When do you consider someone "wealthy" or "rich"?

You can show a mule water, but he'd rather die of thirst than follow you.

 

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Jack asses are the same way I hear. Some people just like to complain and look for excuses. Others make do and and do all right.

The idea that if there just were not as many wealthy people poverty would be eliminated is just ignorant.

 

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What?
There are, in fact, fewer and fewer, wealthier and wealthier people.
Poverty is a mere side-effect of the means by which greater and greater wealth is accumulated.

 

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I left out "not"

Poverty isn't a side-effect. It's a separate issue.

 

How do you figure that? I mean, in actual physics and mathematics, rather than rote rhetoric.
How do you figure economic forces to separate into wealth and poverty streams with no common mechanism?

 

From the Iceauras? If they are below the poverty line, then that's a problem we have to address.

We've gotten to the part where you are losing the argument and start lashing out already? Come now. Try to stick to the topic and avoid the angry slurs, eh? At least for another few posts.

By getting them into good schools, by using Dad's connections, by using the money to influence people in all the usual ways, by inheriting the family business, things like that.

Some of them, yes. If there's an opening for a director of engineering somewhere, he's going to get considered way before she will.

OK. I know nothing about him. Is he below the poverty line?

I agree.

To paraphrase another guy in the thread - "if you read the article you would know that taxes taken in then were similar to what is taken in now. Therefore, you need to find another argument."

I already do. The rich pay a FAR lower percentage than I do. We should remedy that.

 

It works like this. I get an education, invest, start a business or whatever. I do OK.

You don't get an education, don't invest, don't do anything and you don't do as well.

If I don't do as well, you're still poor. If I do even better, you're still poor.

If you have parents on drugs, that has an effect on your future. Me doing well, doesn't.

 

I'm not any angry guy. Projecting?
The rich own businesses and corporate taxes are high. They get taxed. If you are going to be on the tax bandwagon you are going to have to pay more taxes.

The economy doesn't revolve around over-privileged children which seems to be your prime focus.

I'm guessing you aren't "rich" and you're not "poor". Yet you've managed to navigate life. It's the same for everyone else. Why look for things to be upset over?

You're basic argument seems to be "why isn't life fair?". You reply undoubtedly will be "But shouldn't we try to make it as fair as possible?". To which I'll reply "Sure". Now what?

 

At a far, far lower rate than people. They pay 21% in federal taxes. The average billionaire pays 23% TOTAL - federal, state and local. I pay well over 50% because I am not rich enough to take advantage of the tax dodges that billionaires have.

I do. I keep saying this and it appears you keep missing it. I pay a lot more than 21% in federal taxes. I would like the rich to do so as well.

Correct. The economy does not revolve around them.

Same reason you do, I guess.

Not at all. My arguments are:

1) We have programs the government runs. Some good, some bad. Some help people (like education.) We should support these programs more than we do.
2) That money has to come from somewhere. And it damages the economy far less to get it from rich people than from poor people.
3) Privilege exists and is a big reason many people are left behind. We can reverse that in part through education (see #1 above.) The best way to do that is not to remove those privileges but make them more accessible to everyone. Move EVERYONE closer to the finish line.

 

Why can't we have a system where each person pays what they feel they can afford?
Alex

 

How? Where does 'an education' come from? Who has access to it? How much of it can everyone just 'get'?

Invest what? Where? When you invest, do you know whom you are enabling to do what, or what the side-effects, fallout and damages will be to which population, which environment? Do you know where the profit (your dividend) is coming from?

How is that done? What are the actual steps you need to take? What are the prerequisites?

What, like inherit a coalmine?

In order to answer the question, you have to more than OK. You have to get rich. The wealth you accumulate has to come to you from whoever had it before. Then you to give your offspring all the advantages money can buy (and all the people who do not have that money can't buy) and they accrue even more wealth and support the political party that collects tax from other people to subsidize your family business.

Because I had to work in your family's coalmine from age ten.

Barely earn enough to eat every day and can't afford medicine for ailing father.

If you call hauling cartfuls of coal up the shaft for 10 hours a day not anything, compared to smoking cigars and playing snooker at your club, then, yes.

Die of black lung at 38? No, that's not doing well at all.

But of course, these very different situations are unrelated.

Not if I seize your assets and throw you in jail!

You can do even better by making more people poor, not by making the already destitute even poorer.
So, when you're destituted the working class of your own country, in order to increase your wealth, you have to go plunder another continent and make some other people poor.

Unless your parents got rich by means of the drug trade that entrapped my parents when they were still in school.

Wealth isn't created. It moves, like water. It trickles down slowly, and gets pumped up fast.

 

Because then 99% of people would pay zero, and government would fail. That phenomenon is known as "tragedy of the commons."

 

There is doing OK, and then there is rich.
It doesn't affect anyone else?

 

Those who are "doing OK" face the same perceived concerns of yours regarding the rich and yet it doesn't seem to be much of an issue.

I don't really care who is smoking a cigar and playing snooker. It doesn't affect my life. It's not really affecting your life either.

The poor will face greater odds regardless of how everyone else is doing. That's why it isn't related very closely to "the rich". There are poor all over the world. There are countries where virtually everyone in the country is poor.

 

The greater the disparity, the mucher the issue.

Why should you? You just stay on message, promoting fairytale capitalism, where everyone lives in separate bubbles and the cause-effect law is indefinitely suspended.

Not that you're aware of... except maybe the crime rate, militarized police, crumbling infrastructure, execrable governance and the odd riot...
but it sure affects the lives of all the peons labouring to pay for that lifestyle.

It's rending the social fabric in which I live.

In fact, the "better" - which is to say getting richer - the top 0.1% are doing, the larger that population you so casually refer to as "the poor". Their bodies, their communities and families, their resources, their environment, their time, sweat and mental health was sucked up into the wealthy class.

No math, huh?

Indeed! How do you think the rich countries got rich and stay rich?

 

Always the victim...

 

...never the predator.

 

Nor am I.

Have you ever had any "success" in life? If so, was it because of your efforts and did those other "excuses" largely not matter?

 

No "success". But I've had a quite interesting, fulfilling and happy life.

 

That's success. How did you manage that while the rich kids smoke cigars and play snooker?