Calilasseia wrote:Anyone else regard this as scary?

I regard it primarily as criminal and grotesque.

Calilasseia wrote:The notion was merely brought in as a graphic illustration of the gigantic wealth these people own.

And that makes it acceptable to misrepresent statistics, does it? When you write "these 20 individuals have enough money to buy a hundred and two countries", it doesn't matter that that isn't remotely true?

You are comparing the total net worth of an individual with the annual product of a nation. That is misleading and economically illiterate.

You claim that these 20 individuals you listed "have three and a half times the money of Kuwait". Even if we consider net worth to be equivalent to "money" (which, in itself, is grossly simplistic) then you should consider Kuwait's monetary value to also be equivalent to its net worth and not a single year's economic activity.

Let me put in perspective how wrong it is to compare GDP with national net worth. The GDP of Germany (for instance) is around $3tn. The national net worth of Germany is around $18tn - SIX times as much.

Credit where credit is due, though: being wrong by a factor of six is an improvement on previous form.

Calilasseia wrote:Or do you not understand the business of visualising large quantities?

This is especially funny coming from someone who has a history of confusing Gross National income and the Gini coefficient.

Maybe this should be merged with the 1% thread...?
Having read both, someone mentioned that we didn't want the the very obscenely rich to leave the country, (Although it was the USA I think.?)
- This has always been "threatened", if taxes are raised to levels of which they don't approve.
.
I say let them leave. Fuck them.
They're just too greedy to live in civilised countries, among civilised people.

In fact, that's my new "solution" to "solving the 1% problem".
Throw out the all the billionaires, and ban them from returning.
We'd all be better off without such people. They should all buy their own islands, and fuck right off, and live there,.
Make it "socially unacceptable" to be so obscenely wealthy.

I'd bet that half those people are paying the people who actually do the work for them, 'minimum wage', or have moved their manufacturing to countries where none exists, and are paying a pittance.

For every billionaire who accumulates such excessive wealth, there are thousands, or maybe even millions, who don't get their 'fair shake', for the work they do.
The world's gone fucking mad!

Apologies, I'm not feeling very forgiving today.
Grrr.

A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000. The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than the lowest 48 nations combined.[11] The combined wealth of the "10 million dollar millionaires" grew to nearly $41 trillion in 2008.[12] According to PolitiFact and others, the top 400 richest Americans "have more wealth than half of all Americans combined."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality
My Bold (That's assets, not GDP)

We're all in this together.

Rome Existed wrote:Well, I assume Bill Gates is on the list and he gives quite a lot of money to charity.

To be fair though I bet everyone on this forum individually earns more money than tens of millions of people.

With a billion people (or more) subsisting on less than a dollar a day, that's undoubtedly true.

But context is everything and everyone on this forum no doubt has financial issues they find difficult to deal with. It's one thing to subsist on less than dollar a day if you live in a place like Darfur or a country like Bangledesh, it's really not all that different for someone who lives in London who makes $25K a year.

Rumraket wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:Anyone else regard this as scary?

I regard it primarily as criminal and grotesque.

And of course, utterly obscene.

It certainly doesn't bode well for the stability of human societies.

Matt_B wrote:I'd suspect that the vast majority of people on this forum who do earn a lot of money pay income tax on it at a rate substantially higher than the income of the very wealthy, which predominantly will only be attracting capital gains tax, and possibly not even that if they're any good at dodging it.

There's certainly nothing fair to my mind about that, whether they give some of their extra income to charity or not.

I just finished my taxes. I paid 13.5% of my income last year in Federal income tax.

To compare, Mitt Romney paid 13.9% in his last public tax return.

Mitt Romney makes a gazillion more dollars a year than me, but pays just .4% more in taxes than I do.

In addition to the obscenity, there is also bafflement. Who would want that much wealth? What do they possibly imagine they can do with it? There is only a certain amount of consumption that one can engage in...isn't there? I am pretty much satisfied with the amount of stuff I own. I don't need any luxury goods, I don't need a Ferrari, a Rolex, a sprawling country estate or a penthouse apartment in Dubai or anything else of that kind.

If my assets were in the billions I would be really keen on seeing them put to good use in helping people...

All we need to do is kill 85 people and the world would be a lot happier!

Darwinsbulldog wrote:All we need to do is kill 85 people and the world would be a lot happier!

That would distribute the wealth to their heirs... who would also need to be killed, which would distribute that money further, and so on. Supposing we can continue in this fashion, I am sure that a more even distribution can be reached with only the loss of, say, a few million lives.

LucidFlight wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:All we need to do is kill 85 people and the world would be a lot happier!

That would distribute the wealth to their heirs... who would also need to be killed, which would distribute that money further, and so on. Supposing we can continue in this fashion, I am sure that a more even distribution can be reached with only the loss of, say, a few million lives.

And the downside is???

Yes, this is as big a problem - income inequity (see the 1% thread) as any we face IMO, including population and global warming...

kennyc wrote:Yes, this is as big a problem - income inequity (see the 1% thread) as any we face IMO, including population and global warming...

I don't know that it even comes close to our global population problem and it certainly doesn't come within a light year of the climate problem.

Nature will likely take care of the population problem by not growing enough food to feed the extra few billion people we have on the planet. So they'll just die off. The biggest chore we may face in that is just getting them buried.

The climate problem is much, much worse ... because it threatens the entire globe and appears to be set to bring an end to the Holocene climate era to which civilization (as we know it) has become accustomed, and when it shifts into the oncoming Anthropocene climate era humans will find their backs pushed against the wall, facing all sort and manner of disruptions ... in precipitation, a badly acidified ocean, extended draughts, crop failures, water shortages, wildfires, intense weather events, and the like, all of which will together test our ability to sustain humanity in any reasonably civilized manner.

We can live with income inequality, as indeed we have been for the past several millennia, and even though it may be worse today than ever, it's not killing large numbers of people, at least yet. But once we get into the Anthropocene climate era, all bets will be off and there'll be a good chance that tens of millions will die as a result, perhaps even you and I, assuming we're around that long.

Humans have never faced a calamity like the one climate change will bring to us, not ever, and the great majority still don't see it coming, so we can imagine their reaction when it lands full force on their doorsteps. Yep, panic, and a tremendous rush trying to escape to safer haven. But of course there won't be any safer havens, we're all going to bake in the heat and dream of balmier more pleasant and cooler days, and then we'll die.

Compared to this fate, income inequality is kid's stuff.

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:

kennyc wrote:Yes, this is as big a problem - income inequity (see the 1% thread) as any we face IMO, including population and global warming...

I don't know that it even comes close to our global population problem and it certainly doesn't come within a light year of the climate problem.

Nature will likely take care of the population problem by not growing enough food to feed the extra few billion people we have on the planet. So they'll just die off. The biggest chore we may face in that is just getting them buried.

The climate problem is much, much worse ... because it threatens the entire globe and appears to be set to bring an end to the Holocene climate era to which civilization (as we know it) has become accustomed, and when it shifts into the oncoming Anthropocene climate era humans will find their backs pushed against the wall, facing all sort and manner of disruptions ... in precipitation, a badly acidified ocean, extended draughts, crop failures, water shortages, wildfires, intense weather events, and the like, all of which will together test our ability to sustain humanity in any reasonably civilized manner.

We can live with income inequality, as indeed we have been for the past several millennia, and even though it may be worse today than ever, it's not killing large numbers of people, at least yet. But once we get into the Anthropocene climate era, all bets will be off and there'll be a good chance that tens of millions will die as a result, perhaps even you and I, assuming we're around that long.

Humans have never faced a calamity like the one climate change will bring to us, not ever, and the great majority still don't see it coming, so we can imagine their reaction when it lands full force on their doorsteps. Yep, panic, and a tremendous rush trying to escape to safer haven. But of course there won't be any safer havens, we're all going to bake in the heat and dream of balmier more pleasant and cooler days, and then we'll die.

Compared to this fate, income inequality is kid's stuff.

The large popn problem and unequal income distribution DOES have an impact. Say you are poor, and want to reduce your carbon footprint. All you have is rice. It needs to be cooked. So you use wood, or dry dung, or anything else that is cheap and available to you. You probably cannot use solar power, or wind power or any other green power tech because you don't have the cash to buy it and the globalised economy is obsessed with fossil fuels so your government probably won't make such clean power available to you.

Does it all matter in the big scheme of things?

Did man really think that he is a permanent fixture on this planet?

Now that is a delusion.

don't get me started wrote:In addition to the obscenity, there is also bafflement. Who would want that much wealth? What do they possibly imagine they can do with it? There is only a certain amount of consumption that one can engage in...isn't there? I am pretty much satisfied with the amount of stuff I own. I don't need any luxury goods, I don't need a Ferrari, a Rolex, a sprawling country estate or a penthouse apartment in Dubai or anything else of that kind.

If my assets were in the billions I would be really keen on seeing them put to good use in helping people...

Well, if you want a private A380 you're gonna need a few hundred million.

Jovan wrote:Maybe this should be merged with the 1% thread...?
Having read both, someone mentioned that we didn't want the the very obscenely rich to leave the country, (Although it was the USA I think.?)
- This has always been "threatened", if taxes are raised to levels of which they don't approve.
.
I say let them leave. Fuck them.
They're just too greedy to live in civilised countries, among civilised people.

In fact, that's my new "solution" to "solving the 1% problem".
Throw out the all the billionaires, and ban them from returning.
We'd all be better off without such people. They should all buy their own islands, and fuck right off, and live there.
Make it "socially unacceptable" to be so obscenely wealthy.

I'd bet that half those people are paying the people who actually do the work for them, 'minimum wage', or have moved their manufacturing to countries where none exists, and are paying a pittance.

Exiling them accomplishes nothing. They don't even need to stay in any civilised country. With that kind of money, you can live comfortably anywhere. Look at Dubai. It's a desert shithole transformed into rich people playground. Besides, it doesn't matter where they live, as long as they can still conduct their business affairs. You can force them to stop their business activities, and you can also bite the hand that feeds you.

someone mentioned that we didn't want the the very obscenely rich to leave the country, (Although it was the USA I think.?)
- This has always been "threatened", if taxes are raised to levels of which they don't approve.
.
I say let them leave. Fuck them.
They're just too greedy to live in civilised countries, among civilised people.

The very wealthy would be a loss if their leaving meant that they took their money with them, and there was a loss of growth in terms of the companies they have started, and potentially could start in the future. The whole set of industries targeting the super-rich would also suffer quite a setback.

I think they should be pushed into becoming more valuable in the sense that if their money is made off money, ie investments and speculating, it should be heavily taxed, and if it is made through companies which provide employment, largely above minimum wage, and staff development and benefits, the tax bill should be more lenient.

In other words once people attain a certain level of income, their taxes should be tailored specifically according to how much of a drain/benefit they provide to society.

I am all for waiving the tax bill completely for someone who has made all his money through entrepreneurial activity involving employing people on high salaries with good benefits and ongoing training/development, producing goods/services which are internationally competitive, and making a profit which is within reasonable limits, or if above that, ploughing it back into growth of the company or some sort of development which benefits society.

Ie if the money is largely used to the benefit of society as a whole, what makes government better qualified to spend the money?

Manage that properly, on an individual basis, and make it a badge of honour for the super rich to have a zero tax bill because the money is of more benefit to society in their hands than in the hands of government, and the super rich will become people that any country would be proud to have.

Summary of issues here!

http://unsdsn.org/files/2012/12/121220- ... opment.pdf

But what if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?

http://www.lewishyde.com/publications/the-gift