Jumping in here, small cities have McDonald's, Sonics and all kinds of other fast food joints, small towns do not. There are also no DQ's in small towns anymore. There are local ice cream places but not chains. The only chain I regularly see in small towns is Subway. With a population under 10K, they can't usually support a franchise.

This is based on being raised in Southern Indiana and living in Northwestern PA small cities and towns most of my life and traveling the country for work. YMMV

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

This chart is way to simple...so many factors missing. One example - technology while improving our lives is destroying a lot of jobs. Risk pays well, that's one big reason why weather people are doing so much better. I have used this example before, its very simple...I am a VP for a technology company - I don't have an assistant. We don't have a travel department. Some of our SW development has been outsourced to Ukraine and India. The structure of many companies today is so different than it was 20 years ago. This is just one small example.

Look, the work has changed; those that are positioned well are doing well, those that aren't are struggling. Change happens, sometimes quickly and it can seem unfair. Unfortunately, even some folks who have their degrees are finding out their job doesn't exist anymore. All of us have to know and understand our value and realize we are all replaceable.

With all due respect, Mike, I don't understand your point.


Lets make it even simpler: The country borrows insane amounts of money. Rich people are benefitting immensely. The rest of us don't.

I don't think this can be explained away with "different times = different jobs." that may be the case, but it still doesn't address those major points.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

I didn't address the debt question...my bad, I was focused on what I thought was your bigger point with the chart you pasted.

In general, the debt problem is more due to changing demographics and programs designed based on 1960 birthrates not 20th century birthrates. Then you add in healthcare costs growing - so we have about 86% of the budget on auto pilot. You cannot tax your way out of all this.

Can you elaborate on the bolded statement? Curious how the rich benefit immensely while no one else does.

My browser doesn't see the bold, so I'll have to guess.

It's pretty simple: Debt goes up. Massive tax cuts for the rich. Rich people get much richer. Everyone else keeps the same wages.

I'm describing the situation as perceived by a typical middle class worker. Or at least half. The other half go, "Rich guys say it's 'cause of illegal immigrants."

I'm not sure where I need to elaborate.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

OK, I'll help you out here.

First: Wages. The article I posted earlier shows that wages haven't been stagnant - they've actually grown pretty significantly when you include benefits and working conditions. In addition, the price and quality of most goods has gone way down and up, respectively. In other words, a typical citizen works a fraction of the hours to buy a 4k 55" flat screen TV now than they did a 16" black and white TV in the 60's.

Second: The rich. The narrative is that the rich earn all of their wealth through capital appreciation. This is true, but they also take massive risks in the process. The great equalizer that keeps the rich from getting richer (in a true capitalist system) is letting their investments fail. The big failure of our current system is the bailouts and stop-gaps that the Federal Reserve has provided, especially since the great recession. People rail against capitalism, but our current system isn't capitalism. Capitalism would not provide safety nets to banks or companies and would naturally bankrupt poor investments. The Fed has distorted our economy and kept the cronyism alive.

Also, most families squander their wealth by the 2nd or third generations. The rich don't stay rich. New people get rich and replace them. https://www.marketwatch.com/...-fortunes-2017-04-23

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Strava

A few important points pertaining to the debt misunderstanding:

1.) The tax cuts were progressive. The rich got smaller share of the cuts than their share of the then current taxes.
2.) Sure, we've got a large national debt, but how exactly do the poor pay any of it with their ~0% income taxes?
3.) In fact given that spending has never been cut, how are the poor suffering in any way from the debt/tax situation?

With regards to lower end labor not getting its "fair share" of the productivity gains I can see that causing some consternation among working Americans. However we need to keep this in mind:

1.) This outcome was widely predicted in the 1980's as a consequence of globalization (and immigration).
2.) Even though the GINI coefficient has risen here in the US -- as a consequence of overpaid US labor getting replaced by cheaper labor in/from the rest of the world -- the worldwide GINI has dropped over this time period.
3.) Billions of people worldwide are better off from this development.
4.) We can't look at the United States in isolation from the worldwide developments that it's shaping and being shaped by.
5.) The US fed/state/local governments have never spent a higher percentage of GDP, and the Federal tax system has never been more progressive.

Okay, on the article it made two points.

1) wages have not gone up, but wages plus benefits have

2) purchasing power has gone up


On the first point they didn't provide any data. I'm open to that argument, but I need more than just a claim. What data supports this?

On the second point, that's a statistical exaggeration. If I haven't increased wages in the last 20 years, while yours has gone up 20X, converting dollars to numbers of blenders that those dollars can buy looks good if you ONLY apply it to the working class person and not the billionaire. Lets say I can buy twice as many blenders. Okay, then the rich guy can buy 40 times as many blenders. So while using this argument we can say that, technically, not ALL of the benefits go to the rich, certainly the lion's share has.

This has been an argument that the right has been pushing for years. If my wealth goes up by a penny, and your wealth goes up by a gagillion dollars, they say, "you both got wealthier," and then move on.




So to summarize this point, they take massive risks. Sike, they don't take massive risks, but they should be taking them so lets fix that. And even if we don't fix that, lets keep the part of the system that allows them to buy 40x as many blenders when the rest of us only buy twice as many. And while we never get around to fixing the part that needs to be fixed, lets keep affirming that we believe that it should be.




Regardless, what we were promised was a wall, and tax cuts. What we got was enormous tax cuts for the rich, plus a few more blenders for the hoi polloi.


But as I said, I'm actually making out just fine.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

At what point do we start punishing people for hard work? Or growing a business? What amount of income is too much?


It think it has far less to do with "How much is too much" and more to do with "At what point if any is it a zero sum or negative gain?". Almost any person that is worth a billion dollars and most who are worth multi millions make their money by leveraging other people and other things. If I make a million dollars a year and 10 people work with/for me make 100K a year I'd say that's a good thing. If I make a 100Million a year and those and have 1000 people working with/for me making 100K a year, wouldn't you want me to make 200Million dollars next year?

I think it's only when people end up making a billion dollars a year largely at the expense of others that it becomes an issue. This is also why I'm not really that concerned about the "Wealth inequality" issue. I'd rather have 1% as much as a billionaire than 10% as much as a millionaire.

OK Boomer, Google is your friend

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

Labor Compensation The measure includes accrued wages and salaries, supplements, employer contributions to employee benefit plans, and taxes. Estimates of labor compensation by major sector, required for measures of hourly compensation and unit labor costs, are based primarily on employee compensation data from the NIPA, prepared by the BEA. The compensation of employees in general government, nonprofit institutions and private households are subtracted from compensation of employees in domestic industries to derive employee compensation for the business sector. The labor compensation of proprietors cannot be explicitly identified and must be estimated. This is done by assuming that proprietors have the same hourly compensation as employees in the same sector. The quarterly labor productivity and cost measures do not contain estimates of compensation for unpaid family workers.



1) Real compensation for workers has more than doubled over the past 50 years, so that's a moot point
2) If a blender is a larger % of your income than a rich person, it benefits you much more than the rich person if the price of that blender goes down (assuming you need a blender - I would have used a fridge as a better example)
3) The rich do take massive risks. And they make a lot of dumb investments, too (e.g. WeWork). Didn't you see my link about most families losing their wealth in 2-3 generations? The 1% isn't a permanent upper class.
4) The backstop provided by the Fed is the biggest enemy of the working man and subsidizes too big to fail. End the Fed.

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Strava

The debt goes up because the govt is spending money on the lower/middle class. It's basically a big wealth transfer system.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/...budget-101/spending/

Thank you. I'll accept it as a valid point.



You are missing the point. Yes, the price of blenders has gone down. So has the price of a 1950s yacht. More affordable technology isn't something that you only apply to working class people. It applies to rich people, too.

Secondly, its also cherry picking data. What they did was they took this graph, focussed on everything that got cheaper, ignored everything that got more expensive, and then applied that argument only toward middle class people and not toward rich people.







Being the dumb child of a rich person who blows away all of his money isn't a "risk" that deserves a tax break.

Regardless, its not even an argument. "Jeff Bezos is taking a lot of risk" with his 200 Billion (with a B) dollars means what? That he should pay no taxes? That he should pay some taxes? That he should pay less taxes than a single mother as a waitress? His kid will probably blow it all away anyway and therefore we should have a dumb rich kid tax shelter? Are you arguing the Bezos is at more risk of becoming poor than you or I?

What exactly is your point? Being extremely, in and of itself, isn't a risk.






How about this. There's lots of things that benefit rich people and lots of things the hurt rich people. Lets say that we stand for all of them, vote in the politicians who say they stand for all of them, and then when they only do the half that benefit the rich we say, "Well, at least they got it half right."

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

Face Palm.

Do you even know what you just did?

You just showed a graph of social security benefits. That's not a "wealth transfer."

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

Yea, of course it also applies to stuff rich people buy. But the current narrative (that I've set out to debunk in this thread) thrown around by the candidates and other pundits is that the working class has made no gains in the past half century. It's simply not true. Rich people are certainly better off, but so are the poor and middle class, and very much so. Not only has their total compensation more than doubled in real terms, but most of the stuff they buy is cheaper.

With regards to that CPI chart, we've discussed that before: https://forum.slowtwitch.com/...century%3F_P6871734/

It's pretty easy to understand why college and healthcare costs have gone up - the government offers unsecured loans for anyone going to college for any degree, even those that can't pay it back. Going to college makes some people poorer on balance and the spigot needs to be turned off. Healthcare is an opaque, bureaucratic nightmare. Regardless of what your proposed solution there is, one can't deny that the industry is an anomaly. In any case, both issues are policy driven and you can't blame "billionaires" for these problems.



I didn't say any of that nor would I argue any of those points. I am attempting to debunk the current narrative fallacy that says "the rich always get richer" which the evidence shows is not true. Certainly, rich people should pay whatever our tax laws say they should (the amount of which is another debate entirely). My point is that rich people lose their wealth ALL THE TIME and being wealthy in and of itself doesn't guarantee even greater wealth accumulation. On the flip side, poor people become billionaires quite frequently as well, and we shouldn't take away their incentives to start companies that employ thousands, benefit consumers and grow the economy.

Another key point which I previously addressed: If you isolate billionaires and their contribution to tax revenue, it is a rounding error even if you confiscate some or all of their wealth. You can feel strongly that the 0.001% should pay more taxes for moral or whatever reason, but when you actually take time to do the math, it's literally meaningless. Using a wealth tax as a populist political platform is just pandering at best and dangerous at worst.

Furthermore, the total federal budget isn't comprised of just tax revenue. The treasury auctions off billions in bonds on a very regular basis. If fixing poverty, homelessness, medical care or any other persistent problem was just a matter of dollars, they could literally raise the money immediately and solve the issue. The fact that they don't shows that the government just isn't equipped for solving problems like this and no amount of money will actually have the desired effect that politicians say it will.

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Strava