Occupy Wallstreet

[Chip]

[youtube]N2qqRFYv3ao[/youtube]

This is my favorite one.

[Pete Nice]

[Pete Nice]

Veeeeeeeery interesting.

That top 1% that all those liberal hippies are protesting, well, they predominately donate to........wait for it........the left......


<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-politics-of-the-top-01-percent/2011/12/15/gIQAE0z2vO_blog.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezr ... _blog.html</a><!-- m -->

[Rydrum]

Anyone see the daily show the other night (13th)? The speaker was interesting (don't know how right or wrong, but its something to think about)- an author who talks about how our complex taxes fosters the need for big government. And funding for politicians is at the root of the problem.

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-december-13-2011-lawrence-lessig">http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episod ... nce-lessig</a><!-- m -->


the first bit is sorta boring, the 2nd is hilarious, and the interview is the 3rd.

[Rydrum]

Pete- just an FYI

Veeeeeeeery interesting.
That top 1% that all those liberal hippies are protesting, well, they predominately donate to........wait for it........the left......
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-politics-of-the-top-01-percent/2011/12/15/gIQAE0z2vO_blog.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezr ... _blog.html</a><!-- m -->

That isn't quite what the article said, and this is subtle but I think important. The article is saying that the top .01% of political donators skew left. So 1) we are talking the 99.99th percentile and 2) it is of donators not income earners. But I don't know how accurate that is since the article just says they skew left and doesn't supply a source from that.


If what you want to talk about are the political views of the top %1 then, you need to click on the link in that post and find-
"By aggregating 61 polls from 2009-2011, they were able to measure the opinions of about 400 respondents with annual incomes of $500,000 or above. Gallup reports only modest differences in their party identification: 57 percent of the 1 percent identify as or lean Republican,... 39 percent of the 1 percent identify as conservative...*



*I didn't remove anything substantial just the comparisons to the overall population.

[Hondo]

Everything is fucked. Our Congress and President (and not just the current one...but every one for the last 20+ years) is bought and paid for. It's a government by the few and for the few. This is one thing these Occupy people have right. There's no fixing it either. You can't fight that kind of money and influence. We're headed for a big fall and maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe it all has to be torn down first to be re-built a better way. My advice, and it's advice I've been giving for years, is to have some place to ride it out and the tools and resources to take care of you and yours when it all goes sideways. A zombie apocalypse isn't real plausible, but a haves vs. have-nots apocalypse is drawing closer every day.

[Beckster]

Everything is fucked. Our Congress and President (and not just the current one...but every one for the last 20+ years) is bought and paid for. It's a government by the few and for the few. This is one thing these Occupy people have right. There's no fixing it either. You can't fight that kind of money and influence. We're headed for a big fall and maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe it all has to be torn down first to be re-built a better way. My advice, and it's advice I've been giving for years, is to have some place to ride it out and the tools and resources to take care of you and yours when it all goes sideways. A zombie apocalypse isn't real plausible, but a haves vs. have-nots apocalypse is drawing closer every day.

:? It makes too much sense. Damn.

[Rydrum]

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinion/dont-tax-the-rich-tax-inequality-itself.html?ref=opinion">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opini ... ef=opinion</a><!-- m -->

[Pete Nice]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinio...ef=opinion

Very good article. Very good solution. I can not disagree with anything in there.

I find two things interesting also.

1. The "poorest" one percenter makes $330,000. Whether you want to believe it or not, that is a yearly salary all of us could achieve if we really applied ourselves.

2. The article was written by a one percenter.

[Brampton]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinio...ef=opinion

Very good article. Very good solution. I can not disagree with anything in there.

I find two things interesting also.

1. The "poorest" one percenter makes $330,000. Whether you want to believe it or not, that is a yearly salary all of us could achieve if we really applied ourselves.

2. The article was written by a one percenter.

youre delusional if you believe this about everybody

[Pete Nice]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinio...ef=opinion

Very good article. Very good solution. I can not disagree with anything in there.

I find two things interesting also.

1. The "poorest" one percenter makes $330,000. Whether you want to believe it or not, that is a yearly salary all of us could achieve if we really applied ourselves.

2. The article was written by a one percenter.

youre delusional if you believe this about everybody

Not everybody, but everyone on here is smart enough to be able to do it with a little ambition and maybe some backing.

[Beckster]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinio...ef=opinion

Very good article. Very good solution. I can not disagree with anything in there.

I find two things interesting also.

1. The "poorest" one percenter makes $330,000. Whether you want to believe it or not, that is a yearly salary all of us could achieve if we really applied ourselves.

2. The article was written by a one percenter.

youre delusional if you believe this about everybody

Not everybody, but everyone on here is smart enough to be able to do it with a little ambition and maybe some backing.

Well, crap, the one thing that would hold me back from that is that I don't want to move.

[Hondo]

It's a choice. I certainly don't want to be in Ohio working. But it's worth $75,000 more to me to be here. So I'm here.

Road to the 1% bitches!

[Rydrum]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinio...ef=opinion

Very good article. Very good solution. I can not disagree with anything in there.

I thought it was a pretty sweet idea (hence why I posted it). But I wanted to follow up and provide some more info about it. Here are two paragraphs from a blog post by one of the authors of that article (the guy I like Ayres):

"The Brandeis ratio does not take into account how many Americans are unemployed or living below the poverty line. This is not a weakness. The purpose of our inequality tax is not to respond to short- or even medium-term business cycle fluctuations. We want the tax to respond to long-term structural shifts in inequality. We consider it a strength of the measure that the denominator (the median household income) is relatively uninfluenced by the unemployment rate. And using the Brandeis trigger similarly is independent of the impact of illegal immigration on the economy – so we don’t have to worry that in the shadow of a Brandeis tax that Congress would have particularly different incentives to include or exclude new lower paid households from entering the economy."

"The Brandeis ratio as a measure of income inequality also doesn’t pay attention to the relative success of 2- or 3-percenters over time. Focusing just on the relative income of the richest one percent is appropriate if we are concerned with the deleterious impacts of inequality on our democratic institutions because one-percenters (those currently making more than $330,000) disproportionately fund our political campaigns. The bulk of campaign finance dollars comes disproportionately from not just the 1% club, but the richest one-half of one-percenters. Focusing on the average income of one-percenters is a good proxy for the rising political power of plutocrats."

[Rydrum]

Since you guys liked that idea how about I throw out another tax proposal idea- this one aimed at the CEO's of corporations,

"...superstar athletes running up monster contracts (less than 5 percent of the very top are athletes or actors), or even of hedge fund geniuses manipulating the markets from behind their wall of monitors (less than a fifth of the top earners are in finance). It’s a story of corporate managers making decisions to take more of their company’s income for themselves (forty-one percent of top-earners are corporate managers), decisions that are encouraged by the tax code. Rewarding themselves with stock options that in turn reward short-term performance, they made their companies more vulnerable and their workers poorer.

While far from the only cause of structural inequality, the tax code is a big part of it, and tax reform can change it. The first step is to end the special treatment of capital gains and dividend income—not just because the wealthy get more of their income in that form, but because of the incentives it has created to increase inequality and risk. That’s a reform that would both clean up the code and give us more of what we want more of.

The average CEO now takes home 350 times the pay of the average worker, a difference that’s more than tripled since 1990, and is unknown in any other country. A proposal, put forward by investor Steve Silberstein, would adjust the corporate tax rate based on the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker. A company with a ratio at the 1980 level of 50:1 would pay tax at the current rate of 35 percent, with the rate rising for companies with a higher ratio and lower for those with a narrower pay gap."