I don’t doubt your figures. However, bare in mind that 60 companies is not exactly a crumbling system. The government’s tax take comes from somewhere. Where is it?

Big companies have long relied on strategies to reduce their tax bills. — Lif3r

Yeah, that is true, and hence why I am all for closing tax loopholes, and the means to entice tax evasion, like the tax havens, where it's estimated a hefty sum of some 15+ trillion bask away in the Bahamas.

exactly, this too. It shouldn't be allowed, but if we set up parameters to console such matters it will not appease those responsible and they can choose to withdraw from the country altogether if they wish and take their jobs with them. This is what I mean when I say that the infrastructure is constrained by the market.

I am not here to tear down the system. — Lif3r

But you have defined the enemy, and in a very general way.

no I have defined the results of a cast system and am seeking a resolution that doesn't involve full fledged revolution.

Okay, so then would you agree this is a failure of government.

partially, and partially of human greed. Our result is likely a mix of the two. Abuse of government to fuel human greed

But that's not my focus. I'm tired of talking about what got us to this point. I want to talk about how to increase financial stability for everyone as opposed to financial excess for some, security for others, and poverty for many.

If all people’s living conditions were alleviated without stripping the rich of their money would you still be concerned about the income of the rich?

no, I wouldn't care.

If the cast system were
Ultra wealthy
Secure
No poverty

I would be satisfied to know that everyone in society was taken care of by one another and by their contribution to their community.

'm tired of talking about what got us to this point. I want to talk about how to increase financial stability for everyone — Lif3r

Well this is how you do it. You have to define the problem first before you can fix it.

I would be satisfied to know that everyone in society was taken care of by one another and by their contribution to their community. — Lif3r

I hold that to be the responsibility of the government; how they spend money, what their priorities are, what they supply to the people and what the people pay for it: water, energy, health, education, rates, etc. people can refuse to buy consumer goods, a better car, more clothes, more furniture, they can cut back on that. But they can’t cut back on using energy, or paying rates, or government fees, or health costs. The responsibility of the government is the people.

You can’t keep increasing wages because there are so many knock on effects. But you can make their wages go further. The government can help with that. The tax rate is not just 23%, it’s all the other annual government fees added to it.

The rich exploit the poor to rip off the middle class.

I think it doesn't look so bad when we look at the system in its entirety. Good systems ensure equal opportunity. At least that's what they claim. If equality of opportunity to climb up the wealth ladder is a reality then certain features become necessary which probably have some unpalatable consequences. For instance to ensure the possibility of rags to riches we may need to allow for the rich to get super-rich. Putting a ceiling on wealth may dampen enthusiasm for creativity and labor which will have longterm negative consequences on the economy. Look what happened to the USSR where people weren't allowed to benefit from their own abilities.

Another way of looking at the wage gap would be to examine how exactly it's increasing which I believe is your concern. Imagine 3 people. A gets $ 1 and B gets $ 2 and C gets $ 3. The wage gap C - A = 3 - 1 = $ 2. As you can see the wage gap can increase in two ways viz. A gets less than $ 1 or C gets more than $ 3. If it's the former something terrible is going on but if it's the latter then it's a nonissue isn't it.

Taxes are good. What isn't good is the fact that people get away with abusing them in their favor to extreme measures. The issue boils down to the market's constraint on the infrastructure and their ability to use the infrastructure as leverage to increase their wealth at the expense of decreasing the wealth of others.

It's the same thing that always happens. The system works until it's hacked and the wage gap spreads and the poor people get tired of being poor recycle rinse repeat. The question is where are we in that timeline now, and how do we make the next phase of transition in a manner that will benefit everyone and increase our survival, our happiness, and the future of our existence?

Does it really just equate to "us versus them"? Or is there a possibility in the scenario that can appease the poor man and the rich man without compromising the entirety of the system?

The idea of a static rich and poor is quite mistaken. In free market countries people move between different income brackets over the course of their lives. The majority of Americans, for example, will experience at least one year of affluence at some point during their working careers (the same is true of poverty). Nearly all Americans who reach the “1%” will enjoy it for only a single year. So, we shouldn’t look at these groups as static, us vs. them, but as abstract categories and thus not real.

there's simply a structural advantage to being rich — Wallows

The structural advantages you reference greatly assist the rich in obtaining their status in the first place.

The rich and the powerful versus the meek and the poor. Is this phenomenon not a cycle? — Lif3r

The "great cycle" of economic expansion is very long. The Roman Empire was one period of economic expansion, wealth getting, and building. The stretch between the Romans and the Industrial Revolution was around 1200 years, during which there was little economic growth. The comparatively trivial waves of the "business cycle" are maybe a decade or two long. In the business cycle there is rapid expansion, saturation, then contraction. Rinse and repeat.

Wealth is built from the bottom up, the poor being on the bottom, the rich being on top. The principle that separates the two is accumulation. For most of the "modern" human history (the last 10,000 years) accumulation was relatively limited. The best way to accumulate was through force: seizing wealth (military campaigns) or peonage--forcing the peasants to work for the resident lords

It has been suggested by some archeologists - anthropologists that agriculture was invented as a way of making people work for somebody else, but that is speculative. If so, it worked. The poor clod hoppers gathered in the grain which made the local elite rich.

The capitalist/industrial revolution was and is accumulation and exploitation on steroids--hell on wheels for the poor, a gravy train for the rich.

The US is very vigilant about consumer protection. — Wallows

What that means is manufactures try to avoid class action lawsuits. IF the US was "very vigilant" about consumer protection, we would be moving heaven and earth to lower our CO2 output. Global heating will kill the consumer and producer together.

"Government is a committee to tilt the playing field in favor of big business." (A paraphrase of Karl Marx's statement, "government is a committee to organize the affairs of the bourgeoisie".)

Once you bridge the gap between poor and rich your money makes it's own money and your taxes are often times non existent, and if you do so happen to pay taxes it doesn't matter because you make enough money off of the backs of other people who never see a fraction of your wealth and are just supposed to accept that your life is more valuable than theirs because you came up with the idea and you had the connections, and usually the money to make it work in the first place. — Lif3r

Exactly.

The structural advantages you reference greatly assist the rich in obtaining their status in the first place. — Bitter Crank

Do you mean that it assists them in manner of speaking in maintaining their wealth or getting there in the first place?

Both, and not just in a manner of speaking.

The legal system is organized to support private property and entrepreneurial activity. For instance, one can organize a corporation, borrow money from an investment banker, do business, go broke, and have no personal liability. At every step of business, rules governing business elements like depreciation, capital investment, and so on are in place. It isn't just the final tax on income or estate taxes that aids the rich getting richer.

If Joe Blow, factory worker, borrows money to fix his car so he can keep getting to work, and the car is still unreliable, he'll lose his job and will still be fully liable for the loan. True, he could file bankruptcy, but that might not help him.

Now, it is true that the ability to get rich and stay rich is one of the reasons remarkable innovation and aggressive expansion occurs. Michael Bloomberg made his huge fortune by supplying financial operators with something they very much needed: up to date financial information in ready-to-use forms through the Bloomberg Terminal. It was a high end financial data delivery service.

He didn't just become worth $58 billion dollars by delivering newspapers. He was a partner at Salomon Investment Banking, and as a partner accumulated $10,000,000 which he used to start his new business.

Fortunes require a foundation of money, from somewhere. You might be broke, but if you have a simply fabulous idea that will turn a profit, some investment banker might risk a few million bucks om you, and if everything goes well, you end up quite well off. If it doesn't go well, you don't. It went really well for Bloomberg.

Bill Gates didn't become the richest mortal to walk the earth on the basis of how wonderful his Disk Operating System (DOS) was. Dos and several other Microsoft products were rammed down the throats of consumers by highly anti-completive methods. I don't know if you remember this, but once upon a time when you bought a PC it would ALWAYS have Microsoft software on it, pre-installed. Later, it would have Windows, then Internet Explorer, something you couldn't get rid of for love or money. It was crappy software, but that's whaat was in the bundle.

Deals were made with equipment manufacturers. That why people had to put up with generally crappy Microsoft products (some of which, like Word and Excel, were good). If you didn't want Microsoft, you pretty much had to buy an Apple, which was more expensive.

The structural advantages you reference greatly assist the rich in obtaining their status in the first place. — Bitter Crank

If that were true, then supposedly this leaves us with two conclusions...

1) Getting there by any amount of effort is futile because the game is rigged in "their" favor.

2) You have to be really special to attain that status.

Neither of these conclusions is supported by evidence, so one must disregard the premise?

Fortunes require a foundation of money, from somewhere. — Bitter Crank

Not necessarily. Patents are a great example of something available in access even to "Joe Blow". There are even companies that assist you in developing your idea. This is where I diverge from the material aspect of viewing value or profit. Since, Bloomberg saught through investing in making high-quality information available to the masses (originally, to the rich only), then it seems to me that the material aspect of viewing an ROI is defunct or outdated?

Government is a committee to tilt the playing field in favor of big business." (A paraphrase of Karl Marx's statement, "government is a committee to organize the affairs of the bourgeoisie".) — Bitter Crank

Your smarter than that Bitter Creek, throwing in a quote from someone else as if that sums up the problem and answers it at the same time, and paraphrasing it in a different era.

Yes, some corruption, no doubt, and tilting in favour of big business, well probably all business, big and small. But in reality a balancing act that can only just be maintained in the dynamics of a global economy. Of course Marx could have had no idea that governments would go on to introduce social benefits like unemployment and retirement pensions. I guess the great fear of governments is rising unemployment, which is a bit like a gun to your head.

So let’s keep the idea of government in perspective.

Your smarter than that Bitter Creek — Brett

Maybe not, but I think the quote is quite apropos.

Any society has to decide how it will do business ("business" not automatically capitalism), and when nations form (as they have been doing for a while now) it is "the government's task" to decide how business will be conducted. There are major differences from nation to nation.

China's ground rules for doing business were and are quite different than South Korea's and Japan's. Saudi Arabia's rules for doing business are not the same as Nigeria's. The USSR's methods of doing business were different than China's. The American way of doing business is different than both China's, the USSR's, and Russia. In different ways, entrepreneurship has been favored by China, the US, and Russia. Different ground rules = different results.

But the quote suggests that government favours business over people, that it betrays people in the interests of big business, that it serves big business.

I had thought this discussion was about the rich and poor in a democratic society in which our governments generally operate under the same expectations. So I don’t get the reference to other nations who obviously operate on radically different notions about what purpose governments serve.

. If you didn't want Microsoft, you pretty much had to buy an Apple, which was more expensive. — Bitter Crank

Yes, and because of that many were able to enter the computer age without having to pay for the top end. Business is quite a savage arena. Most of us get by without having to enter the ring. All we have to do is wait for the benefits to come our way without any risk at all.

But the quote suggests that government favours business over people, that it betrays people in the interests of big business, that it serves big business. — Brett

While I would not personify government with intention or a sinister nature, surely history shows that government has served big business - and this seems like a "can't have two masters" situation to me. Who gets what they want first? To be fair, big business is much easier to please.

Business is quite a savage arena. Most of us get by without having to enter the ring. All we have to do is wait for the benefits to come our way without any risk at all. — Brett

Sounds like I owe them :roll: We should set up a church where we can go and donate to these gods of human progress. Surely they can do more with the money than I can? And in the end, I reap the benefits with no risk at all :grin:

Business is quite a savage arena. Most of us get by without having to enter the ring. All we have to do is wait for the benefits to come our way without any risk at all. — Brett

Your home is at risk if you do not keep up payments on a mortgage or other loan secured on it

But hey, what's losing your home compared to the risk you might lose someone else's money and then declare yourself bankrupt with no liability at all for any losses you made - oh, the savagery!