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What this effectively means is, that ten percent exercises majority control over huge portions of the US economy. That ten percent is the group making decisions

What this effectively means is, that ten percent exercises majority control over huge portions of the US economy. That ten percent is the group making decisions on how to direct huge amounts of resources created by our economy. Such a healthy democracy.

anovikov 5y ago
And we should understand that majority of top 10% are still poor, irrelevant, working class people.
- vkou 5y ago
  Working class, maybe ~half of them. Poor, no.
- tantalor 5y ago
  > poor The 90%ile is $129,000/yr individual income. https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    Poor? No. But wealth and income (from work) don't have anything in common. You may earn those 100k year after year, but it would still take quite a while until you land into the wealthiest 10%, if ever.
    - tantalor 5y ago
      The 90%ile of Household Net Worth in US is $1.2 million. Is that poor? https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
    - kelsierFe 5y ago
      From that same site, 90% net worth is ~1.25m. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/ https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta... If you contribute 2k a month at 7% interest that would take you 23 years. A long time yes, but certainly achievable on a 100k salary. Of course I know the interest rate might not be that going forward, but the point still stands.
      - nly 5y ago
        No, because in your scenario the people who have $1.25M in assets now are going to have $6M in 23 years (invested at the same rate), so these high earners still won't end up in the top 10%. This is, I'm sure, is what the parent means. Compared to people with capital, people on high incomes are always behind. If you earn more than average, spend less than your peers, and invest wisely then you might move up a bit on the wealth scale, but that's it.
        medvezhenok 5y ago
        I think the idea is that some of the people that have $1.25M now are not going to be around in 23 years, and that money will have gone to [inheritance, eldercare, etc], so who makes up the top 10% will change simply because of demographics.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        As far as inheritance goes, nowadays inheritance will actually concentrate wealth as rich people tend to only have one kid.
      - papreclip 5y ago
        harder to make 100k 23 years ago than it is today. by the time you finish a 2k/mo journey you begin today, 1.25M will be no longer be the cutoff for top 10%
    - whakim 5y ago
      While I take your point that wealth is always more unequally distributed than income, income inequality and wealth inequality are definitely related. The degree to which they're related depends a lot on the tax and regulatory regime. In the United States, income inequality is high relative to most other Western countries, and the top 1% and top 0.1% shares particularly so; this means that if you're at the top of the income distribution you can become wealthy faster. In a country like France, where top marginal tax rates are higher, executive compensation is lower, and estate taxes are less progressive, inheritance and bequests play a (relatively!) more important role in the wealth distribution.
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    129k a year is not a lot of money. Say you live in NYC, you have a stay at home partner and 2 kids. Your living paycheck to paycheck. I'd consider anything less than 200k for a family to be working class. As in your unlikely to be able to survive for extended periods of time without working. If your monthly expenses are 9k, even your take home is 11k your in for a ride if you lose your job. Unemployment has a miserably low max benefit.
    - emerged 5y ago
      Similarly, if you make only $2M/yr and live in a golden penthouse in downtown Manhattan, you’re barely scraping by. Why doesn’t anyone think of these poor souls?
      - nly 5y ago
        His comment seems fair. This random website[0] says the average US living cost for a family of 4 is about $55K/yr. I don't know what $130K after taxes is, but if I take a wild guess and say $85K, that leaves around $30K for savings and investments. Single income living isn't easy in western society. [0] https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/country/united-states https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/country/united-sta...
      - 999900000999 5y ago
        If your job requires you to be in New York I'm not clear what else you can do. Income doesn't scale well in America. If anything taxes are way too high on middle class people. No one making less than a million a year should pay over 30% in taxes.
        emerged 5y ago
        I keep telling people that my job requires this diamond throne and handsome set of fine watches, but they refuse to give me a raise.
- onemoresoop 5y ago
  The problem with the 10% is that it conflates households who barely get by, who make 100-200k per year with others who make way more than that. 100-200k in SV or say NY is really not that much, definitely not enough to be considered wealthy. I've read about a few middle class folks in that range who tanked rapidly with massive debt and foreclosures when a medical misfortune hit them.
j_walter 5y ago
You could also argue that 0.1% is directing all of the laws surrounding our economy...and those are our elected leaders. I'm not sure they are any better at figuring out where to direct the resources than those 10% are.
- afavour 5y ago
  > and those are our elected leaders Kind of an important caveat, no? It’s the entire principle behind having a democracy.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    You know, when you say it like that it really just makes sense and is working as intended.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Yeah, 0.1% are directing the laws, but they are not our elected leaders. They are the unelected leaders of the largest corporations.
  - ldiracdelta 5y ago
    Don't forget un-elected lifetime bureaucrats.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Haha, keep going. It's not even the leaders of said corporations. They report to the Board of Directors and they in turn report to the investors. The wealthy who own large portions of the controlling interest in these companies are sometimes the visible leaders of said corporations, but many of them live out of the limelight and control the rest of us with puppet strings.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  > You could also argue that 0.1% is directing all of the laws surrounding our economy...and those are our elected leaders. If they're doing a bad job, the recourse (at least in theory) is to elect better leaders. What recourse do we have when the rich abuse their power?
roflc0ptic 5y ago
Well, not really. Most of this is going to be in some kind of managed funds where individuals aren’t exercising voting rights. So it’s a much smaller subset that exercises control
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Yeah, banks. I think the economy may be a lot more centralized than people think.
kayge 5y ago
Potentially dumb question: once you own a certain percentage of public stock of a company, do they start contacting you for board meetings or decision-making of any kind? I think I understand your comment, but I'm curious what real-world examples of this look like.
- CGamesPlay 5y ago
  Yes, every voting share (most shares are voting shares but there are some exceptions) is worth 1 vote, and you receive invitations to the shareholder meetings if you have even 1.
- jdsully 5y ago
  Shareholder power is diffuse, a lot like voting for your congressman is. If you hold over 50% of the vote there are more tools available but then your getting lawyers involved. Sometimes corporations are organized in such a way that even 50% doesn't give you effective direct control without very unpleasant side effects (e.g. poison pills).
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Common stock shareholders generally have some voting rights, e.g. for electing board members. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-shareholders-vote.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-sha...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jldugger 5y ago
  > Potentially dumb question: once you own a certain percentage of public stock of a company, do they start contacting you for board meetings or decision-making of any kind? Well, most decisions are outsourced to the board members, who's membership is the main thing shareholders vote on. Mandatory reporting kicks in at 5 percent ownership. At 10 percent, the SEC considers you an insider[1]. Before that, I doubt board members even know you exist unless you talk to them first (and they aren't taking your calls or mine). [1]: https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/officersanddirectors https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/officersanddir...
friedman23 5y ago
Democracy is about democratic control over the government, not democratic control over all individuals or aspects of life. It's not injustice that people can't vote to control what you learn, read, eat, or do. If you write a book, our government isn't suddenly not a democracy because people can't vote on what you write even though you technically now have more power over other individuals since you can control what goes in your next book.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Counterpoint: Those effected by decisions should be making them and those not effected by decisions should not be making them.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    That isn't a counterpoint, it's completely ancillary to what we are discussing. Whether someone is affected by something does not matter. The only thing that matters are rights. People have freedom and the freedom to live their life as they see fit as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others.
    - onemoresoop 5y ago
      How about the right to a decent life? You don't see the decimation of the middle class as a problem for a democracy? I'm not sure what you're getting at, technically you may have a point (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) but at the end of the day when all resources are owned by a few, things start to break down.
      - friedman23 5y ago
        >How about the right to a decent life? Everybody has the right to achieve a decent life. What you are actually asking for is the right to have material wealth. Which isn't a right. >technically you may have a point (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) I don't want the benefit of the doubt from you. You advocate robbing people and spread hate against a group you don't like because you don't have enough toys to make you happy. You are just a part of a mob that has repeated the same mistake countless times in history, with your beliefs you are practically not an individual.
austincheney 5y ago
Or, you could just simply argue that 10% is the group in the best position to beat inflation while the rest of us get poorer. Not taxing the rich, capital gains as income, seems to contribute to inflation about as equally as government social spending due to both second and third order effects of policy influence and economic consequences.
- padobson 5y ago
  Not taxing the rich, capital gains as income, seems to contribute to inflation I'd say you're half right, here. The Fed prints money spends $80 billion a month on treasuries and $40 billion a month on mortgage backed securities, so if you're a government contractor or you have a lot of real estate assets, you're effectively robbing everyone else's savings and devaluing their wages.
- imtringued 5y ago
  If all you want to do is beat inflation you can just buy stocks instead of saving money. The real problem is that people get higher returns than inflation. Often higher returns than the growth rate of the economy as a whole. The idea that inflation is killing us is simply not true.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Your argument only makes sense if those stock purchases are treated as regular reoccurring income, such as exchanged from the market to liquid assets, sufficient to cover the increases of daily expenses. For most people that is certainly never the case.
spamizbad 5y ago
It's central planning without anything as messy as a communist revolution
- oliv__ 5y ago
  No it's not. Those 10% are all independent actors with individual and private interests. I'd much rather the economy be controlled by the top 10% of a productive society than by the 1% of a bureaucratic structure.
  - kazen44 5y ago
    and the former Soviet union wasn't a system with independent actors with their own interests? people seem to think the Soviet economy was ran by a single person decided everything about the economy. while in practice its actual implementation was rife with personal and organizational infighting to reach Stated or unstated goals.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    How about we let more than 10% control the economy? One would think that the ideal of a free market at least exists to involve as many participants as possible.
MuffinFlavored 5y ago
> over huge portions of the US economy "The stock market isn't the economy" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-27/stock-market-is-not-the-economy-by-any-yardstick https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-27/stock-... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/business/stock-market-economy-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/business/stock-market-eco... https://tcf.org/content/commentary/stock-market-not-economy/ https://tcf.org/content/commentary/stock-market-not-economy/
- what_is_orcas 5y ago
  > "The stock market isn't the economy" This is one of my favorite Kai Ryssdal-isms. While this is true, it's not true to a lot of people: politicians and us regular-folk alike often equate the stock market's performance to the state of the economy (hence why this is a saying at all). I like to think of the stock market as an insight into wealth-transfer (from the poor to the rich, obviously... it doesn't flow any other way in the US at this point). When stocks do really well, especially those of service/retail companies, the already-rich are getting richer, generally at the expense of the rest of us.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    > I like to think of the stock market as an insight into wealth-transfer (from the poor to the rich, obviously... it doesn't flow any other way in the US at this point). That's not true. Sam Walton and Jeff Bezos got rich by improving the lives of their customers. You might complain that the improvement came at the cost of exploiting workers. I disagree, but for the sake of argument I'll concede at the margins Amazon and Walmart could pay more. But the bulk of their wealth came from 1) them stealing it from other capitalists, keeping a portion for themselves and passing the rest onto their customers; 2) creating it ex nihilo and dreaming of something (AWS) that never existed and creating it.
    - what_is_orcas 5y ago
      > improving the lives of their customers. It depends on how you define "improving the lives of"... Amazon only won the game by undercutting others in the market to the point where they couldn't realistically compete. But those other market players were employing a ton of folks around the country. That's a huge part of what made Amazon's prices unrealistic for brick & mortar stores: people & infrastructure _in the communities they serve_. I fail to see how eliminating jobs & competition does anything other than consolidate wealth and (by not paying those employees) solidify the direction of transfer of wealth in the poor -> wealthy direction. I think people really misunderstand the effect of moving commerce online. Communities need local services. Communities need goods available locally. Moving employment opportunities away from communities creates a higher barrier for entry into the job market, because now someone needs a car and/or hours-per-day to commute to get to their job. This isn't even to mention the harm Amazon has done to its employees and contractors (folks in distribution centers & deliver-people have had a lot to say about the working conditions).
dantheman 5y ago
Are you implying that the government should control the economy? If so, you think a few hundred people who won a popularity contest and never actually created anything should be in charge of stuff they didn't create? Is that democracy?
- retrac 5y ago
  How about some gentle nudges to a more even wealth distribution, enabling more of the middle class to own capital and participate in economic decisions?
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >won a popularity contest and never actually created anything should be in charge of stuff they didn't create? Is that democracy? Modern democracy is when a few hundred people win a popularity contest and don't actually create the things they are in charge of, yes. The issue at hand is that those few hundred are mostly beholden to an impossibly moneyed class who don't need to do anything in order to continue to amass wealth and power; admittedly most of them never created any of the things they're in charge of. Some of them do things to speed the increase anyway, often at the expense of the masses, or even the few hundred.
  - Aunche 5y ago
    > The issue at hand is that those few hundred are mostly beholden to an impossibly moneyed class who don't need to do anything in order to continue to amass wealth and power It's not have the moneyed class are particularly powerful, but instead politicians are spending all their political capital on infighting rather than meaningful work. As a result, they heavily prioritize maximizing short term political capital, which is why we end up with so many tax cuts and spending rather than regulation or reform. It wouldn't be that difficult to set up a grassroots organization that raises more money to lobby for a carbon tax than oil companies spend on lobbying for subsidies. Even so, politicians would still keep oil subsidies and merely only pay lip service a carbon tax because the former boosts the economy in the short term, and the latter is the opposite.
deleted 5y ago
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paulpauper 5y ago
Pensions are a major stakeholder, more so than individual stock holders. Most people are invested in stock indirectly through pension funds. This is can in part explain why the fed and monetary policy has been so easy, in part to prop up the value of these fund.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  I hope by pension you mean general retirement savings. Because only about 20% of American workers get a pension [1]. Also note that less than 60% of American workers participate in a 401k-type retirement plan. So saying that “most” people are invested in stocks this way is just barely true and kind of distorts the picture. [1] http://www.pensionrights.org/publications/statistic/how-many-american-workers-participate-workplace-retirement-plans http://www.pensionrights.org/publications/statistic/how-many...
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  This. I keep seeing numbers like this article that simply make no sense when you look at the pension fund (and some other such institutional investors) capitalization vs total market capitalization.
TameAntelope 5y ago
Okay, I'll say it; good. Democracy is fine as a method to run a government, but democracy is a terrible way to run an economy. Not nearly everyone should have a say in what happens in the economy. Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be, which means some people will and should be left out of decisions. I would love it if the government could grow the number of people who, on their merits, help guide the economy, and there are groups of people who are unfairly barred from access to the economy and that is bad, but the idea that everyone should get a say in what happens in the economy is very much against the capitalistic principles upon which the US economy is built upon.
- jldugger 5y ago
  > Not nearly everyone should have a say in what happens in the economy. Alternative take: everyone already does have a say in what happens, as they participate. Nobody gets to dictate their own terms, though, but neither does anyone in politics.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Fair enough, though I think the point of contention is that 10% of Americans have 89% of the say, which means the remaining 11% gets divvied up amongst 90% of people, which isn't a lot per-person, comparatively. But generally yeah, I do think everyone does get to participate, and that's a Good thing.
    - jldugger 5y ago
      The other consideration is that apparently a lot of Americans have their wealth tied up in their primary residence. It's a lot harder to own a lot of stock when single family homes cost a million dollars, and you have to live there to get access to the metro's Good Schools.
- vegai_ 5y ago
  >Not nearly everyone should have a say in what happens in the economy. I mean sure, democracy isn't optimal for selecting the best people, but do you think those 10% that do own most of that stock were selected by their skills and abilities?
dfxm12 5y ago
It also means you should ignore people who use the stock market as a proxy for how "the economy" is doing.
imtringued 5y ago
I have seen some youtubers use the word central planner as an insult for government institutions. In my opinion there's a different class of central planners that nobody really gives a damn about. Billionaires influence governments and also have an outsize impact on the economy either by concentrating wealth and thereby denying that wealth to others or by directing their wealth on things that they personally care about but the majority of the economy does not. The conventional trickle down hypothesis is that giving the rich money lets them do their job more efficiently because of centralization. That is basically a belief that only people who do not believe in a liberal(or free) market would have. The idea that 300 million decision makers are worse than a handful of billionaires is absurd. If the work of these billionaires is truly needed then let people make that decision for themselves and give them the option to avoid them.

anovikov 5y ago

And we should understand that majority of top 10% are still poor, irrelevant, working class people.

vkou 5y ago
Working class, maybe ~half of them. Poor, no.
tantalor 5y ago
> poor The 90%ile is $129,000/yr individual income. https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  Poor? No. But wealth and income (from work) don't have anything in common. You may earn those 100k year after year, but it would still take quite a while until you land into the wealthiest 10%, if ever.
  - tantalor 5y ago
    The 90%ile of Household Net Worth in US is $1.2 million. Is that poor? https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
  - kelsierFe 5y ago
    From that same site, 90% net worth is ~1.25m. https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/ https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta... If you contribute 2k a month at 7% interest that would take you 23 years. A long time yes, but certainly achievable on a 100k salary. Of course I know the interest rate might not be that going forward, but the point still stands.
    - nly 5y ago
      No, because in your scenario the people who have $1.25M in assets now are going to have $6M in 23 years (invested at the same rate), so these high earners still won't end up in the top 10%. This is, I'm sure, is what the parent means. Compared to people with capital, people on high incomes are always behind. If you earn more than average, spend less than your peers, and invest wisely then you might move up a bit on the wealth scale, but that's it.
      - medvezhenok 5y ago
        I think the idea is that some of the people that have $1.25M now are not going to be around in 23 years, and that money will have gone to [inheritance, eldercare, etc], so who makes up the top 10% will change simply because of demographics.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        As far as inheritance goes, nowadays inheritance will actually concentrate wealth as rich people tend to only have one kid.
    - papreclip 5y ago
      harder to make 100k 23 years ago than it is today. by the time you finish a 2k/mo journey you begin today, 1.25M will be no longer be the cutoff for top 10%
  - whakim 5y ago
    While I take your point that wealth is always more unequally distributed than income, income inequality and wealth inequality are definitely related. The degree to which they're related depends a lot on the tax and regulatory regime. In the United States, income inequality is high relative to most other Western countries, and the top 1% and top 0.1% shares particularly so; this means that if you're at the top of the income distribution you can become wealthy faster. In a country like France, where top marginal tax rates are higher, executive compensation is lower, and estate taxes are less progressive, inheritance and bequests play a (relatively!) more important role in the wealth distribution.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  129k a year is not a lot of money. Say you live in NYC, you have a stay at home partner and 2 kids. Your living paycheck to paycheck. I'd consider anything less than 200k for a family to be working class. As in your unlikely to be able to survive for extended periods of time without working. If your monthly expenses are 9k, even your take home is 11k your in for a ride if you lose your job. Unemployment has a miserably low max benefit.
  - emerged 5y ago
    Similarly, if you make only $2M/yr and live in a golden penthouse in downtown Manhattan, you’re barely scraping by. Why doesn’t anyone think of these poor souls?
    - nly 5y ago
      His comment seems fair. This random website[0] says the average US living cost for a family of 4 is about $55K/yr. I don't know what $130K after taxes is, but if I take a wild guess and say $85K, that leaves around $30K for savings and investments. Single income living isn't easy in western society. [0] https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/country/united-states https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/country/united-sta...
    - 999900000999 5y ago
      If your job requires you to be in New York I'm not clear what else you can do. Income doesn't scale well in America. If anything taxes are way too high on middle class people. No one making less than a million a year should pay over 30% in taxes.
      - emerged 5y ago
        I keep telling people that my job requires this diamond throne and handsome set of fine watches, but they refuse to give me a raise.
onemoresoop 5y ago
The problem with the 10% is that it conflates households who barely get by, who make 100-200k per year with others who make way more than that. 100-200k in SV or say NY is really not that much, definitely not enough to be considered wealthy. I've read about a few middle class folks in that range who tanked rapidly with massive debt and foreclosures when a medical misfortune hit them.

j_walter 5y ago

You could also argue that 0.1% is directing all of the laws surrounding our economy...and those are our elected leaders. I'm not sure they are any better at figuring out where to direct the resources than those 10% are.

afavour 5y ago
> and those are our elected leaders Kind of an important caveat, no? It’s the entire principle behind having a democracy.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  You know, when you say it like that it really just makes sense and is working as intended.
Grustaf 5y ago
Yeah, 0.1% are directing the laws, but they are not our elected leaders. They are the unelected leaders of the largest corporations.
- ldiracdelta 5y ago
  Don't forget un-elected lifetime bureaucrats.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Haha, keep going. It's not even the leaders of said corporations. They report to the Board of Directors and they in turn report to the investors. The wealthy who own large portions of the controlling interest in these companies are sometimes the visible leaders of said corporations, but many of them live out of the limelight and control the rest of us with puppet strings.
jakelazaroff 5y ago
> You could also argue that 0.1% is directing all of the laws surrounding our economy...and those are our elected leaders. If they're doing a bad job, the recourse (at least in theory) is to elect better leaders. What recourse do we have when the rich abuse their power?

roflc0ptic 5y ago

Well, not really. Most of this is going to be in some kind of managed funds where individuals aren’t exercising voting rights. So it’s a much smaller subset that exercises control

guerrilla 5y ago
Yeah, banks. I think the economy may be a lot more centralized than people think.

kayge 5y ago

Potentially dumb question: once you own a certain percentage of public stock of a company, do they start contacting you for board meetings or decision-making of any kind? I think I understand your comment, but I'm curious what real-world examples of this look like.

CGamesPlay 5y ago
Yes, every voting share (most shares are voting shares but there are some exceptions) is worth 1 vote, and you receive invitations to the shareholder meetings if you have even 1.
jdsully 5y ago
Shareholder power is diffuse, a lot like voting for your congressman is. If you hold over 50% of the vote there are more tools available but then your getting lawyers involved. Sometimes corporations are organized in such a way that even 50% doesn't give you effective direct control without very unpleasant side effects (e.g. poison pills).
tshaddox 5y ago
Common stock shareholders generally have some voting rights, e.g. for electing board members. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-shareholders-vote.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-sha...
deleted 5y ago
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jldugger 5y ago
> Potentially dumb question: once you own a certain percentage of public stock of a company, do they start contacting you for board meetings or decision-making of any kind? Well, most decisions are outsourced to the board members, who's membership is the main thing shareholders vote on. Mandatory reporting kicks in at 5 percent ownership. At 10 percent, the SEC considers you an insider[1]. Before that, I doubt board members even know you exist unless you talk to them first (and they aren't taking your calls or mine). [1]: https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/officersanddirectors https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/officersanddir...

friedman23 5y ago

Democracy is about democratic control over the government, not democratic control over all individuals or aspects of life. It's not injustice that people can't vote to control what you learn, read, eat, or do. If you write a book, our government isn't suddenly not a democracy because people can't vote on what you write even though you technically now have more power over other individuals since you can control what goes in your next book.

guerrilla 5y ago
Counterpoint: Those effected by decisions should be making them and those not effected by decisions should not be making them.
- friedman23 5y ago
  That isn't a counterpoint, it's completely ancillary to what we are discussing. Whether someone is affected by something does not matter. The only thing that matters are rights. People have freedom and the freedom to live their life as they see fit as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others.
  - onemoresoop 5y ago
    How about the right to a decent life? You don't see the decimation of the middle class as a problem for a democracy? I'm not sure what you're getting at, technically you may have a point (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) but at the end of the day when all resources are owned by a few, things start to break down.
    - friedman23 5y ago
      >How about the right to a decent life? Everybody has the right to achieve a decent life. What you are actually asking for is the right to have material wealth. Which isn't a right. >technically you may have a point (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) I don't want the benefit of the doubt from you. You advocate robbing people and spread hate against a group you don't like because you don't have enough toys to make you happy. You are just a part of a mob that has repeated the same mistake countless times in history, with your beliefs you are practically not an individual.

austincheney 5y ago

Or, you could just simply argue that 10% is the group in the best position to beat inflation while the rest of us get poorer. Not taxing the rich, capital gains as income, seems to contribute to inflation about as equally as government social spending due to both second and third order effects of policy influence and economic consequences.

padobson 5y ago
Not taxing the rich, capital gains as income, seems to contribute to inflation I'd say you're half right, here. The Fed prints money spends $80 billion a month on treasuries and $40 billion a month on mortgage backed securities, so if you're a government contractor or you have a lot of real estate assets, you're effectively robbing everyone else's savings and devaluing their wages.
imtringued 5y ago
If all you want to do is beat inflation you can just buy stocks instead of saving money. The real problem is that people get higher returns than inflation. Often higher returns than the growth rate of the economy as a whole. The idea that inflation is killing us is simply not true.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Your argument only makes sense if those stock purchases are treated as regular reoccurring income, such as exchanged from the market to liquid assets, sufficient to cover the increases of daily expenses. For most people that is certainly never the case.

spamizbad 5y ago

It's central planning without anything as messy as a communist revolution

oliv__ 5y ago
No it's not. Those 10% are all independent actors with individual and private interests. I'd much rather the economy be controlled by the top 10% of a productive society than by the 1% of a bureaucratic structure.
- kazen44 5y ago
  and the former Soviet union wasn't a system with independent actors with their own interests? people seem to think the Soviet economy was ran by a single person decided everything about the economy. while in practice its actual implementation was rife with personal and organizational infighting to reach Stated or unstated goals.
- imtringued 5y ago
  How about we let more than 10% control the economy? One would think that the ideal of a free market at least exists to involve as many participants as possible.

MuffinFlavored 5y ago

> over huge portions of the US economy "The stock market isn't the economy" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-27/stock-market-is-not-the-economy-by-any-yardstick https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-27/stock-... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/business/stock-market-economy-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/business/stock-market-eco... https://tcf.org/content/commentary/stock-market-not-economy/ https://tcf.org/content/commentary/stock-market-not-economy/

what_is_orcas 5y ago
> "The stock market isn't the economy" This is one of my favorite Kai Ryssdal-isms. While this is true, it's not true to a lot of people: politicians and us regular-folk alike often equate the stock market's performance to the state of the economy (hence why this is a saying at all). I like to think of the stock market as an insight into wealth-transfer (from the poor to the rich, obviously... it doesn't flow any other way in the US at this point). When stocks do really well, especially those of service/retail companies, the already-rich are getting richer, generally at the expense of the rest of us.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > I like to think of the stock market as an insight into wealth-transfer (from the poor to the rich, obviously... it doesn't flow any other way in the US at this point). That's not true. Sam Walton and Jeff Bezos got rich by improving the lives of their customers. You might complain that the improvement came at the cost of exploiting workers. I disagree, but for the sake of argument I'll concede at the margins Amazon and Walmart could pay more. But the bulk of their wealth came from 1) them stealing it from other capitalists, keeping a portion for themselves and passing the rest onto their customers; 2) creating it ex nihilo and dreaming of something (AWS) that never existed and creating it.
  - what_is_orcas 5y ago
    > improving the lives of their customers. It depends on how you define "improving the lives of"... Amazon only won the game by undercutting others in the market to the point where they couldn't realistically compete. But those other market players were employing a ton of folks around the country. That's a huge part of what made Amazon's prices unrealistic for brick & mortar stores: people & infrastructure _in the communities they serve_. I fail to see how eliminating jobs & competition does anything other than consolidate wealth and (by not paying those employees) solidify the direction of transfer of wealth in the poor -> wealthy direction. I think people really misunderstand the effect of moving commerce online. Communities need local services. Communities need goods available locally. Moving employment opportunities away from communities creates a higher barrier for entry into the job market, because now someone needs a car and/or hours-per-day to commute to get to their job. This isn't even to mention the harm Amazon has done to its employees and contractors (folks in distribution centers & deliver-people have had a lot to say about the working conditions).

dantheman 5y ago

Are you implying that the government should control the economy? If so, you think a few hundred people who won a popularity contest and never actually created anything should be in charge of stuff they didn't create? Is that democracy?

retrac 5y ago
How about some gentle nudges to a more even wealth distribution, enabling more of the middle class to own capital and participate in economic decisions?
revolvingocelot 5y ago
>won a popularity contest and never actually created anything should be in charge of stuff they didn't create? Is that democracy? Modern democracy is when a few hundred people win a popularity contest and don't actually create the things they are in charge of, yes. The issue at hand is that those few hundred are mostly beholden to an impossibly moneyed class who don't need to do anything in order to continue to amass wealth and power; admittedly most of them never created any of the things they're in charge of. Some of them do things to speed the increase anyway, often at the expense of the masses, or even the few hundred.
- Aunche 5y ago
  > The issue at hand is that those few hundred are mostly beholden to an impossibly moneyed class who don't need to do anything in order to continue to amass wealth and power It's not have the moneyed class are particularly powerful, but instead politicians are spending all their political capital on infighting rather than meaningful work. As a result, they heavily prioritize maximizing short term political capital, which is why we end up with so many tax cuts and spending rather than regulation or reform. It wouldn't be that difficult to set up a grassroots organization that raises more money to lobby for a carbon tax than oil companies spend on lobbying for subsidies. Even so, politicians would still keep oil subsidies and merely only pay lip service a carbon tax because the former boosts the economy in the short term, and the latter is the opposite.

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paulpauper 5y ago

Pensions are a major stakeholder, more so than individual stock holders. Most people are invested in stock indirectly through pension funds. This is can in part explain why the fed and monetary policy has been so easy, in part to prop up the value of these fund.

mdorazio 5y ago
I hope by pension you mean general retirement savings. Because only about 20% of American workers get a pension [1]. Also note that less than 60% of American workers participate in a 401k-type retirement plan. So saying that “most” people are invested in stocks this way is just barely true and kind of distorts the picture. [1] http://www.pensionrights.org/publications/statistic/how-many-american-workers-participate-workplace-retirement-plans http://www.pensionrights.org/publications/statistic/how-many...
LorenPechtel 5y ago
This. I keep seeing numbers like this article that simply make no sense when you look at the pension fund (and some other such institutional investors) capitalization vs total market capitalization.

TameAntelope 5y ago

Okay, I'll say it; good. Democracy is fine as a method to run a government, but democracy is a terrible way to run an economy. Not nearly everyone should have a say in what happens in the economy. Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be, which means some people will and should be left out of decisions. I would love it if the government could grow the number of people who, on their merits, help guide the economy, and there are groups of people who are unfairly barred from access to the economy and that is bad, but the idea that everyone should get a say in what happens in the economy is very much against the capitalistic principles upon which the US economy is built upon.

jldugger 5y ago
> Not nearly everyone should have a say in what happens in the economy. Alternative take: everyone already does have a say in what happens, as they participate. Nobody gets to dictate their own terms, though, but neither does anyone in politics.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Fair enough, though I think the point of contention is that 10% of Americans have 89% of the say, which means the remaining 11% gets divvied up amongst 90% of people, which isn't a lot per-person, comparatively. But generally yeah, I do think everyone does get to participate, and that's a Good thing.
  - jldugger 5y ago
    The other consideration is that apparently a lot of Americans have their wealth tied up in their primary residence. It's a lot harder to own a lot of stock when single family homes cost a million dollars, and you have to live there to get access to the metro's Good Schools.
vegai_ 5y ago
>Not nearly everyone should have a say in what happens in the economy. I mean sure, democracy isn't optimal for selecting the best people, but do you think those 10% that do own most of that stock were selected by their skills and abilities?

dfxm12 5y ago

It also means you should ignore people who use the stock market as a proxy for how "the economy" is doing.

imtringued 5y ago

I have seen some youtubers use the word central planner as an insult for government institutions. In my opinion there's a different class of central planners that nobody really gives a damn about. Billionaires influence governments and also have an outsize impact on the economy either by concentrating wealth and thereby denying that wealth to others or by directing their wealth on things that they personally care about but the majority of the economy does not. The conventional trickle down hypothesis is that giving the rich money lets them do their job more efficiently because of centralization. That is basically a belief that only people who do not believe in a liberal(or free) market would have. The idea that 300 million decision makers are worse than a handful of billionaires is absurd. If the work of these billionaires is truly needed then let people make that decision for themselves and give them the option to avoid them.