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Inconvenient fact:

The “poor” in the US & Europe live better than most of the world’s population.

The world’s poor know it, hence they keep coming.

“Mother Jones”? LOL

said:
” Why do the rich scream that any criticism of these policies is “racist, fascist, and Literally Hitler”? Because these criticism are true.”

No it’s not. You’re using the-gift-to-Zionism comparison, Hitler did not do what is alleged of him.

Grow up.

Pay attention, 2 out 0f 3, other stats show 3 out of 4 millionaires, are self made.
So yes, they did earn it, they do deserve it.

And those that inherited money? So what? Good for them.
Parents have the right to leave what they wish for their sons / daughters.

And they were all Jewish; most receiving holocaust reparations.

Land speculation, government lobbying, and shady deals soon converged to create an unequal society of the first order…

Sounds like what happened after the Am Rev too. The constitution was in fact imposed on the rest of us to enable such activity but under the guise of protecting the freedom of the proles, peasants and peons. What it really did was protect and encourage a free-for-all for the rich, powerful, cunning and ambitious. I have evidence.

But then,

Me[nippus]…. But how are things going up here? what is Athens about?

Phi.Oh, nothing new; extortion, perjury, forty per cent, face-grinding.

-Lucian of Samosata, MENIPPUS, A NECROMANTIC EXPERIMENT, ~150 AD

Dat’s Western “civilization” for ya! 😉

Bingo !!

Well stated.

“Because they deserve it. Because they worked for it and earned it.”

Pay attention,2 out 0f 3, other stats show 3 out of 4 millionaires, are self made.
So yes, they did earn it, they do deserve it.

And those that inherited money? So what? Good for them.
Parents have the right to leave what they wish for their sons / daughters.

Correct.

They have much lower IQs, have much higher crime rates, violence as a way of life, over breed, cannot feed themselves or their offspring, and are largely unskilled & unemployable beyond menial & manual labor.

“So how does one pay all these living expenses and various debts with $26,000 after taxes?”

What taxes are you referring to?

Those at that level pay ZERO federal income taxes, but can receive massive welfare benefits as if they do, and they curiously get ‘tax refunds’.

Top 20% pay 87% of income taxes, about 50% pay no income taxes:https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-20-of-americans-will-pay-87-of-income-tax-1523007001

Obviously, the answer is many morelaws

Very close.

“Many morecountries” and you get the Gold Star for the First Week of Springtime. (Starts with a Full Moon in the Northern Hemisphere, the one the Shawnee called the Crow Moon).

Billionaires hate borders for a good reason. Accumulation of insane levels of wealth is not possible where localities produce what’s good for them by themselves. Wealth inequity gained speed every time a rail line put local foundries out of business for the sake of cheaper metal from industrial hubs like Pittsburgh.

Had the States *with their Constitutional right of Republic* been economically self-sufficient, we could look lots different now. The French anarchists were partly right: Property held by foreign plutocratsis theft. Boundary linesshould matter.

As it is now we have another option approaching:Against Civilization, published by Feral House in 2005, made the subtle argument. Various authors made an excellent case, often vividly. The non-subtle argument is: What humans cannot control they destroy. Including things they’ve built.

Ruins all over the world indicate they’ve done just that. A lot of times maybe.

For 2015, here are the top 10 countries, with their percentages of total global personal wealth.

United States — 41.6%
China — 10.5%
Japan — 8.9%
U.K. — 5.6%
Germany — 3.9%
France — 3.5%
Canada — 3.0%
Italy — 2.9%
Australia — 2.0%
South Korea — 1.6%

And here’s the list of the countries with the highest wealth inequality, according to the Allianz report.

U.S.A. — 80.56
Sweden — 79.90
U.K. — 75.72
Indonesia — 73.61
Austria — 73.59
Germany — 73.34
Colombia — 73.18
Chile — 73.17
Brazil — 72.86
Mexico — 70.00
(http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/america-wealth-inequality/)

It’s good to be atop the first list; not so good to be atop the second. Either way, we see that many other nations (Sweden? Really?) suffer from similar wealth inequality, and Ms. Prins’ emotional premise “Rich people bad!” sheds more heat than light on this global dilemma.

“freedom” to be a peon, work in a dead end job forever, and then die in a ditch
it’s the rich that have freedom now; freedom to f*ck you over
tax the rich, take their wealth. if it’s destroyed in the process, who cares? it’s only harming everybody else anyway

If anyone can find a 2.25 savings account, I mean regular savings account, not a CD please let me know. My savings accounts are down to .25 and .30. But at least one doesn’t charge monthly fees for the privilege of giving them my money to use.

2.25 savings accounts, where ????

Read Gilded Age and Great Gatsby. Gilded Age is very funny. It’s a family history, 1700 coastal Virginia to 1880s Missouri. Family like mine always moved west, always hoping to really make it . Never quite made it civil war devastated the family.

Family owns a large but worthless track of land in Kentucky or Tennessee I forget which . Wonderful timber but no road or river to transport it. No coal iron copper, just fores

One family member finally gets into congress and comes up with a do gooder scam. Quaker’s and Freedman’s Bureau go for it.
Congress critter plans to sell the land to the federal government for a Negro and American Indian College

Sound familiar?

Congress critter is helped by various pretty woman and girl family members who act as hostesses society ladies and most importantly, lobbyists. Apparently pretty woman lobbyists were very common in 19th century DC and state capitols.

The plan fails. It’s a pretty funny book about the true motivations of do gooders. They do very well for themselves by pretending to do good.

What is to be done? – It is very simple. (1) Enact and enforce a very progressive taxation. (The useful idiot libertarians who are in the lowest income bracket will be objecting to it the most.) (2) Ignore the libertarians.

donald j tongle says:“Is Ms. Prins coming around to admitting it is government policy rather than the free market capitalism that is creating unnatural inequality?”

Nah, you’re hallucinating. You’re either off your meds or on some new ones. Get back in line !

Obviously, the answer is many more laws, a truly huge government run by an even more fuhrer-like person, massive increases in both taxes and spending, and far less freedom for all businesses and individuals [the ungrateful bastards.] Anything not illegal should be compulsory. That oughta do it.

Regards, onebornfree

Today, many of the rich really are different…about half of them actually. The rest are essentially normal.

The problem is we do not have enough rich people who are properly rich. The world has 3,000,000 Bill Gates geniuses and 2,200 billionaires. Nothing but a lack of proper social rules is to blame for this spread. We have enough information today to know why things are the way they are. It isn’t easy to understand, but it is doable by people nearing the Gates level. There are 28,000,000 people who “should” be hundred millionaires. Most people should have similar quantities to most other people and some people should have little while a few yet are put into various levels of conservatorship.

anon1 says:“What is to be done?”

I’m sure some morons here have long list of government “solutions”, which will all boil down to “more /bigger government, more laws, more taxes, less freedom”.”

You know, the same old crap that “worked” the last time. When was it?[ I can’t quite recall].

Regards, onebornfree

It is merely the chain of ownership in a capitalist economy with no cap on size or distribution. Any system which dos not restrain the top will always become increasingly top heavy till it either nearly collapses or actually does.

Do they?

This article described that an increasingly top heavy economy is unstable and due for collapse. I think perhaps many people of many stripes think this but they differ on how to address it…mostly because 90% of people are not fit to solve these problems. There is no coincidence that anti-intellectualism is very high in America and having an IQ above 125 is negatively correlated with being in the top wealth brackets as well as an education beyond a bachelors. To many want to solve the top heavy economy by giving the top more discretion. They think a lack of freedom at the top keeps them from behaving “like they should.”

I know…because employer compliance is not a problem. It is those dern brown skinned people!

I like the assholes who say it is the government (whatever that is) and not “freemarket capitalism” (whatever that is) that causes the rich to get richer. They’ve been saying that for a hundred years and it still sounds incredibly obtuse. I’ll tell you what makes the rich richer. Idiots who say things like that.

So Buffett’s analogy for market wealth flow over the ages is nonsense?

I.E. The richest will pay increasingly fancier investment brokers increasingly more for decreasing returns till they dissipate, and the cycle repeats? It isn’t like I hadn’t considered it to be merely a token statement to quell the underclasses, but it did seem to have merit given the way markets have performed and the way family wealth has changed.

I’m impressed you can paint trump accurately despite the way confirmational biases work. Most rightists and wealth sycophants cannot.

Though not related to this article, I noticed a lot of “concern” over “discrimination” against whites and jews (though jews are white). How could you not have expected the coin to flip? DERP….this will pass. They are being retarded. It might take a few decades, but objective merit will prevail though hardly be necessary at that point (post scarcity singularity).

But these guys on here think that it’s blacks on welfare taking all their money, and that billionaires are their buddies, and have their best interests at heart, and therefore deserve ever ill-gotten gain, just because it’s “free market” or “capitalism” or some other lying word they use to paper over abject crime.

What is to be done?

This authoress and those like her forget thereal accomplishment the Robber Barons gave to the world: The NGO.

It was quite innocent at the beginning: Corporate foundations filling in the cracks (but greasing the skids for the welfare state) and then building libraries and making endowments to museums (or just plain building museums.)

After 1913 they just started making public policy the same way, and who could stop them when they held the purse strings? In 1947 the purse strings took over the government by screaming “national security” every time there was opposition to their thieving.

Their ace in the hole is prohibition: The Volstead Act is thought to have created an entire tier of fresh, obedient plutocrats simply by providing alcohol when regular citizens were forbidden to engage in its sale. By the middle of the 20th century, ex-bootleggers turned respectable corporate heads were funding half the seats in congress and at least one president.

Drugs are creating a new class of plutocrats right now, and the first president funded by drug lords has already been born. Old money likes new money like this because they can control them with old fashioned blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover made a career out of it back in the old days.

It’s just the oligarchy to which all republics descend. Rome, Venice, all of them. The Serene Republic of Venice was protected by swamps and so is Washington. Most swamps are private property. They always work for Plutus, god of wealth, and He seems to outrank all the other ones right now.

It’s the demographics, stupid.

What is the major thing making the rich richer? No, it’s not finance – as parasitic and corrupt as that is. It’s supply and demand in the labor market.

When there are more workers than jobs, inevitably labor is devalued, and the profits all flow to the owners. However, in a tight labor market, workers become the limiting factor and nothing short of chattel slavery will stop workers from grabbing decent share of the pie, at the expense of the profits of the rich. Because in the long run you can’t beat the law of supply and demand.

Not that long ago Mexico looked to be making progress, it was on track to become another Canada. The Mexican elites deliberately ignited a population explosion, they propagandized that it was every woman’s patriotic duty to have six kids each to make Mexico ‘bigger and better’… and the flooding of the labor market drove wages down, but created a record number of billionaires…

In the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, immigration to the United States was near zero. Wages and living standards boomed, but the rich were limited. The CEOs of major corporations were not billionaires but first among equals. Starting around 1970 the rich opened the door to the overpopulated third world, and so far that policy has increased the population by about 100 million over what it would have been otherwise. That marks an inflection point, where the fraction of the economy going to wages starts to crash and the fraction going to profits starts to soar. Duh.

Why do you think the rich have, as their largest priority, the expansion of the labor force by any means possible? Why do the rich scream that any criticism of these policies is “racist, fascist, and Literally Hitler”? Because these criticism are true.

The rich have one God, and it is cheap labor. And the surest long-term way to get cheap labor, is to make sure there are 100 desperate people competing for every job.

Ultimately the growing inequality across the world is because so-called progressives have surrendered to top-down pressure, and no longer talk intelligently about demographics. This leaves the rich free to breed people like cattle, and move populations around manipulating the labor market, to their own advantage. Divorced of being able to address the real issue, progressives wring their hands in pathetic dismay and can do nothing.

Is Ms. Prins coming around to admitting it is government policy rather than the free market capitalism that is creating unnatural inequality?

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/property/ch01.htm

Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, _What is Property?_

1. you would have a hard time proving that he is wrong

2. all of the solutions that have been tried to this problem are actually worse as hard as that might be to believe

3. my favorite historical example is Robespierre who by all accounts was well-intentioned. He worked as hard as anybody his whole life. He got his head removed by the guillotine. Before that happened he helped remove the heads of many others.

Nomi Prins does not want any revolution I am pretty sure.

The whole idea of money is that a person’s wealth should be an accounting of what society owes them for the contribution that they have made. If I make a chair worth 50 bucks, the person I sell the chair to gives me money that is a debt redeemable anywhere that takes the money. And so the world goes around.

There is not possible way that the ultra-rich could possibly, over the course of their lives, done so much for society that what society owes them is as great as their wealth. Would we all, in aggregate, be worse of by tens or hundreds of billions of dollars if these few ultra-wealthy had never lived and made their contribution?

Of course not. The wealth is unearned. Unearned wealth is alwaysstolen. Legally or illegally, slowly or all at once. These unthinkably large privately-held accumulations of wealth must be, logically must be, theft.

Wealth taxes and inheritance taxes can help but demographics is about to shift income inequality in favour of the rich world poor. There will be a!ways be mentally ill people and junkies at the bottom. Take the incapable out and wages for the rest will rise.

@Sean

The black death also reduced inequality in Europe.

If you aren’t for effectively ending all immigration to prevent the continued flooding of the labor market and subsequent depression of wages, then you are demonstrably disinterested in “inequality.”

But poor people can vote so you get populists elected like Teddy Roosevelt, who was very anti the Ribber barons like JP Morgan, and aggressive in foreign policy. Trump will be too. There is only one way to reduce inequality: war and destruction. From its birth in Ancient Greece democracy has led to war, and populists are the ones to start those wars.

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10921.html
Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

But all the geniuses on here believe that it is just hunky-dory for the rich to make more and more and more money. Because they deserve it. Because they worked for it and earned it.

This is the libertarian creed: give all the money to the rich and then die of starvation with humility and grace. Because it is only right and fair and good.

It’s hard to give heedence to a harpy who conflates wages and income.

So I don’t.

I read a stat in Mother Jones magazine that 90% of Americans have an average income of $31,000 a year and the richest .1 percent have an average income of $27 million dollars. So how does one pay all these living expenses and various debts with $26,000 after taxes? The Trump tax cuts just exacerbated the problem by giving more money to the wealthy and practically nothing to the 90% (at the bottom, which is almost everyone else). A good book on the subject of wealth inequality is “Billionaire’s Ball.”

In part because of the eternal forces described at the beginning of this article, no non-reversible progress is ever really made, but it is not their fault that heirs get all of that unearned income, whether that is Trump or any of the others. Parents are going to try to create DNA dynasties, with interest compounding until the money-making parents’ DNA has trickled to below 10% in their great grandchildren. But those self-made 19th century Robber Barons did sculpt the country’s infrastructure with the help of crony alliances with big government. And the heirs of those so-called Robber Barons, in another libertarian nightmare, gave the US government a ton of land, unlike the Robber Barons of today who fund philanthropic projects in Third World dictatorships.

It is mostly publicly managed parks. But that gifted land could be sold and used to pay off the national debt, making the country more financially solvent and credit worthy for SS recipients, the rich and poor alike, not to mention the few risk-taking entrepreneurs left. It could be sold to people who would create tourist areas, with stipulations that they take care of the land, and the money could be used to build the Trump Wall for purposes of stopping the wage-undercutting flow of welfare-eligible workers from south of the border. It is not just fiscal policy, but the constant stream of workers who are able to accept low pay because of their pay-per-birth welfare streams for US-born kids that keeps wages down and income inequality high. I realize that interest plays a huge role, but the excess profits guaranteed by a welfare-fed labor pool also increases income disparity.

Americans at the top are wealthier than ever, some from inheritance, but the rich are taking less risk to create small businesses and quality jobs for US citizens than ever before. Business formation is down by 30%. Startups—employing 9 people, with 5 of those being foreign temps or noncitizens located in India, do little good to close the wealth gap in the USA, even if they build interesting, if less tangible, things. Part of the dearth of small business creation may be due to inherited wealth, tied up in trusts, where the heirs are not even able to use it for business startups. The financialized economy seems to serve static wealth creation in many ways that most of us simply don’t understand due to a lack of education in economics and finance. It serves the status quo when average citizens do not understand the financial system.

It is like the rich of 2019, no less than the welfare-buttressed classes, live in a feudal cocoon, where the entire society changes shape to protect their wealth from risk, just like society shape shifts in terms of social mores to provide independent households for immigrants and moms in single-breadwinner households that stay below the income limits for welfare programs and refundable child tax credits by working part time or temp gigs, collecting welfare during the months when they don’t go over the earned-income limits.

Everyone outside of those two groups at the tippy top and the bottom, and the larger group of dual-high-earner parents in the top 20%, lives in brutal, tumultuous economic times.

It is great to read literary analogies for a change, rather than the constant barrage of pop-culture analogies. It also highlights the differences and similarities between the oversized business titans of the new and old Gilded Ages. Those 19th century billionaire-class equivalents, too, had help from cronies in big government, but they were more high-energy, like Gatsby, not just whittling off the good assets of failing companies, like the vulture capitalists, or betting on bundled packages of skim with money provided at cut rates by the Fed. Those old-school Robber Barons took on manly projects, overseeing the projects themselves, and employing some imported workers but mostly US citizens.

I am for infrastructure spending as a more productive and safety-enhancing form of stimulus than government paying citizens and noncitizens for sex, reproduction and part-time work, but today’s shady politicians and employers would thwart the Deplorables, employing mostly immigrants using public money. They will probably even thwart the voters in using mostly low-wage immigrant labor to build the few sections of wall Trump has managed to secure funding for. Those old-school Robber Barons also knew how to get their way with Congress, and even though the contracts went to their buddies, they did train US citizens to do the work. In the Financialization Era, employers cannot be bothered with gritty things, like training workers. They are too used to making easy money through interest tricks.

As Ernest Hemingway said, “Yeah, the rich are different from the rest of us. They have more money.”