use labor, its all the same for them. So instead of drastically increased income we should've seen as our technological progress suggests, we're observing increased work hours, stagnated income levels, and even lower quality goods and services. This is because that is the best way for corporations to maximize profits. The well-being of the workers and the utility of the products is redundant as long as it doesn't directly interfere with profitability. That is why mobile phone technology advanced in the manner it did, so it might seem that every component in your device is kept there because if might somehow help you, but in reality it's kept there because it sold more that way. It's a sort of economic evolution. Whatever sells, survives, regardless of it's importance or usefulness. And that is why clothes and housing are so expensive while huge corporations run the world by making fancy and intrusive gadgetry. If they cared about the people at all, everyone could live comfortably without many having to suffer for it. We are certainly technologically advanced enough for this. But like this it won't work, where managers and shareholders not only take away all the money but always demand for more, and use various dubious ways to quench their hunger. With the current technology, almost every nation in the world is capable of being self-sufficient. But you don't even have to do that. If trade and globalization was anything close to being fair, all countries could specialize and everyone would be better off. But inequality and unfettered capitalism has seized most of the world, and this only means that some people will always gluttonize on the expense of others.

Agreed.

Well that's the goal. But from where things are going, it seems unlikely. If anything, inequality and unfettered capitalism is only headed to be even more stronger and even more destructive.

It's easy to if your country is a few small towns of people living over a hotbed of readymade natural resources.

Can't agree more with this post.

"If you take a billion dollars from every billionaire in the country you can run the government for six weeks. "

The financial position of the United States includes assets of at least $269.6 trillion (1576% of GDP) and debts of $145.8 trillion (852% of GDP) to produce a net worth of at least $123.8 trillion (723% of GDP) as of Q1 2014.

Divide the 123 trillion dollars among all Americans.

So, if you divided the money correctly, every household in America would be millionaire. But even if you didn't divide it exactly equally, if there was a ceiling to wealth accumulation, say at one million dollars, then everybody would still be well off.

And let me tell you something, the government too would run much better than before. Because you see, the super rich have a rather hateful relationship with taxes, and they also seem to need to spend many hundreds of billions of dollars every year on protecting their money from other forms of what they think is thievery.

But the rest of us? Well, we're much more accomodating. We don't fetter too much about having to pay taxes, and don't find the need to devise elaborate plans on not paying them. Society doesn't run without taxes, and everybody benefits from them. We understand that. We're also not very enthusiastic about all the wars and the lethal gadgets, especially not when at 598.5 billion dollars it costs more than half of ALL of the budget passed by congress. (54% to be precise, so more than all other discretory government expenditure combined). So, without the super rich, both tax collection and government spending would increase, making everything better off. The reality of now however is, unfortunately, very much the opposite.

5%??

But I also think it's dangerous to be hasty and drastic in the (hypothetical) event of wealth redistrubution, as that can cause many unforeseen problems on the economy. There is much to learn from the failures at similar experiments of the past.

Yes, it did seem plausible to estimate that more and more jobs will be replaced by machines, and unemployment will increase as a consequence as the years go by. But the reality is otherwise. Unemployment is at an all time low. So the question now isn't about the rates of employment, but rather the QUALITY of employment. More benefits, shorter working hours, paid leaves, increased wages, job security and better pensions are just as important as just flat employment rates. The United States has just a 3.5% umployment rate now, but that doesn't at all mean that economy-wise things are just handy dandy and tip top over there.

That is why most government spending is military defense and policing.

You have your figures and estimates all wrong. And that's just two billionaires.

I'm not so optimistic as that.

You have your figures and estimates all wrong. And that's just two billionaires. — Frotunes

This is something from a while back, I no longer remember exactly what I might have said and I didn't manage to find my earlier quote. I didn't follow your chart regardless. It shows discretionary spending of $1.1T. That doesn't include the other $2.7T, going by the 2015 total spending of $3.8T. Nondiscretionary spending includes all the social programs mandated by law., Social Security and Medicare and so forth, plus the interest on the debt (side question: Why do you think the Fed is doing everything it can for the past ten years to keep interest rates extremely low? Could it have anything to do with the disastrous effect on the federal budget if interest rates were allowed to rise in a free market?)

So even if you're trying to demonstrate that stripping billionaires naked would run the government for some nontrivial amount of time; showing a chart that represents less than 1/3 of government spending doesn't make your point. And the problem is that even if you could fund the government for a year or two by stripping the billionaires, what would you do in year three? There wouldn't be any billionaires. So you'd have to come after the millionaires, And after a couple more years, you'd be into the middle class. The middle class pays virtually ALL taxes no matter WHAT you do. The rich write the laws and the poor don't have any money. That leaves you and me to pay the bills.

I might have made an error in the data, but the fact remains that inequality has gotten out of hand in the US, and the government is wasting valuable public sector money on "defense". These are very destructive behaviours.

I'm not so optimistic as that. — Frotunes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Regards
DL

Is it possible that every contributor missed the point in this debate?

I think it is.

Poverty is not an objectively established value of assets and income for a person. It is subjective. Someone or some government body or think-tank says "poverty line in the United States is X dollars income per annum per person and Y dollars assets per person." This is how it's done.

How do you eliminate poverty? By decreasing X and Y to sufficiently low amounts so no person qualifies.

Poverty declarations, theories, etc. are one of the biggest economic / mathematical poofs of our age.

Is it possible that every contributor missed the point in this debate?

I think it is.

Poverty is not an objectively established value of assets and income for a person. It is subjective. Someone or some government body or think-tank says "poverty line in the United States is X dollars income per annum per person and Y dollars assets per person." This is how it's done.

How do you eliminate poverty? By decreasing X and Y to sufficiently low amounts so no person qualifies.

Poverty declarations, theories, etc. are one of the biggest economic / mathematical poofs of our age. — god must be atheist

I agree with this for the most part. On a different note, there is no shortage of land in this world. The queen of england is the largest land owner in the world and if you investigate how much that is you'll see what i'm getting at. A lot of the world's problems can be solved by reducing globalism, changing zoning laws, making practical laws to help with people getting a day off (some people work months at a time with out a day off)(see maryland legislature), and most of all having general concern for those who work for us would greatly improve the lives of the "poor".