There is nothing in the definition of democracy that requires economic equality. Democracy is about the political system, not the economy.
Number of billionaires INCREASES as rest of the country burns
- Thread starter Cinnabar
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There is nothing in the definition of democracy that requires economic equality. Democracy is about the political system, not the economy.
Tell it to Gates.
It's more that they are sure that they are the Bestest Humans to ever walk the Earth, and that all of those old inferior people have nothing of value to offer to said superior humans. .
Even Bret Weinstien, who I greatly admire because he is so often right, goes in for this line of thinking to a depressing degree.
BartenderElite
Verified User
For someone who aligns with the left on more issues on balance, I am someone who loves capitalism.
But this is one of the downsides, for sure.
But this is one of the downsides, for sure.
Your dad was a wise man,.....and so are you,.....well SOME of the time....for a lefty!
Not enough people are smart enough to know that. Thanks for bringing it up. Economically, everyone in this country has the same shot as the next person if they want it.
It is only a downside because they are allowed to buy power with it. Politicians will sell out the rest of the country for whatever billionaires and the lobbyists want.
exactly...
Votes win elections--not money. It doesn't matter how much a politician spends to get elected if more people vote against him. Pleasing lobbyists does not get any votes.
Lobbyists represent all the voters through the many thousands of interest groups they represent. Anything government does that you like was pushed through by lobbyists.
Have you ever been to DC? Does the name K street mean anything to you? You are a bit naive on this.
BartenderElite
Verified User
Well, I mean - that's kind of a biggie....
Wealth stratification rips societies apart....not only has ours been getting worse for decades but social mobility is now a fraction of what it used to be.....the class structure of this society is getting more firm as the American Dream has been dying (is almost dead at this point).
Who here knows this?
Who here knows this?
You make my point. K Street is full of lobbyists from many different organizations. Teachers, gun owners, veterans, senior citizens, family groups, ethnic, racial, and nationalities, other nations, environmental groups, animal rights, business and trade organizations, unions, etc..........
A member of Congress has lobbyists from all sides of an issue bending his ear. Which one does he side with? It depends on his personal views, his district make-up, and many other factors.
Some of the most powerful lobbyists cannot even give campaign contributions because they are non-profit. A prime example is AARP--they are powerful because of their large membership that votes regularly.
I don't think I am naive about this. I think it is naive to think a member of Congress votes with the organization that gave him the most campaign contributions or that lobbyists only represent one side of an issue. A member does not vote pro-union because unions gave him money; unions gave him money because he voted pro-union. And lobbying and campaign contributions are two different tactics.
Without lobbyists members would not know very much about most legislation or how it will affect their districts. They represent the people through 4,000 different organized groups. An organization that gives campaign contributions to a member to vote a certain way is wasting his time if that will hurt the constituents of his district. Members often get contributions from both (several) sides of an issue. Which one influenced him (if any)?
"In addressing this issue it is important to bear in mind that currently, no one is employed in more than 60 percent of the households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, while 75 percent of the households in the top fifth have two or more earners. Moreover, according to Census data, less than 20 percent of the households in the bottom fifth are married-couple families, compared to more than 75 percent of the households in the top fifth; single parents represent 23 percent of the households in the bottom quintile, compared to 9 percent of those in the top; African American households account for almost 22 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, which is 50 percent higher than their proportion of the total population; and over 40 percent of those in the bottom quintile are at the age of retirement or just entering the labor force, which is almost three times that of those in the top income bracket. Thus any effort to discern the socially desirable rate of mobility must weigh the extent to which opportunity, discrimination, work effort, family structure, and the basic demographics of labor-force participation influence movement up and down the economic ladder. The calculation is elusive.
The absence of an agreed-upon standard for judging the just rate of mobility is typically dealt with by comparing America’s rate of mobility to those of other Western democracies. The highly publicized claim that social mobility in the U.S lags far behind that of other nations stems from a widely cited comparative analysis conducted 10 years ago, which placed the U.S.’s rate of mobility next to last among nine wealthy industrial democracies. However, in 2014 a team of economists from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley examined almost 50 million tax returns in what is arguably the most extensive and rigorous study of social mobility to date.
Calculating three alternative measures of mobility, the researchers offered persuasive evidence that the United States has one of the highest rates of mobility in the world, ranking fourth, just behind Finland, Denmark, and Norway. Moreover, the findings showed no decline in the rate of social mobility among children born in the U.S. over the last 40 years. (Within the overall rate, however, the degree of mobility varied among 709 geographic districts throughout the country. The four characteristics most significantly related to these geographic discrepancies were an area’s racial segregation, high-school dropout rates, percentage of households with single mothers, and amounts of community involvement, as measured by factors such as voter turnout and participation in local organizations. Among these characteristics, the share of children in single-parent families was the strongest and most robust predictor of differences in social mobility.)
As for movement up the income ladder, the Harvard-Berkeley study revealed that children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution had a 9 percent chance of making it to the top quintile. That may sound dismal, but in judging this movement by international comparisons it’s important to bear in mind that the range of incomes varies among countries. When the income ladders differ in height, it takes a greater increase over a father’s earnings for his son to move up one income quintile on the taller ladder—and the U.S.’s income ladder is one of the tallest in the world.
So, rather than comparing how one’s income ranks relative to others all across the country, it would be wiser to focus on an absolute measure of social mobility, one that describes an individual’s changing level of prosperity over time. After all, average citizens are typically unaware of whether the rate of relative social mobility has gone up or down; they do, however, have a keen appreciation of whether their material standard of living is better than what they experienced as a child under their parents’ roof.
In this regard, America is doing quite well. According to the Brookings Institution, 67 percent of Americans born in 1968 had higher levels of real family income between 1995 and 2002 than their parents had a generation earlier. The overall proportion of children who were better off than their parents increased to 81 percent when incomes were adjusted for family size; most of those who were not better off than their parents were born to families with the highest incomes. When broken down into upper and lower income groups, four out of five children from the bottom fifth of the income distribution had higher family incomes than their parents. The median income for this group was twice as high as that of their parents. Moreover, the U.S. remains one of the only places in the world where the children of immigrants regularly go on to achieve a socioeconomic profile mirroring that of the general population—as adults, they have similar median incomes, college graduation rates, rates of homeownership, and poverty rates as the nation as a whole.
A recent, widely-covered analysis tracking the rates of absolute mobility over time, though, reveals that the current level of mobility is far below what is was in the mid-20th century; at the age of 30, more than 90 percent of people born in 1940 had higher household incomes than their parents did at a similar age. This does temper the Brookings finding, but it is hard to distinguish the extent to which the decreasing rate of mobility since 1940 signifies the fading of the American dream or is merely an artifact of the increasing participation of mothers in the workforce—a trend that took off between 1940 and 1970.
That is, less than 20 percent of mothers were working and contributing to the family incomes of children born in 1940. In contrast, by the time the children born in 1940 reached age 30, 40 percent of them lived in households with mothers working and contributing to their families’ incomes. Though this rate never doubled again, the share of two-earner families continued to increase slowly, leveling off by 1990, at which point comparing generations involved almost an equal proportion of two-earner families in both the children’s and parent’s groups.
Thus, it’s to be expected that the 1940 cohort of children would have higher family incomes than their parents since (beyond the general benefit from an increasing Gross Domestic Product) this group had the advantage of proportionately twice as many two-earner families as their parents. Similarly, as the relative advantage drawn from comparing two-earner family incomes to one-earner family incomes slowly declined, it would make sense that there’s something of a decrease in the remarkably high rate of absolute mobility recorded for the 1940 cohort.
When people talk about the U.S.’s social mobility, they tend to talk about relative mobility—how much of the difference between one generation’s incomes is associated with the difference between the incomes of their parents’ generation. The best evidence suggests that this has not changed since 1970. But relative mobility rates indicate very little about standards of living, which is the way ordinary citizens assess their well-being. Progressives emphasize the vague psychological discomfort of relative deprivation, which may be felt when people compare how much their income changes between generations to how much others gain or lose. This view of economic mobility discounts the tangible material comfort of an absolute gain in one’s own standard of living, regardless of how the neighbors are doing."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/prosperity-upward-mobility/511925/
I dont have time to read all of that....please condense next time.
Hopefully it was right.
the researchers offered persuasive evidence that the United States has one of the highest rates of mobility in the world, ranking fourth, just behind Finland, Denmark, and Norway. Moreover, the findings showed no decline in the rate of social mobility among children born in the U.S. over the last 40 years.
This is GREAT news!, thanks for reporting! We need more Billionaires. In fact,... everyone should aspire to be one.
One of the ways this could all pan out is we may all become billionaires. My kids might buy a candy bar a few months from now and get a few billion in change.
No, they don't. Do you have the same chance as a person born into the Dow family, the Rockefeller family,The Devos family, the Kennedys? You have to know better. Floundering, not too bright Trump was born into wealth. That is why he has anything at all.
The greatest wealth disparity here, is in Socialist California.
The only solution is wealth confiscation.
Dog...you are too intelligent to suppose the ONLY solution is wealth confiscation. You apparently offered this statement so that you could propose a self-serving, but absurd question base on it.
Aha. And here we are.
Politicians do not confiscate property, beachfront or inland. Legal process does. And part of that process is to establish a reason for confiscation before doing the confiscating.