US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1025

On April 29 2014 09:41 GreenHorizons wrote:


There was lots of interesting information in there. I found this graph particularly interesting in that it gets past the people dragging down averages in the top 1%

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It would be interesting to see how this graph would look through 2013

But we do know (more or less) that the 400 wealthiest Americans have been dramatically increasing their share of America's wealth (it has at minimum doubled since 1983) While the bottom 50-60%'s share of America's wealth has remained stagnant or gone down.

Income is only a piece of the inequality puzzle but it can be clearly seen how it contributes also in graphs like these.

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On April 29 2014 10:02 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Percentile brackets of wealth have a lot of volatility in them, just like income. That is, people tend to move between brackets throughout their lives. That should be pretty intuitive - people exit college in debt and retire with a lot of savings and their primary residence debt paid off.

On April 29 2014 10:34 GreenHorizons wrote:



It's significantly less with wealth than it is with income. That makes a significant difference. It shouldn't be presented as if the two are interchangeable.

I don't even understand what you are trying to suggest with your argument?

On April 29 2014 10:02 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Percentile brackets of wealth have a lot of volatility in them, just like income. That is, people tend to move between brackets throughout their lives. That should be pretty intuitive - people exit college in debt and retire with a lot of savings and their primary residence debt paid off.

On April 29 2014 11:17 WolfintheSheep wrote:


Only applicable to the middle class, really. And it's somewhat cyclical between generations. You retire, spend your savings, then pass on what's left to your children (which basically means leftover savings + property). Then your children do the same.

Lower class either live paycheck to paycheck and don't accumulate any wealth or accumulate debt all through their life.

Upper class never go into debt, already have accumulated wealth, and only build on what they have, then pass on even more to their family.

On April 29 2014 10:57 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

I don't know how much more / less it is with wealth vs income. If you have some data there, please post.

It's the same argument as with income. The top 20%, or whatever, isn't a static group of people.

What family an individual comes from ƒƒexplains about three-quarters of where they end up in the wealth distribution as adults.

Individuals are more likely to mainƒƒtain wealth than to attain wealth, or more precisely, low-wealth children are unlikely to become high-wealth adults, while high-wealth children are very likely to be high-wealth adults. Looking at previous years’ data, less than 10 percent of children who grew up in families in the bottom wealth quartile, which had a maximal cut off of about $8,000 in 1984, reached high wealth levels by adulthood between 1999 and 2003 (when the top group’s minimal value was $82,501and the median was over $189,000). And over 55 percent of children who grew up in families in the top wealth quartile—over $155,000 of net worth back in 1984—held on to their high wealth levels by adulthood.

Individuals are more likely to mainƒƒtain wealth than to attain wealth: Over a 15-year to 20-year period, less than 5 percent of those who were in the bottom wealth quartile (less than $5,767 in 1984) moved up to the top, while 58 percent of those who were in the top wealth quartile (at least $114,563 in 1984) stayed there.

Only 22.3% of the low wealth population has reached the second quartile by
adulthood and less than 9% has reached the top quartile by adulthood. This is contrasted
to the over three-quarters (76.1%) of children whose parents are in the top wealth quartile
and who remain in the top half of the distribution by adulthood—and over half of which
(54.5%) who remain in the very top quartile

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On April 29 2014 12:01 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Upper class typically gets hit with estate taxes, give a lot away to charity and have heirs with expensive tastes. Alternatively a lot of people who gain wealth quickly (ex. lotto winners, pro athlete) tend to not know how to use the money wisely and lose it quickly. There's still considerable room for 'churn' so I'd still like to see data on it.

On April 29 2014 12:23 GreenHorizons wrote:
Nobody claims it is a strictly static group so I don't know why you say stuff like that other than to troll or put use to your straw.

But you understand how someone could move up in income by cashing out assets and people could move down by deferring realizations of income; so while they both 'moved' they are for dramatically different reasons with significantly different real world impacts?

On April 29 2014 12:57 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

You can avoid my 'trolling' / 'straw-men' by simply acknowledging that such facts exists when you make your arguments. Alternatively, you can intelligently respond when I point out a given fact. I'd prefer the alternative as I prefer this to be a point / counter-point discussion.


Yeah that could happen.

On April 29 2014 13:16 GreenHorizons wrote:



I presume people engaged in the discussion are smart enough to know something as simple as that unbelievably obvious fact.

So pointing it out or going out of the way to state it is silly and is why I have a hard time seeing it as something other than straw or troll.

But it fits right into your pattern of picking up on irrelevant points that were never in contention to begin with...

Who is it you think your factoid helped? What insight did it provide not already commonly known/accepted? Everyone engaged in the discussion knows that they aren't strictly 'static'.

But we do know (more or less) that the 400 wealthiest Americans have been dramatically increasing their share of America's wealth (it has at minimum doubled since 1983) While the bottom 50-60%'s share of America's wealth has remained stagnant or gone down.

On April 29 2014 10:33 oneofthem wrote:
dynastic wealth can preserve itself through better quality management of investment and also political and market power concentration.

for all the blah blah about inequality in teh U.S., it's not nearly as bad as some of these other places where wealth can buy you political and market power up front. the danger is the U.S. sliding further into this entrenched oligarchy arrangement that not only is terrible distributively but also chokes off new and creative enterprise, the engine that drives growth.

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state. Kerry's use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.

It wasn't the only controversial comment on the Middle East that Kerry made during his remarks to the Trilateral Commission, a recording of which was obtained by The Daily Beast. Kerry also repeated his warning that a failure of Middle East peace talks could lead to a resumption of Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens. He suggested that a change in either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership could make achieving a peace deal more feasible. He lashed out against Israeli settlement-building. And Kerry said that both Israeli and Palestinian leaders share the blame for the current impasse in the talks.

On April 29 2014 15:24 Danglars wrote:
Yes, it's not as bad as in the ultra corrupt countries where money is easily turned into great political influence. The danger is that government will keep the enterprise out through the regulatory barriers and the laws that entrenched business interests or non-business special interests erect. On the flip side, companies sidling up to government willing to hand them pork for votes is a danger. Heavy lobbying for changes in immigration policy to benefit themselves and bailouts if things turn south..

On April 29 2014 15:20 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Just because its an 'obvious fact' doesn't mean you get to ignore it.

ex.
OK, but none of those groups are static. Leaving college in debt and in the bottom 20% of wealth isn't so bad if you can reasonably expect to get a good job, pay off that debt and save enough to get into the top 20% of wealth by retirement. The more exchange there is between groups, the less static they are, the less the inequality matters.

This is a non-trivial point. It's not trolling or throwing up a straw man. Do you have a counter argument to it or not?

Edit: Ex. "I don't think there's enough exchange between groups" or "there are too many permanent members to each group".

On April 29 2014 17:57 IgnE wrote:


So when rich kids graduate college and start working at entry-level salaries what wealth bracket do they fall in? They haven't yet inherited their family's wealth and they aren't making top 1% income yet. How much of the influx and outflux in the wealth and income categories is due to the creation of this "heir" class that is decidedly wealthy in every way except his tax return?

LAS VEGAS -- Concerns are growing about members of the militia surrounding rancher Cliven Bundy.

Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford, sent a letter to Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie about the safety of residents in the Bunkerville area. Horsford says his constituents have "expressed concern" over the presence of armed militia groups from out of state.

According to Horsford, his constituents say the militia have set up checkpoints where residents must prove they live in the area before they are allowed to pass and have set up a "persistent presence" along federal highways, and state and county roads. They also claim some have established an armed presence in the community.

Horsford told the sheriff that the militia are making people feel unsafe.

Armed people from across the country arrived in Bunkerville weeks ago to support Bundy in his fight with the Bureau of Land Management over cattle the agency says are illegally grazing on federally managed lands.

Horsford's concerns come at the same time the U.S. Capitol Police confirmed they are looking into threatening statements made against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

In these days of political strife, of Cruz v. Warren, Bush v. Clinton, Sterling v. Humanity, it is nice to know that at least one thing can still bring us together to hold hands and eat casserole: Hating banks.

In fact, one of the most radical anti-bank schemes you're ever going to see comes from a conservative economist, John Cochrane of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who is also affiliated with the Hoover Institution and the Cato Institute, two conservative think tanks. In a recent paper, "Toward a run-free financial system," Cochrane proposes a dramatic change in the way banks do business, forcing them to back every single thing they do, every loan they make, every bond they sell, with either some kind of stock or relatively safe Treasury debt.

Such a plan would certainly end banking as we know it, and might end our need to worry about a huge bank collapsing and setting all of our money on fire. It will probably not become reality any time soon: It is a variation of an idea, known as "The Chicago Plan," that has kicked around since the Great Depression and has enjoyed flashes of interest almost every year since the Great Recession, without leading to anything.

The Chicago Plan would stop banks from essentially "creating money" by making loans or taking other risks without a pile of government-issued cash to back it up. Banks now must have a tiny bit of capital, stuff like stock or cash, to back up their risk-taking. The Chicago Plan, and Cochrane's, would make them back up everything, 100 percent. This would stop "runs" on banks, when everybody scrambles to dump bank debt all at once, as happened to Lehman Brothers in the most recent crisis. If all bank debt were backed with cash or stock, then creditors would have no reason to worry.