LOL Videos of awesome

SuicideNeil · 9 Mar 2013

Silly Americans, and I'm blind/deaf too....

Guest-44432 · 9 Mar 2013

Joey Propane · 9 Mar 2013

d_stilgar · 9 Mar 2013

rainbowbridge said: ↑

Click to expand...

Not that I want to shoot holes, but let's stop looking at it as plain inequality and look at plain numbers.

54 trillion total wealth
300 million people in the US
=
180,000 per person under "socialism"

That's actually not very much per person when you think about it.

Now, if you were to divide it up to what people think is "ideal," then you see that the rich only makes "10-20x more than the poorest." What kind of motivation to work is that? $180,000 for the median, then some sort of curve that shows the top 1% maybe making $540,000 a year? The very richest people now only make barely over half a million a year. What sorts of businesses could not be supported with that? Pretty much nothing. Let's face the fact that most of these people in the 1% have their money tied up in the businesses they've built. If these biggest businesses in the country can't support more than $540,000 a year then say goodbye to most of the luxury hotels, pretty much all airlines, most banks, and pretty much every business that operates internationally.

I would say most people who made the "ideal" chart have no clue what they are talking about. They just made a curve that "felt nice" without taking even a second to think about how it would actually affect the economy or how that world would actually look.

What should be ideal would be a typical 80/20 rule. That is, 80% of the value is held by 20% of the people.

Clay Shirky gives a TED talk about how this can be seen even on websites like flickr. Look at the distribution of contributors and the value they add to the site. Same thing, 80/20 rule.

Finally, when you look at those top 20% of people, most of them earned their money within their own lifetime. The percentage of "trust fund" families and "old money" is minuscule. While it can feel unfair and disheartening that someone else has money and you don't, these people earned it themselves, today, in this day and age. I'll feel more sorry once it becomes impossible for people to do that, but for now Bill Gates is still the wealthiest man in the world and most of us have been alive to watch him go from the bottom to the top.

I'm an architecture student, so this is pretty relevant to me, but I recently toured the offices of the 4th largest architecture firm in the US. When was it started? In the 1970s. Again, within the lifetime of those who started it. Heck, within the normal career of the founders.

So yeah, I don't feel that broken up about it. There may not be an 'equality of results', but there still seems to be a pretty good 'equality of opportunity'.

Still, the reality shows 80% of the people with only 7% of the wealth. That's an average income across 240 million people of only $15,750. This is why %50 of Americans already don't pay any taxes. Most get more back than they pay in.