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The fact that someone is rich does not mean he took anything from you, no matter how poor you are. Statements like "If poor people knew how rich rich people are

• maxxxxx 12y ago
  You could argue that they took something from other people by claiming a larger share of economic output for themselves. Something seems wrong when the largest share of economic growth goes to the top as we have seen over the last decades. And I believe this is not because of some economic law but because the top 1% have made the rules to their favor.
  • dandare 12y ago
    a) you have democracy, the top 1% are heavily influencing it but that is far from making the rules. 60% of Americans don't vote. b) "Something seems wrong with..." -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
• ghouse 12y ago
  Well, but it also does not mean that he didn't take anything from me. Generally, the US tax code is designed in such a way that capital begets capital. Put differently, if you make money passively from the money you already have, you pay a lower tax rate then if you haul brick on your back, or teach children. Is this taking? No, not directly, but indirectly, sure.
  • thecopy 12y ago
    I would argue that the state is taking, not the rich (which are not the only people with money invested in the market).
    • toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Feel free to head to Somalia then. I hear they have a wonderful libertarian system setup. EDIT: Seriously folks, taxes pay for civilization. If you don't like it, don't work (so you don't have to pay) or leave. Roads, schools, fire, police, infrastructure aren't built with unicorn dust.
      • icebraining 12y ago
        The context was the differences in tax rates, not taxes as a whole. You can support the concept of taxation while considering the State takes more than it should from certain groups.
        • toomuchtodo 12y ago
          Taxes in the US are at the lowest levels since 1941 [1]. OP I replied to commented that the State was taking from them. Of course the State takes. It provides the framework you operate in that allows you to make that income. If anything, taxes should be much higher for a number we should agree on (whether that's $500K/year, $1MM/year, or $10MM/year is TBD). What group is the State taking "more than it should" from? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Income_tax_rates_in_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States...
          • burntsushi 12y ago
            > Of course the State takes. Then you're agreeing with the commenter that you initially responded to! > I would argue that the state is taking, not the rich
          • deleted 12y ago
            [deleted]
          • icebraining 12y ago
            What group is the State taking "more than it should" from? The poor, arguably (e.g. through regressive taxes).
  • j09jfdasj2 12y ago
    Apples and oranges. Ordinary income is not capital gains. If you buy your first stock, you are using money that was already taxed at the ordinary income tax rate.
    • adaml_623 12y ago
      You are forgetting that trust funds step around the income tax 'problem'
    • rhino369 12y ago
      I don't get why it is apples and oranges. Why is it fair to take 45% of the income I toil for, but it's OUTRAGEOUS to take 25% of someone's passive investment. >If you buy your first stock, you are using money that was already taxed at the ordinary income tax rate. Which is why we only tax the amount gained. I don't see why it should matter if the gain is an investment or working. And a lot of my salary is a return on an investment that I made into my own education and training. IMO, captial gains should be adjusted for inflation* and then taxed like any other income. *you really do a have to adjust for inflation. Right now inflated gains (which aren't real) are taxed as if they are.
• anon1385 12y ago
  >The fact that someone is rich does not mean he took anything from you Of course it does. That's the definition of private property - if they claim to own it then you can't freely use it anymore. The creation of private property involves taking land that nobody owned and anybody could use, and using force to prevent anybody except the owner using it.
  • dandare 12y ago
    Wealth can be created, economy is not a zero sum game. Also you are confusing private property with land, 99% of wealth these days is created without the use of land.
    • nwah1 12y ago
      Locations, the electromagnetic spectrum, minerals... these are all still very important, and all of these are land in an economics sense. If land isn't important anymore, I'll happily accept any donations of Silicon Valley land titles.
• kjjw 12y ago
  The fact that someone is rich does not mean they took anything from 'you'. But the fact that there is such a disparity between their income and your income means they claim a much larger part of the economic output of the planet, and a much larger part of any increase in that output.
  • dandare 12y ago
    The planet does not produce economic output, individuals do. In totally free market everyones output would be proportional to his work x talent x luck. The market is not free and the rules are skewed but that does not mean inequality is on its own bad or that we should eat the rich. You still have democracy, you may blame the rich but in fact 60% of voters don't even bother to come (and most of those who do agree with tax cuts for the rich anyway).
    • Frondo 12y ago
      Individuals alone do not produce economic output. They always rely on people all around them who engage with them, the people who came before them that built up the pool they're swimming in, the people all around them who maintain the pool today... That doesn't diminish any individual's own effort; but to ignore the world around any successful person, when talking about their success, is a little nonsensical.
• tormeh 12y ago
  The allocation of money is about the same as the allocation of the economy's output. Someone's getting more out of it than others. If "him" disappearing from the economy would damage the economy more in dollars than he earns, then he's not taking your money. Otherwise he is. My guess is that the filthy rich add orders of magnitude less to the economy than they take out. Warren Buffet and Steve Jobs are probably exceptions, but I don't complain about them. Most CEOs are probably fine. It's inheritors that are the real problem.
  • mason240 12y ago
    This view seems to come from the mindset that the output of the economy is static and that there is a fixed amount of wealth.
    • ufo 12y ago
      The issue here is that wealth inequality is so massive that it ends up being a net negative even if the economy as a whole is growing. What we are seeing nowadays is stagnant income for the middle class and skyrocketing wealth (and power) for the fortunate 0.1%
      • icebraining 12y ago
        And massive increases in the income of billions of workers worldwide - just not in a few developed countries.
    • tormeh 12y ago
      I explicitly discussed the problem with a variable total economic output. Explicitly. RTFC.
• dbpatterson 12y ago
  So where did their wealth come from? Most likely, they made it through 'business' - which usually means, through benefiting from the work of other, significantly less paid workers. The fact that our economic and political system permits this (and to the extent that it does) is not some natural phenomenon.
  • dandare 12y ago
    Workers are paid significantly less because that is the value of their work on the free market. Anyway, the important thing is whether they have equal opportunity to leave their shitty jobs and start business themselves and earn more through their genius (or loose their savings in free competition on the market). Our economic and political system (mixed market capitalism) may not be natural phenomenon (what is?) but majority of voters prefer it to other systems.
    • RodericDay 12y ago
      > majority of voters prefer it to other systems The whole point of the article is that if "the majority of voters" were informed, they'd vote differently.
• JanneVee 12y ago
  Well the statement is not about logic. It is about revolution.
• eloisant 12y ago
  People don't get rich in a vacuum. Rich people living in US got rich because of the healthy middle class who can afford to buy stuff (or get a loan to). They get rich because of the thousand of workers in their offices and factories. So this is the way wealth is distributed in US. While the inequality is growing in all OCDE countries (and possibly all countries in the world), in US it's much higher than other countries.
• efuquen 12y ago
  I hate this type of argument because it completely circumvent the point. The point isn't that if you're rich that means you've stolen something from the poor. It's the belief that the way our civil society is organized is broken, and plenty of riots have occurred for that reason in the past. The idea is that increased concentrations of wealth to an increasingly smaller percentage of people leads to a less innovative and content populace. And that we should be trying to avoid those trends, it's says something about what and who we value as a society. So stop bringing up the strawman of "rich people are evil" when the article wasn't even trying to making that point. Can we have a discussion about income inequality without that bogus line of thinking?
  • dandare 12y ago
    Gosh, strawman is such popular word these days .. hey, at least look around you before you start speaking about what others believe. Here, right in this forum: "Unjust wages", "business is benefiting from work of others", "the filthy rich", "top 1% have made the rules to their favor", "economic output of the planet", "if they claim to own it then you can't freely use it anymore", "People don't get rich in a vacuum", "they get rich because of the thousand of workers in their offices and factories" ... these people are saying black on white that the rich stole something from them. On the other hand this is the first I witness someone to cry strawman to pull a strawman, how creative!
    • efuquen 12y ago
      Were you commenting on the article or some specific comments here? I'm not sure, but I thought your comment was talking about the article ... If you want to take issues with someone specific views, then do so, but don't make a generalization like you did on a viewpoint that wasn't really even stated by the original post. And posting some out of context quotes give me very little go on, the discussions you can have about this should involve a little more nuance than random text bites from user comments that come from people from all sorts of backgrounds and political leanings. My general point, which seems to have been completely ignored in favor of attacking my use of the word 'strawman', is that discussing income inequality doesn't have to devolve into an us vs them argument, that it has a lot more to do with what sort of society we wish to foster and build. But you seem content in holding on to the former view.
• ryandrake 12y ago
  Gentrification as a counter-argument If my income remained the same, and suddenly all of my neighbors doubled their incomes, I would indeed be economically worse off. Everything would start costing more: Housing, groceries, health care, education--anything priced by a market, because "what the market will bear" has increased. While they're not technically "taking anything from you", when someone else gets richer, you indeed get poorer.
  • dandare 12y ago
    Finally a valid point! It certainly has effect on things like global prices of bread when the rich regularly throw away 20% of their fridges or use crops for bio fuels. But the discussion in this article is more about the top 1%, I doubt you compete with them on the same housing or grocery market. Certainly there could be a spill.
  • Taek 12y ago
    That depends on why your neighbors are richer, and how localized the efforts were. For example, if your neighbors are richer because they've been developing food infrastructure, it's quite possible that your grocery bill has actually gone down, because food is more accessible and cheaper thanks to their efforts. If we're just talking about one neighborhood, this is unlikely. But if we're talking about an entire economy, the poor people are quite likely to benefit as long as the wealth has come from developing the economy.