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Youre turning the economy into what used to be called feudalism.
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2017 Mar 9, 7:13am 3,245 views 10 comments
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Dan8267
2017 Mar 9, 7:50am
On a serious note, capitalism, communism, and feudalism are indeed basically the same economic system and the above pyramid is mostly accurate, although slightly exaggerated. There are degrees of peasantry in our society. Being in the top 5% is still quite nice.
justme
2017 Mar 9, 8:00am
Nakedcapitalism got some some of the equivalences wrong.
1. Teetering on top of the pyramid is a separate hyperplane will all women on it.
2. Central bankers are the equivalent of the clergy, controlling the masses with dogma, for the benefit of the rulers
3. Feminists are ALSO he equivalent of the clergy, controlling the masses with dogma, for the benefit of the rulers
Otherwise it is fairly accurate representation of reality. They just missed a few humongous points by a mile.
Dan8267
2017 Mar 9, 8:05am
They just missed a few humongous points by a mile.
You're triggering me!
Being in the top 5% is still quite nice.
Top 5% in the US, but much much better worldwide. It's pretty good!
Tenpoundbass
2017 Mar 9, 8:41am
There is no 1% just a until now santioned Shaddow Deep State government that acts alone in doing Corporations bidding.
That's not to say that most Congress critters and most board members are not part of this Shaddow Deep State.
They are corepussle on Ameirca's ass and Ttrump is aYuuuuuge Lance.
How Retirement Was Invented
The earliest schemes for financial support in old age were pegged to life expectancy
In 1881 Otto von Bismarck, the conservative minister president of Prussia, presented a radical idea to the Reichstag: government-run financial support for older members of society. In other words, retirement. The idea was radical because back then, people simply did not retire. If you were alive, you worked—probably on a farm—or, if you were wealthier, managed a farm or larger estate.
But von Bismarck was under pressure, from socialist opponents, to do better by the people in his country, and so he argued to the Reichstag that "those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state.†It would take eight years, but by the end of the decade, the German government would create a retirement system, which provided for citizens over the age of 70—if they lived that long.
This was a big "if," at the time. That retirement age just about aligned with life expectancy in Germany then. Even with retirement, most people still worked until they died.
There were exceptions though. Military pensions had long been given to soldiers who had risked their lives (though those pensions didn't necessarily mean they could stop working altogether). In the United States, starting in the mid-1800s, certain municipal employees—firefighters, cops, teachers, mostly in big cities—started receiving public pensions, too, and in 1875, the American Express Company started offering private pensions. By the 1920s, a variety of American industries, from railroads to oil to banking, were promising their workers some sort of support for their later years.
Most of these pension programs pegged the retirement age to 65. This mark had less to do with health and more with economics—workers could keep on trucking for years, and "old age" didn't necessarily mean bad health. (There was some research, however, that documented a decline in mental capabilities starting around age 60. Conventional wisdom held, too, that by 60 a man had certainly done his best work and should give way to the next generation.) When the federal government started creating what would become social security, some of the policies suggested would have had workers off the clock at 60, or even earlier. The economics of that didn't quite work, though, and so when the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, the official retirement age was 65. Life expectancy for American men was around 58 at the time.
Almost immediately after that, though, that balance changed. The Depression ended, and wealth and better medicine meant that in the post-war boom, Americans started to live longer. By 1960, life expectancy in America was almost 70 years. All of a sudden more people were living past the age where they had permission to stop working and the money to do it. Finally, they began to retire in large numbers—to stop working, to embrace leisure, to golf. For a few decades,
older Americans lived without working, enough that we've come to expect that we should be able to retire, even if that may no longer be financially possible for many. Today, the Social Security Administration estimates that there are 38 million retired people in the United States alone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-retirement-was-invented/381802/
"So the sharp increase in Social Security tax for wage earners went hand-in-hand with sharp reductions in taxes on real estate, finance for the top One Percent – the people who live on economic rent, not by working, not by producing goods and services but by making money on their real estate, stocks and bonds “in their sleep.†That’s how the five percent have basically been able to make their money.
The idea that Social Security has to be funded by its beneficiaries has been a setup for the wealthy to claim that the government budget doesn’t have enough money to keep paying. Social Security may begin to run a budget deficit. After having run a surplus since 1933, for 70 years, now we have to begin paying some of this savings out. That’s called a deficit, as if it’s a disaster and we have to begin cutting back Social Security. The implication is that wage earners will have to starve in the street after they retire."
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"So it’s become a shell game. There’s really no Social Security problem. Of course the government has enough tax revenue to pay Social Security. That’s what the tax system is all about. Just look at our military spending. But if you do what Donald Trump does, and say that you’re not going to tax the rich; and if you do what Alan Greenspan did and not make higher-income individuals contribute to the Social Security system, then of course it’s going to show a deficit. It’s supposed to show a deficit when more people retire. It was always intended to show a deficit. But now that the government actually isn’t using Social Security surpluses to pretend that it can afford to cut taxes on the rich, they’re baiting and switching. This is basically part of the shell game. Explaining its myth is partly what I try to do in my book."
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"We have the highest healthcare costs in the world, so out of your paycheck – which is not increasing – you’re going to have to pay more and more for FICA withholding for Social Security, more and more for healthcare, for the pharmaceutical monopoly and the health insurance monopoly. You’ll also have to pay more and more to use public services for transportation to get to work, because the state is not funding that anymore. We’re cutting taxes on the rich, so we don’t have the money to do what social democracies are supposed to do. You’re going to privatize the roads, so that now you’re going to have to pay to use the road to drive to work, if you don’t have public transportation.
You’re turning the economy into what used to be called feudalism. Except that we don’t have outright serfdom, because people can live wherever they want. But they all have to pay to this new hereditary “financial/real estate/public enterprise†class that is transforming the economy."
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/03/michael-hudson-retirement-social-obligation.html
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