Reality of wealth distribution in the US?

[Drem]

If this is accurate, it actually surprised me. I thought it was distributed a little more evenly

[Arlos]

Yeah, it's accurate. That's the depressing part.

I suppose you're one of the 92% who DID think it was more equitably distributed....

Basically, the income methods the wealthy use (investment income) is taxed at a radically lower rate than real income is. (ie, capital gains, "carried interest", etc.) Combine that with the decoupling of the salaries of senior management, plus the decoupling of average wage-earner salaries from productivity & profits, and you get the wild disparities we're seeing. I mean, like it says, look at the ratio of the salary of a CEO in the 1970s to his average employee then, to what it is now. Also look up the productivity curve compared to the salary curve. Used to move in lock step. Ever since Reagan, though, productivity has continued to climb. Wages have stayed almost flat since 1980.

http://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress ... -wages.jpg (image to big to re-show here, go there and look at it)

-Arlos

[Harrison]

And to top it all off, the top 10% are the ones "paying" (legal bribery) the legislators to tell us lower 90% how to live our lives.

It's awesome.

[Tikker]

.

[brinstar]

[Spazz]

I know it and you know it Brinstar but what do we do. Unions are going extinct jobs are going overseas and one half of our political system thinks that if we go to war hate fags and dont tax anyone shit will be great. Im a pessimist and I think that most folks are going to keep getting poorer while the 1 % get richer. The rulers of our country have moved the pieces into check mate and it doesnt really feel like there is a lot we can do about it.

Gm used to be our countries number one employer didnt it ? Ford one of them I think. They paid people a livable wage and shit was good for most everyone. Now walmart is the number one employer and they dont pay there employees a livable wage so they gotta get medicaid and welfare and foodstamps. Republicans think that its great to pay people pennies but really get upset when those employees come up short and need assistance. Its madness that what is wrong is right infront of people and they cant see it. As long as a huge chunk of people think its ok for companies to pay there employees the lowest possible wage this problem is going to continue to grow.

Not everyone who works at walmart is a fuckup or a teenager. Lot of folks got laid off or lost or lost there job in some way and it was all they could get. How are you sposed to pay your car note your rent and feed yourself on 7 dollars an hour in 2013?

If tax cuts to "job creators" create jobs and wealth than where are all the jobs at? Taxes are lower in america than ever in history and I think they are lower than just about any other part of the civilized world so shit should be poppin right ?

I feel like ranting im feeling pissed tonight but im trying to keep it in check.

Walmart and like are counting on the government to pick up the slack and in my opinion that makes them the leech. If you cant afford to pay those who work for you full time a base livable wage than you have no business being in business and thats the truth of it. We are in a race to the bottom. If you think its ok to pay people 7 bucks an hour than your for welfare and foodstamps and dont try to argue with me otherwise.




Nope im going ranting tonight

The american dream used to be that if you were willing to show up and work hard you could have a decent life. The goalpost keeps moving though. Now you need to be willing to do more than work you gotta get an education but wait theres more you need to look into your crystal ball and make sure you get a degree in something where there will be jobs in 10 years when your done. Still not done see its a global world now so your not just competing against your fellow country men for a living but against niggaz that make 13 cents an hour and work 20 hours a day. Lotta jobs have moved away or just dont exist anylonger so you had better have the best resume in a stack of 600 or even though you paid for the education your not as qualified as the guy who did it for 19 years and got laid off and will work cheap cuz hes desperate to pay his mortgage. Yup step right up and play the game of life new and improved 2013 edition with less wealth to go around and a whole lot more pitfalls to keep you from attaining it.


People need to read a fucking history book. Communism, socialism ,and fascism dont usually come to a country at gunpoint but get voted in because the people are tired hungry and desperate and will followe a leader who promises them better future. Those of you out there in internet land who scream that america is changing your right it is and its because of the policies you favor leaving people poor and disenfranchised. On top of that people want to disarm me and that gets me really riled up I have seen what countries with a few haves and a fuckin ton of have nots look like and its more madmax than it is my little pony. It also looks like where we are headed. Do we really want the fevalla in america thats the end of the road if we continue at the rate we are going.

How many of you want to come to my hometown? The ghetto is only going to spread as that gap grows might want to figure out how to deal with that before you guys are on here swapping tales with me about crazy people selling/on drugs , getting beat down by the police,hookers and kids with guns. Place I live used to be kind of a rough working class neighborhood but over the last decade it has gotton worse. Its not rocket surgery to see that it got worse as niggaz got more broke.Want to know why everyone sells pills and crack down here? I think it has to do with the fact that there isnt anything near me other than liquor stores and fast food joints around me and that cant employ everyone and they dont pay enough to feed yo kids. Desperate people do desperate things. You think lot of em dont see the drugs wrecking the place and know that sooner or later its going to end badly for them ? They do but they are so desperate that its a risk that becomes worth taking. How many people with a decent gig sell crack and rob people ? Im going to say not a whole lot.If theres not enough jobs to go around than maybe we either need to look at our trade policies or put a one child rule into play for a while so that our population matches our jobs available. This shit is ridiculous. I dont want everything in my life to be from china id kind of like to take a little bit of pride in my country and our goods.

You know what its like to live in michigan ? Everywhere you drive you look around at things that used to be where we made things. We see the places our fathers and grandfathers worked on the line to give us the lives we lived bulldozed rusted over and abandoned. None of us can figure out why either. Is this new global world better for us? Is the cheap plastic shit from china better? We were a proud region who made the cars you drive and the middle class lifestyle and now we are destroyed and you can find bitter men in any place where they gather who remember what it used to be like. It was once thought of as the Paris of the west and it now resembles photos of war torn kosovo. If you think im bitter your right I am. I can find no good reason for things to be the way they are. They told us that its ok if we lose manufacturing jobs they will be replaced by easy service jobs and youll enjoy the cheap goods. That is not what happened.

[Drem]

Man that was a depressing/accurate read. And while i agree on almost every point, assuming everyone's actually trying to better their lives and giving it their all, you have to take into account that grips of people have little to no motivation or ambition. There's a simple threshold to getting a good job in the US: passing a drug test

If food stamps and welfare in general required you to pass a drug test, even just one, with no threat of a followup at anytime, i guarantee the amount of people on welfare would be less than 50% of what it is now

It sounds rude but it's true. I can't even stop smokin for a month to get a real job. Im just dickin around in limbo under $15/hr and it's no one's fault but my own. But i alsohave never taken food stamps or anything, whatever that says about me. It's not the "man" or the 1%'s fault entirely, you gotta admit. I hardly know anyone that wants to work. Everyone wants to fuck off and party

[Spazz]

Sure I agree to an extent and im guilty of fucking around to much. I dont think a persons worth should be decided on piss though. I could test positive for a lot of drugs and it not be an issue as well but i dont like to go the route and i think thats actually more harmful. I do think a lot of people are hungry for an opportunity though they dont necessarily know how to get it or it isnt there. One of the things that fucks people up where I live is not having photo Id. Its shocking to me. There isnt really anything for them though other than mcdonalds and in our culture we have degraded mcjobs so much that most people feel humiliated taking them. Of course people are there own worst enemy but on the flip when you combine stupid with lack of opportunity you get a complete fucking disaster. A lot of people where I live are so ignorant about basic things that its shocking. It starts at home lot of these youngsters have complete shit parents who never taught the kid anything about the world so he learns from those around him since people are too poor to own cars and see other places.

Ill also come right out and say that hood culture is greatly flawed. The blind lead the blind and its going on multiple generations. Its not black either poor white trash commit the crimes father the babies they dont raise and are not leaders in there community at all. My girl teaches a bunch of the little hoodlums in detroit and they are unreachable and act as if they have not been raised at all. I see it out my front door as well. I get so pissed off like you guys should know better but after observing home lives of these people I understand that they truelly dont know any better at all. I had the advantage of having a mother that could walk on water and she tried to teach my heathen ass a thing or two but a lot of them dont have it.

The poor need a leader and a voice in this country man and they dont have it. I cant think of a strong black leader that is relevent at the moment and I cant think of anyone that I want to follow and support myself. Like I said in another thread I tried my best down here but it seems unfixable and the people unreachable.


I do think i have some of the answers but I know I dont have them all. I think some tariffs and protectionism would help. I think refusing to do business with any human rights violators would not only help us but help the world and help us look like that shining beacon we are sposed to be. I think ending the war on drugs would help ease the war like atmosphere that sometimes brews up like a storm. I think spending a fortune on education and making college more affordable and accessible to all would help a great deal as well. DOing good things in society takes a lot of money though and thats the problem.Its going to clash witht big business or people hate taxes and always think some minority or welfare brood mom is living lifestyles of the rich and the famous off there labor so they flip out and fight it.

This shit is so complicated and tangled that it makes your face hurt to even think about it but all of our major problems are connected to each other and if we dont start at the bottom were never gonna fix it. You dont build a house from the roof down you dont start a cake with the frosting.

I try my best to be honest about the world I live in and to make sense of the things I see.

I think I would compare poverty to being at the great lakes or the ocean ya know when the waves drag you under each time you go to get up another one drags you down. First ya lose your job then your car dies or gets repoed next thing the lights are getting shut off. Our safety net in america is not very godd as the stats from this crisis we went through come out indicate. Once you hit the skids if you dont pull out real quick it gets (clinteastwoodvoice) "fuckin ugly" in a real hurry. I see a lot of people around me who just kinda crash landed. When auto got hit and continues to get hit its not just the factories, its the people that feed em on lunch break, and cintas and people who stock vending machines and one domino after the next just regular ass people falling into the pit cuz the rug got yanked out from under them. In a lot of ways when it comes to the financial meltdown and globalization I live at ground zero and it fuckin blows. I will say this though weather it be a job or a hustle niggaz up here are gettin paid. As things have gotten worse economically I have seen people make a living off of all sides of the law. Sadly black markets are always open to anyone who wants to take the risk to set up shop but what are ya gonna do when the lights are off and your hungry and no one is returning your phone calls ? I know too many people with sharp minds who have gotten caught up in that bullshit cuz they felt like thats all they could do. Prison and poverty go hand in hand.

[Spazz]

God damn I am long winded when I am on a serious note.

[Reynaldo]

It's not about hard work or education or any of that anymore.

These days, getting a good job is all about getting networked early on (either by your parents connections or internships in college).

Sad but true.

[Spazz]

Yea thats another part of the problem. Often times to get your foot in the door you gotta know the right people and that ends up shutting outtons of qualified people.

I also get pissed off when people say a job isnt a right. Its not but you need to have one to get by and when theres not enough to go around it fucks the country up.


Why is not ok to have a sweatshop in america but we are fine with buying goods made in them as long as it wasnt here? I dont want my shit to be made by slave labor no matter where it comes from but I dont get a say at all.

I think more free trade and tax cuts will fix this though dont you ? If we could just privatize everything so that no matter what you did someone was making a dollar that would fix all of our problems over night. That and getting rid of minimum wage. Think of how much unemployment we could cure if employers could pay ya 2 bucks an hour. We would live in a utopia in no time

[Menelvir]

I enjoyed watching it, it was very compelling, and I didn't really have a mental picture of the level of disparity.

When you introduce the productivity vector along with the wages vector, I'd say it makes a reasonable argument for slacking, i.e. when you've reached a certain income level that affords you a certain standard of living, there's little incentive (maybe even disincentive) to work any harder because the (monetary) gains are so overwhelmingly marginalized.

If the worker motivation isn't there, then that seems to affect in parallel concepts like worker mobility and/or worker leverage, which may be one of the few ways workers could benefit themselves without the assistance of a larger group (e.g. union).

If I have to double my work efforts in order to see a 1/10th or 1/8th increase in pay, which does it behoove me more to do, seek out that harder, longer-hours, more stressful job, or stay where I am?

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.

[Menelvir]

I thought of something else.

One point that might factor significantly but which the video does not mention is that of population growth.

If the income groups that can least afford to have children are multiplying at the highest rate, and if the wealthiest income groups have one of the lowest population growth rates, this fact will certainly skew the resulting wealth distribution per person toward the slowest growth segment, especially over a period of generations, and it will steadily grow worse with time as the general population grows.

[brinstar]

a fat lot

fuckin preach dude

[Drem]

I thought of something else.

One point that might factor significantly but which the video does not mention is that of population growth.

If the income groups that can least afford to have children are multiplying at the highest rate, and if the wealthiest income groups have one of the lowest population growth rates, this fact will certainly skew the resulting wealth distribution per person toward the slowest growth segment, especially over a period of generations, and it will steadily grow worse with time as the general population grows.

Good point. But isn't that sort of assuming that if you're born poor, you stay poor? Because I don't think it always happens that way

I'm curious how many people are filthy rich because they screwed over their business partner

[Tikker]

.

[brinstar]

Good point. But isn't that sort of assuming that if you're born poor, you stay poor? Because I don't think it always happens that way

upward mobility is also at an all-time low

sure there are exceptions, but for the most part you don't fall far from the tree

continual budget cuts, skyrocketing tuition costs, decaying infrastructure, stagnant wages, etc - plus who knows what's gonna happen when the student loan debt bubble bursts in the next 18 months or so

[brinstar]

There's a simple threshold to getting a good job in the US: passing a drug test

~snip~

It sounds rude but it's true. I can't even stop smokin for a month to get a real job. Im just dickin around in limbo under $15/hr and it's no one's fault but my own. But i alsohave never taken food stamps or anything, whatever that says about me. It's not the "man" or the 1%'s fault entirely, you gotta admit. I hardly know anyone that wants to work. Everyone wants to fuck off and party

of the 3.4 million pre-employment drug tests performed by Quest Diagnostics in the first six months of 2012, only 2% were positive for marijuana

the thing you think is a problem is a nonsense wedge issue dressed up and sold as a problem

[Drem]

ok i'm gonna rant spazz-style for a bit because i don't think you have the right perspective. this is a problem. i could let you talk to shitloads of people that will back me up because they're actually living like this right now. it's a choice

so anyways, yeah, weird, stoners don't take drug tests. that's my whole point. everyone knows it's the most harmless drug in the world that consequently stays in your system the longest. guys smokin 1/8 a day aren't gonna go try to pass a test, and if they do, there are shitloads of options to help them pass, whether it be drinks, fake dicks, or someone else's pee. that's a terrible figure to use in this argument and i'm not sure why you chose to mention it, because my whole argument is that there are shitloads of people working jobs for $11/hr because they make a somewhat liveable wage and are totally content. despite the fact that they aren't building a future for themselves because they have a job that lets them smoke weed on break, smoke with the owner or their boss, etc, and it's honestly a pretty enjoyable lifestyle in your early 20s if you're going to die at 30 and aren't planning ahead, hahahahah

maybe it's endemic to the northwest because 90% of the people i see smoke weed. if they chose to, they could go be a janitor at the hospital for $12/hr with benefits, paid vacation, etc., but they just don't want to. it's as easy as that. there are so many excellent starting positions available here that are constantly on craigslist because no one ever applies or they fill the job and start smoking again, get a random UA and get fired and the job's back in craigslist within a month

this doesn't apply to places where everyone isn't a stoner, but for eugene, portland, most of california, and who knows about washington now that it's actually legal, it's a very accurate assessment of why a lot of perfectly capable people are broke. they barely make money at all and the money they do make goes right into an ounce of weed every paycheck and their after work drinking sessions to tide them over til the next paycheck. i'm just speaking from experience here. i was like that and so are most of the people i know

most of the problem with people and progress and all that shit is a simple lack of ambition imo. the opportunities are out there if you choose. you might not get exactly what you want, but there are options. plenty of them. our best doctors are from other countries for a reason. it's because they work 5,000x harder than lazy-as-fuck entitled Americans. everybody grows up here thinking they should be a fucking King or something by the time they're 20. or because they went to culinary school they should immediately be exec chef at the ritz carlton. you gotta work for that. or like someone else said earlier, you gotta know the right people. one or the other. nothing's impossible just because you read some graph that people aren't getting paid as much. it's because no one's qualified or tries to do real work anymore. they're totally fine with getting $11/hr so they can get drunk every night and smoke to their heart's content. then when they're 30 and have nothing to fall back on, realise it might be time to change. thus community colleges being stock full of old people

keep in mind i'm only really talking about why poor people don't move up to the middle class. there are usually simple reasons behind it. i'm not saying some dude flipping burgers could be bill gates tomorrow if he tried a little harder. but it's not hard to live a comfortable life these days. most people on food stamps don't need to be, etc. all of these things add up and put a lot of strain on the economy in general. mostly because a lot of money earned legitimately at a job is just changing hands with drug dealers after a business pays out its employee. it's not going back in to the economy

you can choose to not agree with what i'm saying, but i see it happen every day. i know this doesn't happen everywhere. but it happens in the pacific northwest. a lot

[Spazz]

Im not disagreeing with you at all. Im a total burnout I know the type I act like the world is ending when my jar hits the halfway point.I still dont think a persons worth should be judged on whats in there piss though.It pisses me off that I could go get a job and test positive for xanex and opiates but not weed.

Im sure things are different region by region where I live its not weed holding people back but lack of opportunity in all directions and fierce competition for the jobs that do exist.

[brinstar]

a lot

okay that's a good post. especially valid point re: people not even bothering to (legit) take pee tests

all i meant was that people who honestly want to rise out of ACTUAL poverty (not slacker poverty, there's a difference) often have the cards stacked against them. i fully agree with you that they're shooting themselves in the foot by blazing six times a day, but there's a MASSIVE difference between a 30-year-old dude who works a job any 18-year-old could do simply because he doesn't want responsibility and a dude who got laid off and foreclosed and can't afford to learn a new trade

only other thing i would ask is if you think maybe your perception is skewed by your current occupation? last i knew you were cheffing at some sort of fancy chicken joint (correct me if i'm wrong) and honestly i'm hard-pressed to imagine a field with more stoners than restaurant kitchen work

for that matter, it's fair to say my perspective is skewed as well due to occupation. the population i work with are people whose drug addictions got them serious charges. we make them quit using and drinking, we make them finish their GED if they don't have one, and we make them get jobs. NE has the second-lowest unemployment rate in the country (#1 is ND, thx halliburton), and even stone cold sober, our people face a steep-ass climb


anyway if i were a toxicologist or chemist i would be digging like mad to invent/discover an instant way to tell if someone has been blazing at/before work. i guarantee that most employers who screen out stoners only do it because they don't want their company held liable for workplace accidents or whatever caused by people baked on the job. same with law enforcement - if there were a fast, reliable way to determine if someone was driving baked you can bet opponents of legalization would sing a different tune (the rational ones would, anyway). whoever comes up with the "breathalyzer for weed" is gonna make a pile of cash REAL fast

[Drem]

Im not disagreeing with you at all. Im a total burnout I know the type I act like the world is ending when my jar hits the halfway point.I still dont think a persons worth should be judged on whats in there piss though.It pisses me off that I could go get a job and test positive for xanex and opiates but not weed.

Im sure things are different region by region where I live its not weed holding people back but lack of opportunity in all directions and fierce competition for the jobs that do exist.

yea i'm not saying i love that that's how things are, trust me

and yea alex, i am definitely skewed in my perception because of my past occupation. i left that industry because of all the druggies and the impossibility of ever getting benefits. currently i work at a record store. the pay's worse, but at the end of the day i make more because i don't waste nearly as much on drinking and smoking anymore

and now we have a little one on the way so i'm suddenly aiming a little higher. this issue has been my main bottleneck throughout my 20s so it's probably why i think it's such a huge problem. hahahaha

but yeah, you're right. some guy that got laid off and foreclosed is screwed. can't argue with that

[Jay]

Just save up for studio time via your shit job or money from winning battle raps at ciphers, record single, set up meeting with Dr. Dre. Problems solved.

[Drem]

that worked for like four people. hahahahah

[Jay]

So proof that it works! =P