The Posse - Brazil

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg True, Gates and Buffets get their $80 bucks legitimately. But since I see no other way to the rest to get a minimal amount of the pie than limiting the bite of each one, the problem is in the system. Oh why not triple the wealth? If that worked, the US - the wealthiest country in the history of mankind - wouldn't be in that social mess.

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 Sorry but I don't agree. Wealth is not limited. Look at the amount of wealth in the last 200 years it has gone up 15,000%. 200 years ago a Japanese person hardly had enough food to eat. Today he has plenty, watches flat screen TV, antibiotics, flies in jets around the world and on and on. Socialist are totally wrong on this. Wealth like imagination and innovation is unlimited.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg oh yeah like any ponzi scheme things are wonderful while it works.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg But you know what? I used to think that way too till I was like 12-year-old. Like, why the gov just print money at will to make everybody millionaire? Then soon you start to understand that wealth is very much finite. That the expression wealth is "created" is just a figurative manner of speaking when in reality is just "transferred." That you have huge inflation (ie devaluation of money) when you have inbalance of paper wealth/real wealth.

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 You are confused. Money is not wealth. They are two different things. Money is printed by governments which creates inflation and is a tax and yes very destructive. Wealth is flat screen TVs, cars, new inventions, new innovations, etc... Wealth is unlimited like our imagination is unlimited. The 12 year old boy in you was right.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg "If somebody makes 10M is bad?" It depends. If somebody's making this money in a country like Ethiopia (where the average income is $220,) that's too bad. You need to start with the fact that wealth is limited. Let's say you got $100 to share with 10 guys: if the first one takes $80 and 2nd $10, no-brainer the rest will end up with peanuts or nada at all. And you're saying "oh but he got the $80 bucks legitimately, so I see no problem."

[garybsg]

Japan like America is a fiercely capitalistic country saddled with a socialistic government that is suffocating it. The lottery is a perfect example. The more the government takes the winnings(for equality), the less lottery tickets they sell. People don't buy lottery tickets to be equal.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg people are not that dumb around here. You see news from the world about those hundred million lottery winners, and yet no one is demanding it should be that way in Japan too. On the contrary, they see with incredulity like "how come they allow such thing??" Japanese travels a lot, they know pretty well how better their society is. And btw, lottery here sells as much as anywhere else (around U$18 billion a year.)

[danielav9]

the deluded ppl who thinks that brazil is the higher country in social disparity is totally dis honest,to himself,he ought to compare the slums of brazil with south and south east asia! where ppl there live above rivers!in the middle of the road,squeezing land and space with cars! not try to defending the selfish brazilian elite who selfish enuf nt to want to share their resources,but just comparing the level of brazil poverty wid other countries!

[garybsg]

Income gap is bullshit. If you worked for Bill Gates for $1 million, your income gap would be over 99% since he makes billions. Your absolute wealth ($1 million) is what counts and Brazil's absolute wealth is going up. Brazil's future depends on choosing free markets or Obama-type socialism. One leads to wealth the other to more poverty.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg I read once in a Brazilian business magazine that Brazil's top 50 company CEOs are the 3th highest paid in the world just behind US and Germany (around U$700.000/year). Now our overall average income is just U$8000/year. No way you can compare the level of poverty between US and Brazil. I remember sometime ago Public Enemy's Flavor Flav visiting a favela in Sao Paulo and he was like "We have poverty in US, but dem not this bad". If you visit one, you know what he meant.

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 Imagine a country without an income gap. If everybody earned the exact same amount of money a country would collapse. Why? Because almost all of your income would be consumed. No money for R&D, factories would begin to break down with no money to fix equipment, no money for venture capital which means no inventions, no increase in productivity etc. A nightmare.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg Now imagine a country where the rich take their part of the pile based on 1st world standard (as I heard once from a federal court judge justifying their salary increase to close to U$10.000) while ignoring the 3rd world reality. A nightmare, but this is already REAL.

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 There is no concept of "justifying" your income. You EARN your income from your effort which is yours. There is no concept of 1st world standard or 3rd world standard, there are people who EARN more then other people. Why? Because they have more value to SELL another person. How does a poor person get richer, he increases his value through skills, hard work, discipline etc. You need to take a course in economics to understand how it works.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg not when some government sectors work like cartels. I know this very well because I have some relatives working there with unbelievable privileges. sure you can work it out to BE one of them (can't beat them join them) and just accept the overall mess. and sure people are different. there are those one-in-a-million people extremely skilled to make money (whether rightly or not). so let that be the priority and you see the result.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg UNLESS you're considering that blatant inequality is something inevitable, even fairly acceptable because it is just the reflection of each one's "market value." Then we have nothing to discuss anymore, because I'm not in that league: I prefer a little of individual concession in favor of overall social improvement. It's like gun rights in the US: people there prioritize more than anything their rights to carry it than think about the benefits of not carrying it.

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 The benefit of not having a gun is when attacked by a criminal you die. Also, your premise is " if one person comes up short in life the government can by force take another man's property for the social good". This is the central belief of socialism and communism. That belief has lead to the impoverishment (and murder) of a large part of humanity. If you believe that, I agree with you, we have nothing else to talk about.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg well, about guns my experience says otherwise. I know much more people killed because they WERE armed... anyway that's another subject. You don't need to turn to a totalitarian regime to mold a more equal society. The country I'm living right now, Japan, has it. Here rarely the salary gap exceeds 20-30 times within the same organization (CEO include.) The result is just startling: a country this size with no inner cities at all. That's because they have strict rules to avoid inequality.

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 Don't agree at all. You attribute the effect of equality to no slums. I visited the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany in 1978. Lots of equality and lots of slums. You confuse Japanese culture with economics. The essence of your argument is injustice. It is unjust to take something which you did not work for, create, invent or earn no matter what the value. If that is not true than change the number form 20-30 times to 1 time. Where that number come from? Good luck with that.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg yeah it's a culture thing indeed. I work in a toyota subsidiary as a foreign outsourced worker for a decade. I'm the lowest of the low (a foreign worker from 3rd world) and my kind of job that back in my home country would pay like U$2000 a year at most (or a quarter of the overall average.) Here I earn U$40.000, which is pretty close to the Japanese average (U$45000).

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg they can pay me that amount because the gap is absurdly low compared to my country. no matter your post, a plant manager or a college graduate engeneer or a toilet cleaner, pretty much the salary varies from35.000 to 80.000 (freshmen start with the lowest).

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 I am saying you don't see wicked violent slums because the Japanese culture is not violent. Period. How much a man gets paid, low or high is no one business but the company and the employee. If a president make 10 times or 100,000 times more then a regular employee it is the freedom of a company to decide, not the governments. Sorry, you may hate that but freedom is not about being nice, it's about being free.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg Japanese culture is not violent?? Dude this country's culture is way more violent that the west. Not only in cartoons or TV, but you see it in their daily lives.Still today physical punishment is common. I personally saw countless times employees beaten by bosses for some mistake. No one business but the company and the employee? Well, and look what we got. From what I see here in Japan, definitely this is what I prefer for my country over the American model.

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 Not sure what you are talking about. I made a point that how much a person gets paid is no one's business except the employer and employee. As far as Japan not being a violent society that is true. However, Japan does have a violent history with its neighbors but today the Japanese are very civil and good world citizens.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg Japan has a stable society today because of its social equality. That's something you hear a lot from them. And to prove that, its homicide rate used to be 8 times higher from today's 1 per 100.000 people till late 60s, when slums pretty similar to brazilian favelas were common everywhere. Today more than 80% of the population is considered middle-class (income between U$35000-U$70000.)

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 Japan has a stable society because it has embraced capitalism which has raised its standard of living. Social equality destroys societies because it destroys freedom. All over America you can find Toyota's and Honda cars. Social equality din't put them there, capitalism did.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg Why do you think people call it Japan Inc? One politician (JLD's Nobuteru Ishihara) described Japan as "the only developed socialist country in the world." Though he said it pejoratively. You see capitalistically unimaginable regulation here. Lottery prizes are limited by law to up to couple of millions: instead of few getting hundreds of millions like in the rest of the world here literally hundreds of winners (precisely 710 last year) get few millions each.All to avoid inequality.

[CUMBICA1970]

@garybsg Toyota's legendary former CEO Fujio Cho said something like this on TV: "The average salary in the US and here in Japan is fairly similar. But I see lots of my American colleagues getting thousands, millions of times than the average income. I mean, we're all human beings. We're not living in a feudal era divided by castes. Certainly we don't have multi-billionaires as in the US. But consequently we don't have that amount of poor people too. That's our biggest strength."

[garybsg]

@CUMBICA1970 So if a man makes $10 million dollars this is bad? Thomas Edison made millions and he gave us electricity, Bill Gates computers, Bell telephones etc. They made millions but they gave untold wealth to our society. To imply richness is badness or it generates poverty is simply nonsense. A small income gap tells you nothing. A man who makes $1/hour and his boss makes $1.50 an hour have a small income gap vs. a big gap of an MS engineer who earns $150,000 vs Gates's billions

[Felocoventura]

It's not all slum. The favelas are the highly compressed clusters of poor. But high density poverty, exists in high density areas in general. So in Rio, Sao Paolo, Curitiba, Joinville, Porto Allegre, Floriannopolis etc. But what about the inland huge vast forrests of small huts, and shackle houses within the horrible terrain. Marshlands, rivers, and small tiny agricultural villages that produce money for the country. Most villages, aren't even charted by the government. Are self-governed rebels.

[nickfl1980]

new or higher taxes will never solve the biggest problem on earth, poverty. Just read the history of how and why taxes are created and we all will come to the conclusion, keep it as low as possible. Why? The rich want more money? fine, let them, invest in human capital. to raise capital, you must invest in people who will work for you to make more money. create goodpaying jobs so that people can go to school, pay tax, buy food, and consume what they like. higher taxes = corruption=poverty

[OCTHOUGHTS]

they should castrate your tongue idiot..

[Rogerioapsandrade]

Man, that´s too old. Sao Paulo has changed since then (The gap continues, though)

[xLanKx]

@Rogerioapsandrade agreed...a lot has changed around here

[TheUnknownGrower]

@Rogerioapsandrade but it got worse

[CDmagz]

Every human being has the right of a decent existence!!

Thank you for this video

CDm

[2bbgunsup]

Different language same story.

[paranhosfabiogmail]

The poor people should be castrated. Society is tired of paying for irresponsible parents.