- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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What a disgusting shithole america has become.
Become? They call it the American dream because you gotta be asleep to believe it.
I miss George
preech choombata.
Tukeyá, beltalowda?
The American Dream has morphed into this “anyone can be rich” idea.
When I was a kid, it was a house and two cars.
Which is basically a multimillionaire in today’s standards. Unless you mean two junkers and a house in the hood. I’m not opposed to the latter but it’s hardly anyone’s first choice.
You’re being very hyperbolic. We have a house and two cars. I have around $200 in my bank account. Admittedly, it helps that we do not live in the most desirable part of the country, but we also live paycheck-to-paycheck and have not even ever been hundred thousandaires.
You can’t be poor and achieve it, but you don’t have to be rich either.
I feel you. I have my house in the hood with my two Hondas.
Shit should not be this difficult.
A $200,000 home isn’t luxury but it also isn’t the American dream.
I didn’t mean to suggest that. Housing prices and car prices are ridiculously and unnecessarily high. I’m just saying that the American dream has morphed into something that at least a large proportion of the population can even now achieve into something that almost no one can achieve.
Yeah, it was started by rich people looking to increase their wealth and influence and has remained under their control ever since.
It’s only going to get worse. Money buys elections and Putin, along with American oligarchs have a lot to spend on getting their desired results.
You mean AIPAC.
Yet it remains one of the happiest countries in the world. I’m not saying we don’t have our problems, because we clearly do, but the idea that the country is a “shit hole” is just baseless nonsense.
Top 23 isnt what I would call “Happiest country in the world” Especially not for the worlds most powerful nation. So yeah, shit hole applies
Edit: For perspective, theres 190± countries depending on whos counting, The most powerful Country on this planet doesnt even enter the top 10% of countries with the happiest citizens. At 190, the states is in the top 12%
Happier than nearly 90% of the countries in the world isn’t amount the happiest? Where do you draw the line then? Seems like your definition is ridiculously narrow.
Once again, the ACTUAL MOST Powerful Nation in the world is basically at the bottom of the list when compared to countries of similar wealth and political stability. US only looks good when you compare it to countries with significant poverty or political problems. So yes, if you’re trying to escape life under a cartel, the states is a better option, if you live in Europe, the Commonwealth, or any of the Nordic Countries, hell no would you move to the States
Europe, the Commonwealth, or any of the Nordic Countries
(Just for clarity, the Nordic countries are part of Europe if anyone thought anything else)
And it’s still happier than nearly 90% of the world. To me, that’s one of the happiest in the world. Where do you draw the line?
I don’t care where it stands in relation to other countries. The problem is that happiness is decreasing at an alarming rate.
Well, I was responding to a claim that the US is a “disgusting shit hole” not that our happiness is dropping.
Bowing down to the wealthiest people is what makes it a shithole. America sold its self respect to give the rich more tax breaks.
1: Shithole is in response to your country’s remarks about other countries
2: You are bragging about being lower than the DEFAULT for countries similar wealth and political stability as the US. Its like someone with an alcohol addiction, but who doesnt have to work for a living bragging that they feel more fulfilled in life than someone who is struggling to put food on the table for their children
Shithole is in response to your country’s remarks about other countries
This makes zero sense in the context.
You are bragging
Challenging the nonsensical claim that the us is a “disgusting shit hole” is not the equivalent of bragging about anything.
A drunk man can be happier than a sober one, but that’s not much to brag about.
Who’s bragging? Certainly not me. I just challenged the nonsensical claim.
More needs to be said about taxing the wealthy. 70% for every dollar over 10 million. Wealth tax for those hoarding wealth in stocks.
Fuck 70. It was 91 after WWII.
I read somewhere that that was literally only for a single person. But the fact that taxes were used to aggressively trying to curb wealth hoarding is something we need to look at today
You are way too generous.
Some own islands, land, mansions, art, bonds, cars, boats.
Not generous, but not thorough. Don’t ask me to write the bill!
The New Bad Deal.
Rich get richer and everyone gets fucked on their taxes while dealing with crazy high inflation.
Thanks GOP! YOU GUYS REALLY KNOW HOW TO GOVERN
Oh yeah, this is just a GOP problem. Like people don’t get richer during Biden administration. Please stop using every problem in this system to get your rich genocide candidate elected instead of looking for actual problems.
Stop manipulating people into flip flopping voting for the other party every time this system hurts us more and more, if we don’t get rid of both of them at the same time we only made one monster bigger.
Hrm? We talking about trumps tax breaks for the rich in here. Maybe get your coffee and try again.
Nitpicking stories out of context is just as bad as lies. Biden does the same things, just lies more about it and hides it better. https://www.investmentnews.com/tax/news/biden-bill-provides-tax-cut-for-millionaires-hike-for-mega-rich-214502 “However, the updated figures also show that despite the higher tax rate, those earning at least $1 million would collectively pay $46.8 billion less in taxes in 2022.”
A tax hike for the mega rich you say?
It wasn’t enough of a hike, and therefore worthless. Just like he isn’t pressing Israel hard enough, so he’s literally Hitler. /s
What the fuck would you know about it, Canada?
It’s not like these billionaires are spending this money, so it’s just been invested for 7 years. What’s the old adage, Rule of 72? Given a 10% rate of return, they would be expected to double their money in…
…seven years.
While the tax policies certainly aren’t helping the majority of the population, let’s not pretend compound interest isn’t a thing.
It’s not as if that makes it any better. Tax policy should be designed to actively combat the inequality increase created by compound interest, not go along with it.
But, due to their investments they do invest it in large quantities, often spread over a large stock portfolio.
And if we had a fraction of a penny financial transaction tax, we’d get a ridiculous amount of money from the investor class and almost no one else would be affected.
For a week, until all the quants do the math and realize HFT isn’t profitable anymore.
That would mean less revenue, but stock traders would still make many transactions per day like they did before HFT, so it would still bring in a massive amount of revenue.
Well yeah, significantly less (50% of all trades are HFT) but I see your point.
Wealth is not cash or cash equivalents though. They aren’t investing all of their wealth
Most of the wealth of billionaires is invested, often in the same vehicles used by everyone else (stocks, real estate, etc).
That’s more than inflation I wonder where it’s coming from.
And yet poor people keep voting for him, thinking that the used car
salesmanclown will make them richUsed car clown? Sounds scary
Pretty sure he’s a used clown car salesman.
How does a used clown get into the car selling business?
“We all float in the swamp, Jimmy”
(Imagine Pennywise, but orange)
poor peopletemporarily impoverishedThis is the problem. Americans think their side hustle will hit big any day and they’ll be billionaires, that’s why the laws should be pro-wealthy
Till we close the loop holes for these billionaire foundations buying elections (i.e. the Koch network) - billionaires will continue to tip the scales their way. Courts also need to be 10 year appointments, not life time.
More over we need to make it easier to remove both federal and state judges from their positions if necessary. As it stands now removing judge for any form of misbehavior is far too difficult.
Trump is such a shit stain
This is a problem of every popular candidate in both parties, even in a lot of third parties.
No, he is orders of magnitude worse.
Still waiting for that trickle down.
How trickle down really works
What we need is a controlling asset tax, 99.9% tax on the value of assets controlled beyond $100m
0.1% of a billion dollars is still 10m. Since we’re on track to see our first trillionaires soon, I’d argue we need a 100% tax bracket as well. 0.1% of a trillion is 10 billion.
0.1% of a billion dollars is still 10m.
It’s 1m.
You’re correct, I multiplied by .01 instead of .001.
Wouldn’t matter, 99.9 is enough to trash these fortunes within a few years.
We need to change how stocks work. Separate investing in a company and buying control. That way we can tax unrealized capital gains. Put a 100M$ cap on personal wealth. Since the argument against it is always that people will lose control of companies if they’re forced to sell stock. Either that or ban stock as a medium of anything other than investing in the company. No using it as collateral, no trading it, just straight back to the company for what it’s worth.
How likely is it that the trump tax giveaway was all about FUNDING the Fascist takeover of America ? Because they wouldn’t have had the money otherwise
It’s not just billionaires. If you put any amount of money into the S&P500 in Jan 1 2017, it would be worth more than twice as much today.
But is it really fair that a person with 50 million can turn that into 100 million, whereas most people can turn at most $5,000 into $10,000?
Earning $5,000 over 7 years is basically worthless.
The median 40 year old has retirement savings of $45K, not $5K. And the median 70 year old has savings of $200K. In both groups, doubling the amount is quite significant.
Using median makes it a loaded statistic skewed in favor of the minority (in this case, the wealthy).
Over half the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, so that median number is already in the ‘well-off’ category by default, making them irrelevant to the main point of discussion.
You have it backwards. The mean, not the median, is skewed by outliers.
If there are ten people in a room with $10 and one person with $1,000,000, the median is $10 whereas the mean is ~$90,000.
No idea why you’re down voted for math :/
Is that true? Median is literally taking the value in the middle. So if there are 30 million 70 year olds then it would be picking the 15th millionth person and using their savings.
You might not know what median means (math pun!).
Averages or Means are skewed by outliers, not the median. The median is just picking the middle number in a list of numbers. There is no skewing possible. If you have 99 people making $1 per year and one person making $1B per year, the median is $1. The average/mean is $1,000,000.99 which is way skewed.
Jesus Christ those are pathetic numbers for retirement at those ages.
Got to eat. Retirement is gone, and your 401k is nothing more than a subsidy so you can work part time as a greeter until death.
No one is putting their entire retirement into the stock market, so they’re not doubling the amount.
At age 40, it’s recommended that you put 60-80% of retirement funds into the stock market. Doubling that is still significant.
Sweet, I didn’t realize I could double $0.
And you can do it as many times as you like, no charge*!
* = charges may apply, see your local hedge fund for details
What does fairness have to do with it? Compound interest is just math.
One could trivially make an argument that we should redistribute the wealth among the population, but there is not a clear way how to do this effectively, or it would have been done already.
The hard part is taking on the appropriate amount of risk in order to actualize those gains; a bank won’t just give you a 10% interest rate, you have to work your ass of for it. An entrepreneur needs to assess the landscape and invest in what the market will want tomorrow, and most people guess suboptimally (3-6%), or end up losing money, whether in fact (negative returns) or relative to inflation (0-3%).
Even pointing to the S&P 500, as most people do, you still need to make the conscious decision to sell and take profits, FOMO be damned. Or alternatively, taking a perceived loss but actual profit (e.g., you didn’t sell right at the peak, but that’s usually okay). It’s not easy, and most people don’t have the time or stomach for it; these people are best served by long term, government-backed bonds, after which you will come out only slightly ahead of inflation.
Using the rule of 72, and a 3% bond rate, it would actually take you 24 years to double your money, not seven. And that, my friend, is why you and I are not billionaires.
but there is not a clear way how to do this effectively, or it would have been done already.
That is terrible reasoning. That would only be true if every idea ever come up with had been tried and no new ideas will come up.
UBI would be quite effective for many reasons. The reason it hasn’t been done already has nothing to do with how effective it might be. And we know giving everyone money is effective, because Alaska does it with their oil dividends.
Another method that has definitely not been fully implemented is debt jubilees for people with more debt than assets to cover that debt (e.g. student debt forgiveness, medical debt forgiveness, etc.).
It’s not reasoning, or an argument for or against, it is just a statement. I’d admit that it’s probably a tautology.
What the post described is a taxation and societal problem, not a problem with investing or compound interest in general.
I’d easily agree that society is unfair, and that our taxation policies are directly antagonistic to the middle class, but again, this is simply math (and though it is theoretical, microeconomics).
But is it really fair that a person with 50 million can turn that into 100 million
Yes.
And since that can only happen by investing that amount into the economy, it’s wisely encouraged by the system, versus putting the 50 million in a vault somewhere.
The fact that you can’t see how this is a huge flaw in, at the very least, the American form of capitalism is sad.
You think it’s sad because you’re deeply ignorant. Do you also think that if the $5 baseball card you bought becomes worth $100, that that means you’ve stolen $95? lol
No, I don’t also think that.
I do, however, think that I didn’t insult you, so that insult was absolutely not warranted.
They are not investing it into the great magical economy. It’s in hedge funds that actively destroy the economy.
It’s essentially an investment in the country’s further financialization and privitization…both of which are things completely ruining the country (unless you’re rich, then these movements just make more parts of the country your own personal playground).
And, it’s worth pointing out that the rich carry a large asset base in their own companies which they can borrow against tax free while the value of the underlying assets continually grow. The only thing similar a non-rich person has access to is a home equity line of credit…and even then you own a home with equity which…you ain’t rich but you ain’t exactly broke either.
Wealth is not the same as liquid assets
Liquid assets are a type of wealth. For many people, liquid assets make up the biggest part of their wealth.
When you’re a billionaire, most of your net worth comes from businesses you own, not liquid assets.
And guess what those business have? Valuations. Stock price is just an aggregate indicator of the valuation for a company, for the given percentage of shares that are publicly traded. But private companies have valuations, too, and even if they’re not tied to a public stock offering, those valuations are used to form these Billionaire lists.
Same thing with real estate. The value of any asset is based on what someone is willing to pay. Sometimes, you’ll find some crazy billionaire or investment firm who grossly overvalues an asset relative to their peers, and that insane overvaluation does get rolled into those lists.
But such is the nature of economics. You’ve neither gained nor lost value until someone pays you. Until then, it’s anyone’s guess.
Billionaires are far more likely to own part of a business than 100% of a business. And if you own stocks, then you too own part of a business.
When you’re a billionaire, most of your net worth comes from
businessesassets you own (and can borrow against without having to claim the loans as income), not liquid assets.FTFY
No, they don’t. Liquid assets don’t increase in value. If they had $1 in cash seven years ago, it would be worth less than that today due to inflation.
Stocks are liquid assets. They can increase in value.
T-bills are also liquid assets. They can also increase in value.
Savings accounts and money market accounts are also liquid assets. They can also increase in value.
I’m pretty sure that liquid assets are things that you can spend, so cash and bank accounts. Anything that you have to sell to buy things is not a liquid asset. (Note that we are not talking about barter. I had a friend at college who traded a snake for a VW camper, neither of which would be considered a liquid asset. Even though technically you could put the snake in a giant blender…)
No, a liquid asset is one that can be sold quickly for its full market value.
For example, if you have stocks worth $100K, you can quickly convert them to $100K in cash. Whereas real estate is not liquid, because you usually cannot quickly convert a house worth $100K into cash.
Some people make a distinction between “liquid assets” and “near-liquid assets” and would classify something like a money market account (which also does grow in value as many liquid assets do) as a liquid asset, and maybe some forms of stock as near-liquid assets…but I’m splitting hairs.
Ultimately, you’re right…downvotes be damned.
But what for? Even with the toys of millionaires (yachts, villas), over a few 100 millions it’s only a number.
They don’t just buy toys. They buy laws, politicians, service, deference, control, luxury, immunity…
When you have that much money everything is for sale and people will kiss your ass to sell it to you.
For what, to make more number go up? Or would you murder someone if you could get away with murder? Or maybe they didn’t get that rich in legal ways, in the first place?
There’s a concept called the hedonic readmill. Essentially “nothing is ever enough.”
You chase power/money for greater happiness, but our natural tendency is to then feel neutral once we achieve it and so you want to chase greater happiness and so on and so on…
Exactly, hubris and greed.
Why hasn’t Biden done anything about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act?
Dems had house majority when he started and he could have tried to push changes through like Trump did.
Because he isn’t a dictator.
Yeah but what has Biden done about the heat death of the universe? I’m just saying, the man is the President.
I don’t know, but gas prices have been creeping up, so he must have accidentally leaned on the ‘gas prices’ lever in the Oval Office again.
Nah, probably because he has rich friends.
Congress is more in charge of taxes and budgets, not the president. However, it would seem Democrats in general want to use this for the upcoming elections (along with nearly everything they promised last election).
Sure but when Biden started Dems had a majority. He could have tried to push some tax changes through like Trump did.
I agree. I mentioned something similar the first time tuition relief was blocked.
Both sides have rich friends
He only had a pseudo majority. Sinema and Manchin weren’t actually Dems and often voted against things that mattered.
I would personally love more information on this topic. I view elections for Congress to be much more important than presidential elections.
Looking around I found this website via her Wikipedia entry. It’s a website that measures how close a member of Congress votes with Biden (but only from 2020 to 2022) and Sinema and Manchin seem to vote with Biden on nearly everything he wanted. My personal opinion is those two senators along with Biden act as the “centrists” (right of center) that we expect them to be.
That’s why I added “against things that mattered.” They mostly voted along party lines on the small stuff, but for the major things that would have been impactful then one or the other would swap their vote or hold back their vote until the bill was watered down enough. It felt almost like it was planned which one would be the block so that neither was the block too often. And eventually the bill would get watered down enough that it wasn’t as impactful and then they could vote yes.
I did get your point, I just wanted more examples. I do believe you, it’s just the info I found must have been incomplete or counted the times they voted with Biden once the bill was watered down.
It did lead me to an interesting point. I’m used to seeing independents being progressive. Not leave the Democrats because they are not centrist enough.
USA USA USA
