Today's Financial Commentary: The "Poor" Rich People

[mexxxking]

rich and evil are synonyms(wanting more then you need); for too long rich lied to themselves and others that it had something to do with hard work or inteligence, individual responsibility and this version of globalism have nothing in common with each other, if there werent 1001 ways to commit treason in this society, people would be alot more willing to comprimise, until then bribery is what makes the wheels spin

[jinjin16]

Financial whores funding a sex whore covered by media whores. Priceless.

[goose1077]

You made an interesting point. Taxes don't affect billionaires. This is true, if person is worth $6 billion instead of $10 billion, it has no affect on their life. So were does the $4 billion in taxes come from? ...The jobs that the billionaire is so good at creating. This is why it makes no sense to raise taxes on the top bracket.

[therealcaptobvious]

Actually, 1% of Americans own 99% of it's wealth. They pay 25% in all income taxes. The salary earners, aka. employees paid $1.25 trillion in taxes last year. Those corporations, some with a hefty bailout packages to the tune of $8.5 trillion, only paid $300 billion in taxes. The corporations haven't created anything but service jobs for the U.S. economy lately.

So you have to be the judge of that.

[goose1077]

The bail outs are not the corporations' fault. That is the government's fault for doing it. All that said, what's wrong with being a doctor, math matician, or engineer? What do the weathy people do with most of that wealth? The number is more like 20%, not 99%.

[goose1077]

or 25%

[therealcaptobvious]

A lot of it is kept in Corporate America. Wall Street is worth what? $50 trillion? The net worth of the U.S. is what...$60 trillion roughly? How do you think these rich men get their write offs? Stock options would be another way.

In personal finance, the Forbes richest people claimed around $1.76-2 trillion collectively. 1% of our country is 3 million people, or that in households. The 99% of us have less than 1% of it's wealth. Go look it up.

[goose1077]

I did look it up. That's how I came up with the 20%-25% figure instead of your 99%. The money that is kept in corporations is primarily spent on wages for people like us.

[therealcaptobvious]

Without Murdoch's helped. I looked at the Census bureau. and you?

[therealcaptobvious]

The bailouts are not the corporation's fault? AIG feels very strongly about that.

I don't have anything against a doctor earning more than the salesmen, or a CEO for that matter. i actually value doctors more than CEO's. Doctors are not the billionaires that are getting off easy on the taxes. The CEO's who get millions each year in salaries and bonuses for bankrupting their companies and begging for a bailout is just nonsense. No, 99% of Americans own less than 1% of it's wealth.

[goose1077]

Doctors work for the service industry.

[therealcaptobvious]

What does that have to do with taxes?

They're not claiming entitlement to million dollar bonuses, stock options and so forth, then asking Congress for a bailout after they screwed people over and bankrupted their companies. Incompetant CEO's do that. And too many run America's businesses. or "lifelines"...

I brought up the doctors because they're one collective group of people that might be worth their salaries.

[goose1077]

The point is, you implied service jobs are not good jobs. I was just pointing out that that often isn't true.

[therealcaptobvious]

you still lost your point. How many people can become doctors? Truth be told, wages have gone down since factory work has left the country. It's your reality along with everyone else's. You might want to stop pulling anything to disprove it and see it for what it is.

[goose1077]

I gave 3 completely unrelated examples of service jobs that are not even close to the 8 bucks an hour jobs people think of when you say service job. There are thousands of them. Factory jobs have been leaving for decades and during those decades wages rose. It's during the last economic cycle that we saw a switch. I don't see this as a permanent trend. It's also worth pointing out that in 2007 we had our greatest manufacturing output ever. We just did it with fewer workers.

[therealcaptobvious]

We're talking about REAL wages. Not nominal.

And the production jobs are leaving the U.S. Manufacturing has been at it's lowest in 28 years. BTW, you only gave me one example of a service job.

[goose1077]

"what's wrong with being a doctor, mathematician, or engineer?" copied and pasted from above. U.S. Manufacturing output in 2007 was at an all time high. 2008 numbers are not in yet. Productivity is the biggest competitor to manufacturing jobs. Real wages didn't decline over 30 years. It's drops some during some cycles, including this one. We talk about this all the time on a business week economy blog. Wages in 2005 were higher than in 1973.

[goose1077]

Bottom wager earners received a 6% increase over that period. Middle wage earners received a 10% increase. Upper wage earners received a 33% increase. So everyone is better off but if you have skills you have more of an improvement.---State of Working America ILR press, an imprint of Cornell University Press.---Numbers go unfavorable for a few years and everybody flips out like it is going to happen for ever.