Posted on 03/06/2011 4:48:19 AM PST by mmanager
ST. LOUIS • It was late morning at the coffee shop, and the professor wanted to talk about rich people.
Mark Rank usually focuses his attention on the low end of the income charts, on poverty. As a professor of social welfare at Washington University, he's considered a top academic expert on that topic and social justice.
But he was moved to join a reporter here, at a back table of Kayak's Coffee across the street from his school, to talk about income inequality because of an interview in last Sunday's Post-Dispatch with Thomas A. Garrett, a St. Louis Federal Reserve vice president and economist. Garrett wrote a paper titled, "U.S. Income Inequality: It's Not So Bad," which argues that the rich's getting richer doesn't make the poor any poorer.
It doesn't matter, Garrett argues, that the distance between the rich and everyone else, from the middle class on down, stands at its widest point since the 1920s Gilded Age. "My point is, the social ills that are the result of having a low income are not because other people have more," he says. "It's because those at the bottom don't have enough income. The resource pie is not fixed. If I make more than you, it's not that I've taken it from you."
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
Yeah, but he deserves his, because he is serving people and didn't earn it by making an evil profit at an evil corporation.
Fixed it. And the answer is 'yes'.
over 50% of the people have no idea what an income tax is in this country, is that fair? Have some skin in the game , so when an Idiot politican talks about a tax hike, he IS talking to you.
Check out the video posted on FR yesterday.
Protester To Tea Partier: “Why Do You Have A Right To Your Money?”(EPIC VIDEO)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2684233/posts
A few years ago, Limbaugh defined the rich (by the RATS definition) as; “...anyone one who makes $1.00 a year more than you..”
bttt
I feel like I just drank a 1 gallon jug of Carbonated Smarm.
For the moment, the ideological heirs of those that believe the flames of liberty must be extinguished and the aspirations of the individual curtailed for the alleged good of humanity have grown more sophisticated in their methods of getting the people to comply with their agenda. However, as Americans draw ever closer to the breaking point of just how much they are willing to put up with as frankly we are fast approaching the threshold where there is precious little left for the state to steal, we must ask with concern: will the aspiring despots among us resort to the violent tendencies of their philosophical progenitors in the attempt to bring about socialism’s ultimate triumph?
I don't understand the question.
“Its about envy and greed”....and Government Control.
You are correct, the modern corporate structure has been used by the corporate elite to insulate themselves from the workings of the market. The 2008 financial meltdown is a prime example where very few of the Wall Street bank chiefs lost their jobs even though they had to go running to the government for a bailout to save their companies. A year later they were back to “earning” multimillion dollar bonuses only because their banks were borrowing from the Fed at 1% and lending to the federal government at 3%.
Look in contrast at the individual entrepreneur or small business person. These people rarely make 40 times the average worker’s salary, much less 400 time yet they are the employers of most people in the private sector. In this world, there is no government bailout if the company gets in trouble. The small business person retrenches, cutting payroll and other expenses and possibly selling off assets to survive. I the company fails, the entrepreneur pays the ultimate price and loses everything. If the head of Goldman Sachs fails and loses his job, he walks off with tens of millions of dollars.
The small businessman is fully accountable for his performance and pays a huge financial price for making mistakes that cost him his source of income. He loses everything. The corporate chief has limited accountability for performance. Even if he loses his job for poor performance he is rewarded with generous severance and benefits. Plus while on the job his pay and benefits are disproportionate to what most individual entrepreneurs can earn either on a percentage basis to the lowest paid employees or in real terms.
When I worked in senior management for a large corporation, the top levels executives spent more time discussing how financial manipulations would affect their bonuses for the year than they spent talking about customers, real investments in productive assets, or products. Most were financial MBA’s who thought any business could be modeled on a spreadsheet. Most of these corporate financial types also enjoyed higher salaries and bonuses than did the division presidents who managed the customers, managed the factories, created the new products, and were accountable for generating the sales and earnings.
Those who play on class envy do have a point when they describe the excessive salaries paid to corporate office executives who have little to do with the day to day creation of wealth for the company.
I don’t have the answer to this situation where market forces do not seem to be curbing the excessive pay at the top of the corporate pyramid. Unfortunately, if the market doesn’t either impose real accountability (i.e. when CEO’s depart they leave with nothing just like in the small business sector), the political world will impose some form of “social justice” on the corporate world.
I'd add to that most Americans have no idea just how much of our income we pay in taxes. It isn't just what is withheld, but extra taxes like property tax, sales tax, excise taxes, fuel taxes, utility taxes, water taxes, cell phone taxes, etc. The last time I did an experiment to see just how much I actually pay in taxes, it was well over half of my pay, and I was definitely at the bottom of the income ladder at that time.
The left continues to feed to people the lie that somehow, Americans pay very little in tax compared to the rest of the world, and that somehow, "if taxes were higher, just like they are in Europe," things would be better.
The surest path to reducing taxes in this country is to abolish the practice of withholding. Force everyone to cut quarterly tax checks to all the various governments which impose tax.
Among the most unhappy people are those who inherited their money and so they never had to contribute to society or work for anything. That might seem like paradise to some but it destroys your self-worth as a person and leads to self-destructive behavior.
Among the happiest people in our society are those who started with practically nothing and earned through their own merit and efforts a wealthier position in society. Nothing can top the high of personal achievement.
Really?
Nada...Zilch...Zero...Not a d*mn thing is right about redistribution ref. Ten Commandments
How can Money be ungodly?
Thou shalt not covet.
Enviers want government control for the purpose of banning and destroying objects of their envy. Their goal is reducing their painful feelings of envy, if only fleetingly. Government control is a method, not a motivation. Leftists want to pilot the boat not for the benefit of the passengers, but to crash it into an iceberg.
All nice words to conceal COMMUNISM!
I sent you the $100.00.
You never sent the pictures.
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