How to distribute wealth equally?
- Thread starter Saint
- Start date
Expressing opinions on line. If you think my opinions are BS, it makes me think I am on the right track. (It would be like Martin Shrekli telling me my opinions on healthcare are all wrong.)
The thing is , if I had not called you out , from post # 121 , what then would you conclude ?
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
That was what I was trying to prove. I believe just about all the regulations installed after the crash are withdrawn and if they have
not, they are being ignored. The problem is not a matter of petty theft. We're talking billions
No problem, how about 12 miles, I think that is the coastal zone the nation claims.
Which means radio waves from broadcasting stations passing right through your backyard, without your permission.
Fracking is a serious oproblem, from many stories I read about earthquakes, water pollution, air pollution. None of these need consent of the owner to be free of these health hazards and the owner has no recourse when something bad happens. I'm sure you are familiar with the Halliburton Loophole.
That is true of some - decreasingly significant - share of their accumulation.
It does not make up for the loss of demand and variety and innovation due to their accumulation of the wealth generated, and sequestration of it in their own possession - it generates much less demand in large piles under one person's control, than in smaller piles under many people's control.
People are hired in response to demand for their labor or services - anticipated market - not the availability of funds to hire them.
In the last round, the accumulated wealth of US productivity found its highest return in offshore investments (mostly capital, machinery and land etc) and hedge funds devoted to various US financial instrument schemes, defrauding foreign and naive entities outside the reach of US law, and the like. The estimated loss of GDP suffered by the US due to these hedge funds alone was and may remain - iirc from forgotten source a few years ago - 1.9% @year.
It is due to the produced wealth of the society accumulating in the large, inefficient, poorly informed, risk-averse, and comparatively unproductive reservoirs of the estates of the rich.
I agree, and I don't think any of the problem was "petty theft." Nor was the problem evil corporations intending to take grandma's house, or a cabal of flippers intent on damaging the economy. The genesis of most such financial problems is the emergent behavior of the complex economic system we have.
No one person caused the problem by buying homes they couldn't afford. While there was some nearly criminal activity (i.e. rapid flipping with no intent to ever live there or pay the mortgage) most people just took advantage of good mortgage rates. Likewise, while some fund manangers were frauds (i.e. selling packaged mortgages that they knew were astronomically risky) most were just trying to make money for their investors.
And that's why you need regulation that goes above and beyond the laws for fraud and the like - because the emergent behavior of the system as a whole, rather than the work of any individual actors, is what causes the problem.
12 miles is 60,000 feet - so every airliner that transits your airspace needs your permission? Assuming 1 acre plots, that means that they'd have to get 4 permissions a second when at cruising speed. Somewhat impractical.
Well, heck, air, noise and pollen pass right through your backyard without your permission, too.
I agree. Fracking needs a lot of work done to reduce those effects (and more regulatory oversight.)
The behaviors - which were familiar scams transposed to modern opportunities - did not magically "emerge" until the key banking regulations were repealed, and enforcement of remaining law cut way back.
It was massive fraud - a bubble of epic scale, inflated by corruption and dishonesty. Deregulated and lawless greed. The normal and historically standard and easily predictable and in fact predicted behavior of unregulated moneylenders since Cain invented money.
Even at the level of the retail mortgage, the trivial aspect, the individual borrower buying a house to live in, the straw that broke the camel, there was massive fraud; Countrywide, for example, was iirc the biggest household mortgage lender in the US - coast to coast operations. It wasn't just "some", but the biggest and market setting players, the central and dominant insurance operations, the ratings agencies with 90% of the business.
The larger part of the real estate lending fraud and collapse was in commercial real estate.
And the fraud bubble in the derivatives was twenty or thirty times as large as the retail wing entire - ten times as large as the entire US housing market including the loans that were solid and legitimately financed.
They didn't want grandma's house, and they weren't intent on damaging the economy, of course not. Why would they care? Like all unregulated moneylenders and market players from time immemorial, they were intent on defrauding the public and each other, raking in boatloads of profit from corrupt and manipulative dealings with any victims they could pull in, winning and growing rich. Even short term consequences were somebody else's problem - the health of the economy was a matter of complete indifference to them; being rich, they assumed they were immune from economic disease.
And that assumption was borne out, for the most part. They are still rich. They are not in jail, but in power - sitting in Trump's administration, consulting with Congress, schmoozing at Davos. They got to keep the money, for the most part. Afaik not a single one was rendered homeless. No more than a couple were jailed. Even the few who suffered the indignity of being deposed under oath, fined, and excluded from polite company, are living comfortable lives of luxury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Mozilo
There's no ''The thing is'' about it, you just don't get his point about you and Martin Shrekli.
Clue, think how you come across on this site with your one word perhaps two words posts, containing no argument to what your ''replying'' to. Clueless.
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Xmo1
Registered Senior Member
Spot on! What do you think of a humanitarian technocracy? How would you implement it?
The behaviors were always there. If you are saying that reducing regulation allowed expression of them, then I agree.
Agreed.
They weren't intent on defrauding the public; why would they care? They were trying to make money, and others were making a lot of money by offering subprime mortgages (and later mortgage-backed securities.) That's not corruption; that's their _job._
Everyone doing their jobs led to the problem - which is why it's not a simple problem to solve. Comprehensive regulation to set standards for loan risk is needed to overcome the quite natural tendency to make money for their shareholders/employers/clients.
Here in the US? About 10-20%. That seems to be range of the threshold for defining poverty during most of the US's existence. We can't change that; there will always be poor people. But we can work to make sure that those bottom 20% are only (for example) ten times as poor as the richest in the US, instead of millions of times poorer.
After the lessons of 1929 the behaviors were curbed, even prevented, well enough to maintain function in the larger economy indefinitely. Then these curbs were repealed and neglected, essentially starting in 1981 and proceeding by stages to the launching of disaster in 1999.
They were intent on defrauding the public, and they cared because there was a lot of money to be made that way.
Countrywide et al were systematically defrauding both the borrowers and the buyers of the misrepresented debt, for example. And then came the derivative level - an entire economic edifice built on fraudulent ratings and concealment of risk from debt buyers.
That's entirely corruption.
A liar loan backed by over-valued collateral presented as sound debt is a fraudulent document. Steering people who qualify for conventional mortgages into ARMs by concealing from them that they qualify for sounder terms and obscuring the terms and risks of the ARM they are taking on is predatory lending.
And so forth.
Bankers don't need regulations to tell them that deceptive ratings of derivative tranches and steering the poorly educated into ARMs granted without income verification or explicit description of risk is dishonest and predatory. They need regulations to keep them from doing it anyway.
The economy - any modern economy - needs rigorous enforcement of rigidly prohibitive banking laws to prevent moneylenders from turning predator and wrecking the place.
It also needs heavy taxation on the rich - heavy enough to prevent accelerating accumulation of wealth by the rich.
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RainbowSingularity
Valued Senior Member
stop talking facts ! its extrememly inconvinent !
RainbowSingularity
Valued Senior Member
Because your cult leader told you so ?
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
One easy solution is lower taxes or higher limits on tax-free income for the working poor. Every penny that is earned by the millions of working poor is immediately returned into the economy. That's how you stimulate the economy.
Give a millionaire a couple of thousand dollars and he'll throw a nice one night party.
That's not how you stimulate the economy.
I am not sure who my cult leader would be, nor am I sure from your post what I would be doing because he told me to do so.
Or reduce that (lowest) tax bracket from 10% to 5%. That way they are still contributing via income taxes, but at a much lower level.