8 ms·

I think the great problem of our time is that the challenges get easier to solve every day but we mostly spend our time making rent. And not the kind of rent m

I think the great problem of our time is that the challenges get easier to solve every day but we mostly spend our time making rent. And not the kind of rent mentioned in the article - just plain old fashioned too-much-month-not-enough-money kind of rent. When we’re desperate, we grovel and do whatever work we need to to survive. This is akin to how researchers spend inordinate amounts of time applying for grants rather than, you know, saving the world and all that. This is because any free capital in the economy gets vacuumed up by a few large players who only divvy it out through "sanctioned" channels that most people no longer have access to. In the olden days, the main force balancing this was taxation. Even if you look at it as a purely zero-sum game, any money paid by the very wealthy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the masses. This didn't sit right with the very wealthy and they rigged the system to such a degree that I've never seen an appreciable tax increase in my lifetime, even in the face of trillion dollar deficits and the loss of the middle class in the US. Mathematically, trickle-down economics has given us just exactly the system it was designed to. I mourn for the millions (billions) of people left out, but for whatever reason a lot of people don’t even see them. Maybe the great problem of our time is ignorance..

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
Or simply, our means of production have become so efficient that it didn't matter whether you were right or wrong, things would still hum along and the profits would continue. In the agricultural age, if you fucked up a harvest, you and your family could starve. Before agriculture, if you fucked up a hunt, your whole kin-clan could starve. Nowadays, if you fuck up the housing market, and millions of people go bankrupt, nothing gets broken enough to turn a concern into a crisis, so we never fix anything, and nothing ever changes.
- api 9y ago
  Many people have proposed variations of this as the reason civilizations collapse. They are destroyed by their success. They gain so much surplus that it completely isolates them from any kind of feedback mechanism, over time causing them to completely rot from within. Eventually the core becomes so rotten that the whole system falls apart. This can be sudden. I think an intuitive grasp of this is why so many conservatives have a natural disdain for welfare. But I think their disdain for welfare at the individual level is misplaced. The isolation of the most powerful and largest scale systems from consequences at the macro level is a far larger problem than the isolation of individuals from consequences at the micro level. Welfare can indeed become addictive and lead to a "welfare class," but these are largely powerless and relatively poor people who may be somewhat of a burden on society but do little damage otherwise. The real danger is a rich powerful professional welfare class that makes big ugly mistakes and is isolated from the consequences of these by power and abundance.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    This is about right. Think of the F35 as welfare, a big ugly mistake isolated from consequences yet employing and profiting a professional welfare class.
    - api 9y ago
      The F35 is indeed welfare, but it's not the most damaging kind. Things like that represent waste but do little in the way of active harm, and sometimes they can even have side benefits like funding the development of advanced technologies that can find more productive use elsewhere. The real active harm comes when you get a professional class that does very bad things. These can be mistakes, like the total collapse of the economy in 2008, or they can be intentional crimes. Either way if there are no consequences then no correction gets applied and the problem gets worse. A large scale wealthy civilization can absorb a tremendous amount of official incompetence and misconduct.
      - CalChris 9y ago
        Agreed. However, in addition to viewing the F35 as welfare you can also see it as Too Big To Fail. I think there are side benefits to defense spending. Silicon Valley was built on that [1]. But there's tremendous risk with large (and doomed) projects when they fail (which they will). [1] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ Uber is going to fail. The F35 is going to fail. Throwing good money after bad will stave off that day of reckoning but then only make it a worse accounting.
        dmoy 9y ago
        At some point though, if major world powers never go to war with each other, then the F35 can't really fail insofar as it will never actually see combat. It reminds me of the sci fi novels Dread Empire's Fall, in which the galactic civilization's ship fleet has never fought a battle in thousands of years, so nobody can actually know how to do it, and they don't know if a certain tactic, ship, etc is really a failure or not.
- crpatino 9y ago
  It is not that we are so efficient, but that a priviledged tiny cabal have learned how to push the consequences of their mistakes to the rest of the population. To borrow your example: In agricultural age, if you fucked up harvest your family starves. Today, if you fuck up the housing market, thousand of families end up in bankrupcy, and tens of thousands of small investors loose their savings... but you do not personally know any of them, so you wont even feel shame when you cash-in that million dollar yearly bonus. There's historic precedent for that kind of divorce between actions and consequences, and it is not pretty. There's a certain French doctor you should google: his name's Josheph Guillotin.
  - mercurial 9y ago
    > There's historic precedent for that kind of divorce between actions and consequences, and it is not pretty. There's a certain French doctor you should google: his name's Josheph Guillotin. I'm not sure what analogy you are going for. Guillotin did not invent the guillotine, and only advertised it as a more humane way of execution. He was opposed to the death penalty.
    - acabal 9y ago
      They're referring to the French Revolution, and then the Terror. One of the causes of the revolution was the poor being fed up with the massive wealth imbalance. An economic depression was making the masses starve in the streets, while the wealthy 1% enjoyed lives of comfort and luxury enabled by the rigged aristocratic land-owning system. So the peasants had their bloody revolution, killed a lot of the aristocrats using Dr. Guillotine's invention, and now we have modern France. (This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of a complex historical topic. Please feel free to correct me.)
      - mercurial 9y ago
        I am well aware of the French revolution and its causes, thank you. As I said, Guillotin did not invent the machine. He did not like death penalty, but if it had to be done, he would rather have had it done by a machine than by axe or sword (for the nobility) which occasionally did not kill in one hit, or by hanging (for the ordinary populace). The actual inventor of the guillotine is one Antoine Louis [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Louis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Louis
Allower 9y ago
>In the olden days, the main force balancing this was taxation. What? Taxation in the US has never been higher, you are a fucking moron
Shivetya 9y ago
taxes in the US are far more progressive than they used to be. there are however many new avenues to follow to increase wealth. those below a certain income level are more likely to get eaten up by embedded taxes, regulatory fees and government service fees. then throw in we are bombarded every day continuously to buy this,buy that, go here, do that. We get told every day of wonderful stuff available for pennies or dollars a day. we have tv shows and advertisements implying status for owning certain products. besides managing their money we fail to teach kids in school just how well marketing manipulates them into believing what is needed to have them spend money. still regulation has become the go to tool to prevent competition and when that doesn't work the fear of exploitation of the poor or under privileged is brought to the foreground. the simple fact is we have too much government for it to be effective for the regular person, it only serves those who can afford to operate on its level
- tryitnow 9y ago
  Really? Could you be more specific on how regulatory fees and government service fees are a bigger problem than massive, gaping wealth inequality and the power differentials that go along with it? And what's the solution? Deregulation? Wouldn't that just make consumers even more vulnerable to the predations of the powerful? In fact, it seems that powerful interests generally lobby for more regulation, not less, so I'm not really sure what your point is here. And your statement about "too much government" is vague and abstract. How exactly is "too much government" contributing to wealth and power inequality. Historically, it has been government intervention that has acted as a counterweight to concentrated power. In fact, people who have been complaining about too much government became influential in public policy about the EXACT time a lot of these trends in wealth inequality started (the late 1970s). Sorry to be so critical, but I think a major contributor to our problems is people who make blanket statements about that are vague and imprecise and do not articulate any real policy goals.
  - CodeWriter23 9y ago
    In response to your first question, my go to answer would be the government's favorite rent seeking apparatus: parking enforcement. Parking tickets are a regressive form of taxation that disproportionately affects the poor. I'm not talking about exceeding your time at the meter. I'm more referring to Street Sweeping violations on a weekly basis, when they hardly ever actually send a street sweeper down your block. Another example is how LA Sanitation continued to charge myself and thousands of other apartment dwellers the monthly flat rate, despite our landlord hiring a private service, and the fact that the city collected our cans and the city trucks didn't collect trash. They refused to refund my money, citing a City Council Resolution on the matter. The city was eventually sued and this policy was repealed. If I refused to pay, since DWP does the billing for Sanitation, my electrical service would have been terminated. Don't even get me started on CA's solution to Sacramento's refusal to curtail spending by passing a $.20/gallon gasoline tax. CA residents already pay more gas tax than most other states. And last but certainly not least, CA Senate Bill 18/2017 which thankfully was crushed by activists. This "Children's Bill of Rights" did not increase safety nor the welfare of children in general. It did however insinuate the State of California as your child's new parent, whilst mandating a new level of services to be provided by the billionaire author of the bill, Jim Steyer (Common Sense Media). Funded by your tax dollars, of course.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
narrator 9y ago
A lot of that tax money goes to pay interest payments on government bonds which are owned by the rent collector class. The more money the government borrows to pay for health care and such, the more money the rent collectors make. They've effectively hijacked the progressive impulse to create a way for their vast wealth to earn interest. The regular bond markets would never be able to soak up such enormous amounts of money and pay risk-free interest on it. China creates their own debt free money as needed. The U.S government must borrow it. You ever notice how economic pundits have been predicting an economic crash in China for the last 30 years that never seems to come? It's because the government just endlessly bails out the economy in a debt-free way that never sticks the taxpayers with the bill.
- colefichter 9y ago
  > China creates their own debt free money as needed. The U.S government must borrow it. You ever notice how economic pundits have been predicting an economic crash in China for the last 30 years that never seems to come? It's because the government just endlessly bails out the economy in a debt-free way that never sticks the taxpayers with the bill. That's.... not how it works. USA consumers purchase lots of imports from China, which causes massive flows of capital from the USA to China. China uses these capital flows to purchase treasuries from the USA which (in part) funds the federal deficit. At no point is China just "creating debt-free money". The exact same thing happens in other countries with large trade surpluses. Part of the reason for the Greek crisis was that Germany exports a lot of goods to Greece. This capital flow drives down the price of money (the interest rate) in Frankfurt and drives up the price of money in Athens. The Germans, seeing that they could get 1% at home or 7% in Greece (in the early 00's) then used the capital flows to purchase securities in Greece, such as bonds, CDOs and CDSs.
  - narrator 9y ago
    >At no point is China just "creating debt-free money". I didn't say debt free dollars. Of course China can't create dollars. I meant debt-free RMB.
- baursak 9y ago
harryh 9y ago
- There is plenty of free capital in the economy. More than ever really. To the point that the "capital glut" is a regular topic of discussion in economic news. - I don't know how old you are but both Clinton and Obama significantly increased taxes on the rich. Federal tax receipts as a % of GDP are fairly constant going back to WW2. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
- Retric 9y ago
  First that graph shows a huge range of rates. Just 2000 vs 2004 is a 22% drop, but even that's just federal rates. Total government spending is the only meaningful metric when state, local, and federal funds are all taken out of your paycheck. Further, not being static does not mean it was ever meaningfully increased. The rate from 1982 was higher than either Clinton or Obama rates. And 1982 was below the rate from 1932 to 1981. Compare US GDP growth and a high top marginal rate seems to promote growth, though there are many ways to slice and dice these numbers.
  - harryh 9y ago
    1) I expect that if we included state and local taxes the story would be much the same, though I don't have a graph handy. You could be right I suppose. 2) I think we mostly agree here. There have definitely been meaningful changes both up and down (on the order of 20%) over the years depending on both economic and political changes. However, when you look over a 50 year timespan (everything post WW2 basically), you don't really see a meaningful longitudinal change. To me this refutes the OPs point about taxation being meaningfully different in the "olden days."
    - Retric 9y ago
      2) He was not talking about total recites. And the top tax rates are a very different story: https://www.cch.com/WBOT2013/029IncomeTaxRates.asp https://www.cch.com/WBOT2013/029IncomeTaxRates.asp PS: IMO, a ~1 to 2% AMT on all wealth per year would be incredibly beneficial. But, there is currently about zero chances of that ever happening.
refurb 9y ago
any money paid by the very wealthy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the masses What? The size of gov't has only increased over time. That's money being pulled out of the economy through taxes. If anything redistribution has drastically increased over time.
- mcguire 9y ago
  "That's money being pulled out of the economy through taxes." That money goes straight back into the economy.
  - refurb 9y ago
    That's not the point. The OP said "In the olden days, the main force balancing this was taxation.". My comment was taxation is higher now than it's ever been.
    - baursak 9y ago
      Counterpoint: it's not. I can substantiate my counterpoint after you substantiate yours.
      - refurb 9y ago
        It was a fraction of what it is today before WW2. I don't see any trend downward over time. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S Let's see your data?
        baursak 9y ago
        Your own link disproves your claim that it's now higher than ever before. It was much higher than now up until Reagan neoliberal era that we're still in now.
        refurb 9y ago
jondubois 9y ago
I totally agree with the statement about wealthy individuals pouring money into very few narrow channels. Wealthy people don't think outside the box enough, they just invest money with their friends who are probably already wealthy themselves. This widens the class gap and is bad for the economy.

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago

Or simply, our means of production have become so efficient that it didn't matter whether you were right or wrong, things would still hum along and the profits would continue. In the agricultural age, if you fucked up a harvest, you and your family could starve. Before agriculture, if you fucked up a hunt, your whole kin-clan could starve. Nowadays, if you fuck up the housing market, and millions of people go bankrupt, nothing gets broken enough to turn a concern into a crisis, so we never fix anything, and nothing ever changes.

api 9y ago
Many people have proposed variations of this as the reason civilizations collapse. They are destroyed by their success. They gain so much surplus that it completely isolates them from any kind of feedback mechanism, over time causing them to completely rot from within. Eventually the core becomes so rotten that the whole system falls apart. This can be sudden. I think an intuitive grasp of this is why so many conservatives have a natural disdain for welfare. But I think their disdain for welfare at the individual level is misplaced. The isolation of the most powerful and largest scale systems from consequences at the macro level is a far larger problem than the isolation of individuals from consequences at the micro level. Welfare can indeed become addictive and lead to a "welfare class," but these are largely powerless and relatively poor people who may be somewhat of a burden on society but do little damage otherwise. The real danger is a rich powerful professional welfare class that makes big ugly mistakes and is isolated from the consequences of these by power and abundance.
- CalChris 9y ago
  This is about right. Think of the F35 as welfare, a big ugly mistake isolated from consequences yet employing and profiting a professional welfare class.
  - api 9y ago
    The F35 is indeed welfare, but it's not the most damaging kind. Things like that represent waste but do little in the way of active harm, and sometimes they can even have side benefits like funding the development of advanced technologies that can find more productive use elsewhere. The real active harm comes when you get a professional class that does very bad things. These can be mistakes, like the total collapse of the economy in 2008, or they can be intentional crimes. Either way if there are no consequences then no correction gets applied and the problem gets worse. A large scale wealthy civilization can absorb a tremendous amount of official incompetence and misconduct.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      Agreed. However, in addition to viewing the F35 as welfare you can also see it as Too Big To Fail. I think there are side benefits to defense spending. Silicon Valley was built on that [1]. But there's tremendous risk with large (and doomed) projects when they fail (which they will). [1] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ Uber is going to fail. The F35 is going to fail. Throwing good money after bad will stave off that day of reckoning but then only make it a worse accounting.
      - dmoy 9y ago
        At some point though, if major world powers never go to war with each other, then the F35 can't really fail insofar as it will never actually see combat. It reminds me of the sci fi novels Dread Empire's Fall, in which the galactic civilization's ship fleet has never fought a battle in thousands of years, so nobody can actually know how to do it, and they don't know if a certain tactic, ship, etc is really a failure or not.
crpatino 9y ago
It is not that we are so efficient, but that a priviledged tiny cabal have learned how to push the consequences of their mistakes to the rest of the population. To borrow your example: In agricultural age, if you fucked up harvest your family starves. Today, if you fuck up the housing market, thousand of families end up in bankrupcy, and tens of thousands of small investors loose their savings... but you do not personally know any of them, so you wont even feel shame when you cash-in that million dollar yearly bonus. There's historic precedent for that kind of divorce between actions and consequences, and it is not pretty. There's a certain French doctor you should google: his name's Josheph Guillotin.
- mercurial 9y ago
  > There's historic precedent for that kind of divorce between actions and consequences, and it is not pretty. There's a certain French doctor you should google: his name's Josheph Guillotin. I'm not sure what analogy you are going for. Guillotin did not invent the guillotine, and only advertised it as a more humane way of execution. He was opposed to the death penalty.
  - acabal 9y ago
    They're referring to the French Revolution, and then the Terror. One of the causes of the revolution was the poor being fed up with the massive wealth imbalance. An economic depression was making the masses starve in the streets, while the wealthy 1% enjoyed lives of comfort and luxury enabled by the rigged aristocratic land-owning system. So the peasants had their bloody revolution, killed a lot of the aristocrats using Dr. Guillotine's invention, and now we have modern France. (This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of a complex historical topic. Please feel free to correct me.)
    - mercurial 9y ago
      I am well aware of the French revolution and its causes, thank you. As I said, Guillotin did not invent the machine. He did not like death penalty, but if it had to be done, he would rather have had it done by a machine than by axe or sword (for the nobility) which occasionally did not kill in one hit, or by hanging (for the ordinary populace). The actual inventor of the guillotine is one Antoine Louis [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Louis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Louis

Allower 9y ago

>In the olden days, the main force balancing this was taxation. What? Taxation in the US has never been higher, you are a fucking moron

Shivetya 9y ago

taxes in the US are far more progressive than they used to be. there are however many new avenues to follow to increase wealth. those below a certain income level are more likely to get eaten up by embedded taxes, regulatory fees and government service fees. then throw in we are bombarded every day continuously to buy this,buy that, go here, do that. We get told every day of wonderful stuff available for pennies or dollars a day. we have tv shows and advertisements implying status for owning certain products. besides managing their money we fail to teach kids in school just how well marketing manipulates them into believing what is needed to have them spend money. still regulation has become the go to tool to prevent competition and when that doesn't work the fear of exploitation of the poor or under privileged is brought to the foreground. the simple fact is we have too much government for it to be effective for the regular person, it only serves those who can afford to operate on its level

tryitnow 9y ago
Really? Could you be more specific on how regulatory fees and government service fees are a bigger problem than massive, gaping wealth inequality and the power differentials that go along with it? And what's the solution? Deregulation? Wouldn't that just make consumers even more vulnerable to the predations of the powerful? In fact, it seems that powerful interests generally lobby for more regulation, not less, so I'm not really sure what your point is here. And your statement about "too much government" is vague and abstract. How exactly is "too much government" contributing to wealth and power inequality. Historically, it has been government intervention that has acted as a counterweight to concentrated power. In fact, people who have been complaining about too much government became influential in public policy about the EXACT time a lot of these trends in wealth inequality started (the late 1970s). Sorry to be so critical, but I think a major contributor to our problems is people who make blanket statements about that are vague and imprecise and do not articulate any real policy goals.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  In response to your first question, my go to answer would be the government's favorite rent seeking apparatus: parking enforcement. Parking tickets are a regressive form of taxation that disproportionately affects the poor. I'm not talking about exceeding your time at the meter. I'm more referring to Street Sweeping violations on a weekly basis, when they hardly ever actually send a street sweeper down your block. Another example is how LA Sanitation continued to charge myself and thousands of other apartment dwellers the monthly flat rate, despite our landlord hiring a private service, and the fact that the city collected our cans and the city trucks didn't collect trash. They refused to refund my money, citing a City Council Resolution on the matter. The city was eventually sued and this policy was repealed. If I refused to pay, since DWP does the billing for Sanitation, my electrical service would have been terminated. Don't even get me started on CA's solution to Sacramento's refusal to curtail spending by passing a $.20/gallon gasoline tax. CA residents already pay more gas tax than most other states. And last but certainly not least, CA Senate Bill 18/2017 which thankfully was crushed by activists. This "Children's Bill of Rights" did not increase safety nor the welfare of children in general. It did however insinuate the State of California as your child's new parent, whilst mandating a new level of services to be provided by the billionaire author of the bill, Jim Steyer (Common Sense Media). Funded by your tax dollars, of course.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

narrator 9y ago

A lot of that tax money goes to pay interest payments on government bonds which are owned by the rent collector class. The more money the government borrows to pay for health care and such, the more money the rent collectors make. They've effectively hijacked the progressive impulse to create a way for their vast wealth to earn interest. The regular bond markets would never be able to soak up such enormous amounts of money and pay risk-free interest on it. China creates their own debt free money as needed. The U.S government must borrow it. You ever notice how economic pundits have been predicting an economic crash in China for the last 30 years that never seems to come? It's because the government just endlessly bails out the economy in a debt-free way that never sticks the taxpayers with the bill.

colefichter 9y ago
> China creates their own debt free money as needed. The U.S government must borrow it. You ever notice how economic pundits have been predicting an economic crash in China for the last 30 years that never seems to come? It's because the government just endlessly bails out the economy in a debt-free way that never sticks the taxpayers with the bill. That's.... not how it works. USA consumers purchase lots of imports from China, which causes massive flows of capital from the USA to China. China uses these capital flows to purchase treasuries from the USA which (in part) funds the federal deficit. At no point is China just "creating debt-free money". The exact same thing happens in other countries with large trade surpluses. Part of the reason for the Greek crisis was that Germany exports a lot of goods to Greece. This capital flow drives down the price of money (the interest rate) in Frankfurt and drives up the price of money in Athens. The Germans, seeing that they could get 1% at home or 7% in Greece (in the early 00's) then used the capital flows to purchase securities in Greece, such as bonds, CDOs and CDSs.
- narrator 9y ago
  >At no point is China just "creating debt-free money". I didn't say debt free dollars. Of course China can't create dollars. I meant debt-free RMB.
baursak 9y ago

harryh 9y ago

- There is plenty of free capital in the economy. More than ever really. To the point that the "capital glut" is a regular topic of discussion in economic news. - I don't know how old you are but both Clinton and Obama significantly increased taxes on the rich. Federal tax receipts as a % of GDP are fairly constant going back to WW2. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Retric 9y ago
First that graph shows a huge range of rates. Just 2000 vs 2004 is a 22% drop, but even that's just federal rates. Total government spending is the only meaningful metric when state, local, and federal funds are all taken out of your paycheck. Further, not being static does not mean it was ever meaningfully increased. The rate from 1982 was higher than either Clinton or Obama rates. And 1982 was below the rate from 1932 to 1981. Compare US GDP growth and a high top marginal rate seems to promote growth, though there are many ways to slice and dice these numbers.
- harryh 9y ago
  1) I expect that if we included state and local taxes the story would be much the same, though I don't have a graph handy. You could be right I suppose. 2) I think we mostly agree here. There have definitely been meaningful changes both up and down (on the order of 20%) over the years depending on both economic and political changes. However, when you look over a 50 year timespan (everything post WW2 basically), you don't really see a meaningful longitudinal change. To me this refutes the OPs point about taxation being meaningfully different in the "olden days."
  - Retric 9y ago
    2) He was not talking about total recites. And the top tax rates are a very different story: https://www.cch.com/WBOT2013/029IncomeTaxRates.asp https://www.cch.com/WBOT2013/029IncomeTaxRates.asp PS: IMO, a ~1 to 2% AMT on all wealth per year would be incredibly beneficial. But, there is currently about zero chances of that ever happening.

refurb 9y ago

any money paid by the very wealthy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the masses What? The size of gov't has only increased over time. That's money being pulled out of the economy through taxes. If anything redistribution has drastically increased over time.

mcguire 9y ago
"That's money being pulled out of the economy through taxes." That money goes straight back into the economy.
- refurb 9y ago
  That's not the point. The OP said "In the olden days, the main force balancing this was taxation.". My comment was taxation is higher now than it's ever been.
  - baursak 9y ago
    Counterpoint: it's not. I can substantiate my counterpoint after you substantiate yours.
    - refurb 9y ago
      It was a fraction of what it is today before WW2. I don't see any trend downward over time. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S Let's see your data?
      - baursak 9y ago
        Your own link disproves your claim that it's now higher than ever before. It was much higher than now up until Reagan neoliberal era that we're still in now.
        refurb 9y ago

jondubois 9y ago

I totally agree with the statement about wealthy individuals pouring money into very few narrow channels. Wealthy people don't think outside the box enough, they just invest money with their friends who are probably already wealthy themselves. This widens the class gap and is bad for the economy.