patrick.net

Check you're title.

your poor don't know they are poor and that's the way you like it, you like it
That's the way you like it!

Your/You're; One is correct Anglesh. The other,poetic liscense.

Quite profound, if only the po folk would protest bank bailouts.

marcus says

Check you're title.

True, I don't have poor. Although, I am poor.

hehehe...merriam's fucked....

HEY YOU says

Your/You're poor & don't know it?

Oh ok, so you think that all CEOs do the same shit? So your thought process is the same as a Pavlovian dog, all thought is by association?

They fail to mention that most CEOs only hold the position for 5 to 8 years..

They fail to mention how many of the CEOs were only able to perpetrate their deeds because of government. Your report says 112 out of 500 or 22% were bailed out by the government during the crash in 2007. I'm a thinking that this is government problem.

They talk about 8% who are fired because of incompetency. Guess what 80% of small business fail within the 1st year of those 80% fail within 5 years, IOW only 4% last more than 5 years. So this is a tough game and it is no wonder that 8% are not competent enough. It is so tough that another 7% cook the books.

Then they go on to yammer about flow through taxation as if it is a loophole. That is not so, since the 80s the corporations have been taking advantage of the Sub-chapter S category but it is not a loop hole.

Gawd when will you ever quit drinking the Piketty cool aid. stupid question never, BTW have you actually read the book?

above chart, per-capita (age 15-64)

real housing costs have doubled since 1980, taking another $400/mo from everyone over inflation.

This matches my experience pretty closely, what rented for $300 in the 1970s now rents for $2000+, an increase 2X over inflation.

If corporate america split the rising profits ($5,000 per capita since 2000) 50% with their workers, on a per-capita basis that'd be another $200/mo in purchasing power.

Of course, if only the latter income windfall came, the landlords would soon take it all, too. Your disposable income is also your rent, well 30-50% of it anyway.

Bellingham Bill says

And CEOs are on the take, but their skim is just a fraction of corporate profits overall.

If you gave the entire sum paid to the Ceos to the workers their hourly pay would increase by cents not dollars.

indigenous says

If you gave the entire sum paid to the Ceos to the workers their hourly pay would increase by cents not dollars.

Is there anyone you care about but the strong and the wealthy?

indigenous says

Bellingham Bill says

And CEOs are on the take, but their skim is just a fraction of corporate profits overall.

If you gave the entire sum paid to the Ceos to the workers their hourly pay would increase by cents not dollars.

And if the CEO got nothing, the company would collapse, and all the workers would end up with nothing. The most important person in the company is the CEO.

Strategist says

Most certainly high compared with other countries. It's the shareholders money, and therefore it's their call.

No it's not the shareholders money unless the rules of shareholder voting get changed. Corporate compensation is part of the board, not shareholder voting. Since executives usually sit on other boards it's not like there is a lot of resistance to high compensation. It's a cozy club. You scratch my back I'll scratch yours.

dodgerfanjohn says

No you dingbats. What drives an economy is investment in production

I can't believe so many people can be so blind to such a simple concept.

Over the last 40 years, these things have all been occurring in tandem:

1. Corporate profitability rising exponentially
2. Income/wealth inequality rising to near all time highs
3. Interest rates trending down to near all time lows
4. Debt levels generally rising-both private and public

Do you think these might be related? Perhaps as you take money from the poor and middle class (workers) and give it to the rich (owners), the poor and middle class would have to borrow that same money back from the rich?

dodgerfanjohn says

No you dingbats. What drives an economy is investment in production.

Unfortunately with the regime currently in place in the U.S., the incentive for investment has been in used housing and other passive investments. The incentive to form a business or bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been utterly crucified by the policies of the Obama administration and his appointments.

The incentive has been utterly crucified by every administration and appointments since reagan was elected. Not too good on current history are we?

bob2356 says

The incentive has been utterly crucified by every administration and appointments since reagan was elected.

I would say the real culprit was Nixon, and the floating exchange rate brought to us by Milton Friedman.

indigenous says

bob2356 says

The incentive has been utterly crucified by every administration and appointments since reagan was elected.

I would say the real culprit was Nixon, and the floating exchange rate brought to us by Milton Friedman.

Other than 1946-1971 exchange rates have floated since the invention of money. What's your point?

bob2356 says

What's your point?

It allowed mercantilism by Japan and China.

According to Professor Friedman’s vast archive of historic data, inflation
would be rapidly extinguished if money supply was harnessed to a fixed
and unwavering rate of growth, such as 3 percent per annum. If that disci-
pline was adhered to consistently, nothing more was needed to unleash
capitalist prosperity—not gold convertibility, fixed exchange rates, cur-
rency swap lines, or any of the other accoutrements of central banking
which had grown up around the Bretton Woods system.
Indeed, once the central bank got the money supply growth rate into a
fixed and reliable groove, the free market would take care of everything
else, including determination of the correct exchange rate between the
dollar and every other currency on the planet. Under Friedman’s monetary
deus ex machina, for example, the unseen hand would silently and effi-
ciently mete out rewards for success and punishments for failure in the
banking and securities markets. The need for clumsy and inefficient regu-
lation of financial institutions would be eliminated.
Friedman’s “fixed rule” monetary theory was fundamentally flawed,
however, for reasons Martin had long ago discovered down in the trenches
of the financial markets. The killer was that the Federal Reserve couldn’t
control Friedman’s single variable, which is to say, the “money supply” as
measured by the sum of demand deposits and currency (M1).
During nearly two decades at the helm, Martin learned that the only
thing the Fed could roughly gauge was the level of bank reserves in the sys-
tem. Beyond that there simply weren’t any fixed arithmetic ratios, starting
with the “money multiplier.”
The latter measured the ratio between bank reserves, which are potential
money, and bank deposits, which are actual money. As previously indicated,
MILTON FRIEDMAN’S FOLLY

that Americans have borrowed one-half “turn” of national income from the
rest of the world in order to live permanently beyond their means.
These massive US trade deficits have actually become a way of life since
Camp David, yet they were not supposed to even happen. Professor Fried-
man advised the Nixon White House at the time that market forces would
actually eliminate the incipient US trade deficit by “price discovery” of the
“correct” market clearing exchange rates.
In this manner, floating exchange rates would continuously rebalance
the flows of merchandise trade, direct investment, portfolio capital, and
short-term financial instruments according to the changing circumstances
of each nation. A global variant of Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” would sup-
plant the financial stabilization and trade settlement functions of the old-
fashioned gold standard that the discarded Bretton Woods system had
been built upon.
In short, international markets would be cleared by the continuous
repricing of exchange rates. This meant that deficit countries would suffer
currency depreciation and surplus countries the opposite, thereby main-
taining international payments equilibrium.
As previously demonstrated, this seemingly enlightened, pragmatic, and
market-driven arrangement didn’t work in practice. As it turned out, Adam
Smith’s unseen hand never even reported for work after Professor Fried-
man’s floating-rate contraption was put into global operation.
Instead of floating with market forces, exchange rates have been chron-
ically and heavily manipulated by governments. This is especially the case
with respect to the mercantilist nations of Asia in pursuit of an “export your
way to prosperity” economic growth model.
In pegging their currencies far below market-clearing levels in mono-
maniacal pursuit of export advantage, Japan, China, South Korea, and the
caravan of imitators along the East Asian rim accumulated more and more
dollars. They then parked these excess dollars in Treasury bills and bonds,
and sequestered the latter in the vaults of their central banks.
Over the years, these staggering accumulations of dollar liabilities have
been labeled as “foreign exchange reserves” in deference to the wholly ar-
chaic notion that the dollar is a “reserve currency.” But the $7 trillion of dol-
lar liabilities now held by foreign central banks are not classic monetary
reserves at all.

From here:

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-man-who-justified-the-fed/

tatupu70 says

Do you think these might be related? Perhaps as you take money from the poor and middle class (workers) and give it to the rich (owners), the poor and middle class would have to borrow that same money back from the rich?

Hey, fine by me. By far the largest thief of my paycheck is the cumulative government. More than rent by a long shot, and rents the second biggest expense with the monthly food bill of $600/mo being a very very distant third.

But back to the money third...Feds swipe around $15k, state takes another $5k, taking out savings, big gov hammers me for 9% every time I buy something so let's make that another $8k a year or so. And that doesn't even include hidden gas tax, Medicare, cell and cable fees, and other shit I can't even conceive of. So conservatively I probably pay in sum total around $40k a year in taxes.

Your point is going to be that some mysterious boogeynan .1% is stealing money from me.

I highly fucking doubt that imaginary amount comes anywhere close to $40 fucking thousand dollars a year.

Peeler says

Hey, fine by me. By far the largest thief of my paycheck is the cumulative government. More than rent by a long shot, and rents the second biggest expense with the monthly food bill of $600/mo being a very very distant third.

But back to the money third...Feds swipe around $15k, state takes another $5k, taking out savings, big gov hammers me for 9% every time I buy something so let's make that another $8k a year or so. And that doesn't even include hidden gas tax, Medicare, cell and cable fees, and other shit I can't even conceive of. So conservatively I probably pay in sum total around $40k a year in taxes.

Your point is going to be that some mysterious boogeynan .1% is stealing money from me.

I highly fucking doubt that imaginary amount comes anywhere close to $40 fucking thousand dollars a year.

Yep - well said.

Peeler says

Your point is going to be that some mysterious boogeynan .1% is stealing money from me.

Nope--that's not my point at all. Nobody is stealing anything from you. The rules of the game were changed so that owners have a huge advantage over workers. I'd like to change the rules back.

And, by all means, let's cut military spending. I'm all for it.

indigenous says

According to Professor Friedman’s vast archive of historic data, inflation

would be rapidly extinguished if money supply was harnessed to a fixed

and unwavering rate of growth, such as 3 percent per annum. If that disci-

pline was adhered to consistently, nothing more was needed to unleash

capitalist prosperity

Why do you think fixed prices would help anything. Wages would simply stop growing (or start falling) in tandem.

tatupu70 says

Why do you think fixed prices would help anything. Wages would simply stop growing (or start falling) in tandem.

Wrong. Teachers roughly make the same salary today as they did in 2008, some of them were just starting to be able to afford a house when prices kept dropping. Now they are priced out thanks to QE and billions of crony subsidies to the housing sectors such as the purchase of MBS. Artificial inflation is the destroyer of the middle and upper class and only leaves government dependents and .1 percenters.

mell says

Wrong. Teachers roughly make the same salary today as they did in 2008, some of them were just starting to be able to afford a house when prices kept dropping. Now they are priced out thanks to QE and billions of crony subsidies to the housing sectors such as the purchase of MBS. Artificial inflation is the destroyer of the middle and upper class and only leaves government dependents and .1 percenters.

Actually, it's not wrong and your post does nothing to prove it wrong. Assets are not considered in inflation calculations.

What's wrong with renting, anyway? If you want to lower housing prices--build more!

Peeler says

Your point is going to be that some mysterious boogeynan .1% is stealing money from me.

Who opened the window and allowed sanity to fly in?

CaptainShuddup says

Who opened the window and allowed sanity to fly in?

Another classic line from the Capt'n

Call it Crazy says

Hey, I like this one.

You are flattering yourself, could not care less.