Occupy Wall Street - Page 175

On November 18 2011 12:38 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't vote because it's been empty promises. No one I can truly get behind.

On November 18 2011 12:31 Ropid wrote:
I have a question. I heard abstention is about 50 % in the US. Are there studies what the inclinations of those 50 % are? Would they have voted for Democrat or Republican Parties or would they prefer something else? Why are they not voting? I tried finding stuff with Google, but I could not get it to work like I wanted and did not find anything.

A second question I have is, are there discussions about changing the way the US congress works, so that "weird" parties like a Green Party that would get, for example, 10 % across all the US, but 0 % of the electoral districts, gets representatives into the US house of representatives? What happens to everything that is not "mainstream" like the Democrat and Republican Parties in the US? This second question makes me think that lobbying is useful and needed in the US and cannot be abolished.

On November 18 2011 12:13 SnK-Arcbound wrote:
Ok well my source is the IRS specifically the census data. I think that beats something provided by the NYT. Also your study ignores the fact that more laws are passed the prevent social mobility (surprise, the government stops class mobility with regulation). Name for me a country that produces more wealth than the US and also follows the ideas of the OWS. There is a specific reason why one never has existed.

edit: here you are http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/incomemobilitystudy03-08revise.pdf
• There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during
the 1996 through 2005 period as over half of taxpayers moved to a different income
quintile over this period.
• Roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved
up to a higher income group by 2005.
• Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 – the top 1/100 of 1 percent –
only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of
these taxpayers declined over this period.
• The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade
(1987 through 1996).
• Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the period from
1996 to 2005. Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after
adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over
this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income
groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher
income groups.

the government stops class mobility with regulation

There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during
the 1996 through 2005 period as over half of taxpayers moved to a different income
quintile over this period.

The U.K. is the worst performer on this indicator, with an earnings elasticity of 0.5. Parents earning $10,000 less than the average will pass on 50 per cent of that difference to their children. The children, in other words, will earn $5,000 less than the average.

The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).

On November 18 2011 12:18 jmack wrote:


My fucking face. I'm sorry but wow. That is exactly what the movement is about. The general assemblies work entirely on a communication and consensus driven policy to actually work out societies real problems. I think you may be secretly more in favor of OWS than you think. I don't know about your local protest but I suggest at least stopping by one of their General Assemblies to really see for yourself.

On November 18 2011 12:31 Ropid wrote:
I have a question. I heard abstention is about 50 % in the US. Are there studies what the inclinations of those 50 % are? Would they have voted for Democrat or Republican Parties or would they prefer something else? Why are they not voting? I tried finding stuff with Google, but I could not get it to work like I wanted and did not find anything.

A second question I have is, are there discussions about changing the way the US congress works, so that "weird" parties like a Green Party that would get, for example, 10 % across all the US, but 0 % of the electoral districts, gets representatives into the US house of representatives? What happens to everything that is not "mainstream" like the Democrat and Republican Parties in the US? This second question makes me think that lobbying is useful and needed in the US and cannot be abolished.

On November 18 2011 12:58 mechavoc wrote:


See that is part of the problem communicating the message of the movement. I thought they were just about camping illegally, spray painting anarchist signs around my office, being a general nuicance to traffic/local businesses and to instigate confrontation with the police.

But if that is really there goal maybe I need to learn more.

Edit: also I thought it was to set the 99% vs the 1% then maybe we can do 98% vs 2% etc...

On November 18 2011 13:00 mechavoc wrote:


You can vote for whoever you want, you can write in anyone you want.
As long as they weree born in the US over 35 yrs old and I think not a convicted criminal you can be president.
So if the OWS really was the 99% they could elect whoever they wanted for president and congress.

The Meaning of Money

By Ayn Rand



``So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. ``Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

``When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor - your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

``Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions - and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

``But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made - before it can be looted or mooched - made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

``Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

``But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich - will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt - and of his life, as he deserves.

``Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law — men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims — then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

``Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

``Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, `Account overdrawn.'

``When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, `Who is destroying the world? You are.

`` You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood - money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves - slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers - as industrialists.

``To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money - and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self-made man - the American industrialist.

``If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase `to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity - to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted of obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words `to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

``Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide - as, I think, he will.

``Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out."

On November 18 2011 12:54 Expurgate wrote:


Let's break this down, shall we?

First, let's take a moment to laugh at

Now:
That's true. If you had bothered to look at what I linked you, you would have seen roughly the same thing, but with an older dataset. About half the population moves between income brackets.

This is not, however, the way most economists measure income mobility. They do it by a means called intergenerational earnings elasticity (IEE), which relates the earnings of children to the deviation of their parents from the average in their society. By this measure, the U.S. ranks very, very poorly. Surprisingly, the U.K. does the worst on this measure, with a child's lifetime earnings inheriting about 50% of their parents' deviation. In other words,
The U.S. ranks roughly with the U.K. on this measure; statistically speaking, parents' earnings have a very strong influence on children's future earnings. On the other end of the spectrum, Canada has an intergenerational earnings elasticity of just .19. Here's a chart that compares IEE across OECD countries.



This is linked to another one of the points you quoted: This is true. The overall level of income mobility is the same; that is to say, it is wretchedly bad by developed country standards.

Now you might ask: why should we use intergenerational earnings elasticity rather than looking at income mobility simply defined?
Well, we answer: IEE measures the degree to which income mobility is spread across all of society. High income mobility does not by itself mean that opportunities are equal across society. Even if 80% of all taxpayers changed income groups between two arbitrary years, the top 20% might never change. In this situation, you have economic stratification, where a permanently wealthy upper class exists besides severe economic turbulence for the lower 80%.

Thus, most economists rely on IEE in measuring socioeconomic mobility across countries, and not on strict income mobility numbers.

If by some miracle you actually read this and want to check facts, the OECD paper linked here has many, many further details.

Part 2 coming.

Over the past 10 years 66% of the lower 20% left their income bracket for a higher one. Only 10% of the lower 20% fell. You think that is little social mobility? 66% leave their bracket for higher incomes? Want me to look up how many of the top 1% and 5% have fallen?

Why yes, I do. Because you're not telling the truth. Why don't you play around with this for a little bit. Data collected by full-time, professional economists, who spend their lives studying this subject, show that inequality and social mobility have gotten substantially worse since.

That's true.

On November 18 2011 12:13 SnK-Arcbound wrote:
Ok well my source is the IRS specifically the census data. I think that beats something provided by the NYT. Also your study ignores the fact that more laws are passed the prevent social mobility (surprise, the government stops class mobility with regulation). Name for me a country that produces more wealth than the US and also follows the ideas of the OWS. There is a specific reason why one never has existed.

edit: here you are http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/incomemobilitystudy03-08revise.pdf
• There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during
the 1996 through 2005 period as over half of taxpayers moved to a different income
quintile over this period.
• Roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved
up to a higher income group by 2005.
• Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 – the top 1/100 of 1 percent –
only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of
these taxpayers declined over this period.
• The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade
(1987 through 1996).
• Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the period from
1996 to 2005. Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after
adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over
this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income
groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher
income groups.

Roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved
up to a higher income group by 2005.

Overall, the evidence indicates that over the 1969-to-2006 time span, family income mobility across the distribution decreased, families’ later-year incomes increasingly depended on their starting place, and the distribution of families’ lifetime incomes became less equal.

On November 18 2011 13:16 SnK-Arcbound wrote:
You said I'm not telling the truth that of the bottom 20% 66% have moved out of their bracket.
I then provide a source which says 50% of the bottom 25% have moved to higher brackets.
And now you say that I am correct right in your first sentence of your new quote
So not only did you lie in first your response, you then admit that I'm correct but attempt to discredit me by saying that the original link says what I said, even though you claimed I was wrong and you linked what made me wrong, even though it says the same.

There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period as over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile over this period (emphasis mine).

On November 18 2011 13:16 SnK-Arcbound wrote:
Your source is incorrect because it looks at brackets and not people. You could be in the bottom 20% all your life and still get richer. Every single person starts out poor and earns their way higher. Considering your can't keep consistent ideas over the course of 30 minutes I see no reason do argue with someone of your intelligence anymore.

On November 18 2011 14:04 ckw wrote:
Yea guys because the Egyptian revolution didn't block traffic at all.

On November 18 2011 15:48 Pertinacious wrote:


I'm sure OWS would love to lump themselves in with those people.

On November 18 2011 16:52 TanGeng wrote:

Egyptians are probably wondering with growing skepticism that it will accomplish lasting change.

On November 18 2011 17:02 SySLeif wrote:
You guys are right! Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are evil bastards. Let's throw all our computers out the windows and smash them. Better yet let's strip them off all their wealth too. It's not like they put something together that would change humanity, or better yet it's not like they were driven by money to do it!