Would you prefer:
a) 50% of something
b) 100% of nothing
I CHOOSE B!! 100% IS MORE!! I LIKE MORE! I WANT MORE!
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Occupy Bay street
- Thread starter thebigwoof
- Start date
Would you prefer:
a) 50% of something
b) 100% of nothing
I CHOOSE B!! 100% IS MORE!! I LIKE MORE! I WANT MORE!
You joke, but I bet that referendum would be close. All those people rioting on the street would probably choose b.
I get the sense that a lot of people in Greece really don't understand what's going on there.
actually, i get the sense that the average greek recognizes that they are partly to blame for their circumstances. it's just that they hold the banks, the government, and the system at fault, first and foremost. they want those pieces to be held accountable before they are.
not sure if this is realistic, but i think that's how it actually is. . .
as for the referendum, well, they are the cradle of democracy. . .at least they were trying to live according to their roots. . .
If that's the case, then they are failing to hold themselves properly accountable. Tax dodging seems to be a national pass-time and where else does a government get the money to operate, but taxes?
agreed
obviously, but if you're a hellene who has gotten away with it for decades, and the only difference between 2008 and 1998 was a banking credit crisis that precipitated a ruinous economic collapse, then why not pass the buck?
without question, their problems have some internal roots, but iirc, i read somewhere that even if every cent of owed taxes was paid out, the greek economy would still not have the wherewithal to recover completely.
the greeks also see part of the problem with their economy as a structural one, with their hands tied by eurozone requirements that keep germany's manufacturing sector humming, and the greek economy a client state.
I would favour incarceration, as the solution, but I doubt they have the money for prisons either.
Europe is pretty brutal and I wouldn't wish it on any other state.. New entrants are typically forced to accept foreign subsidized industries but forbidden from subsidizing their own. They end up propping up France, Germany and a couple of other minor players (Belgium for example), while their own industries go to the crapper. Once they end up in the total crapper, they get bought by French, German and British interests (some from the US as well) for very few pennies on the dollar. That's a very good economic colonization scam.
mma01
Well-known member
Im pretty sure my post was focused on investment bankers , not stock brokers. You realize they are not the same thing, right?
Secondly, the info you dug up from the dept of labour is very broad based and is not realistic in terms of getting into a bulge bracket firm like Goldman Sachs, where most of the public ire about banker pay is being directed at.
Secondly, the info you dug up from the dept of labour is very broad based and is not realistic in terms of getting into a bulge bracket firm like Goldman Sachs, where most of the public ire about banker pay is being directed at.
johnp
Well-known member
November 3, 2011
From New York Times today..
Oligarchy, American Style
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!
Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.
So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.
In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.
It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.
Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979.
So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.
The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.
If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.
Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.
But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.
The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?
Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.
From New York Times today..
Oligarchy, American Style
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!
Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.
So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.
In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.
It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.
Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979.
So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.
The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.
If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.
Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.
But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.
The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?
Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.
What the crap is with all of these links and supposed "news feeds"? The last couple posted here are fraught with bias and misunderstandings. The best parts of this thread are when people post their own thoughts and ideas on the matter.
LOL, people posting other people's opinions on this crisis instead of trying to achieve their own understanding of it is a huge part of the problem with this protest IMO.
LOL, people posting other people's opinions on this crisis instead of trying to achieve their own understanding of it is a huge part of the problem with this protest IMO.
Tax dodging is going to collapse a nation's economy? Give it some thought please before hitting the 'reply' button...
Is that the same national passtime they have in the other PIG countries, or do they each have their own party trick for destroying their country's economy?
It sounds to me like just another nonsense attempt to blame individuals from those that don't want to acknowledge that there's a significant systemic problem here.
The US economy didn't blow a gasket because individuals made bad home buying decisions, though certainly there are some examples of it. People merely followed the advice of their lenders because they've always been the ones to play the role of advisor in these transactions. This is simply an instance of the faith we all put in institutions so that we can get by in this specialised labour economy. You trust your grocer that their apples aren't laced with arsenic, or your car dealer that your new car isn't going to blow up on it's own.
What about Iceland? How do you blame individuals for that catastrophy?
Or, is there something more going on that just a few billion people making poor decisions all at the same time?
In the US was it really "faith" in what the banks were telling them or was it just them hearing what they wanted to hear...
In the US it was many million making the same bad decision at the same time, while thousands of other people were making other bad decisions compounding the problem.
Now in Europe hindsight being 20/20 the Euro gave the PIGS access to cheap credit (by being part of the Euro) helping them dig the holes even deeper. It artificially lowered the value of the currency for the "rich" countries (Germany etc.) because it is pulled down by the poorer countries (this works out well for the "rich" countries). It artificially raises the value (strength) of the currency for the poor countries (being pulled up by the strong), this is bad for them.
In short, the poor countries got access to cheap credit and a high currency which just made digging way too easy. The "rich" countries have a currency that is lower in value which helps them compete outside Europe. It is a lose-win all the way. People not paying taxes is just the icing on the cake (that they want to have and eat too...).
BTW when I am saying stronger and weaker. If Germany was on its own currency wise their currency would be "stronger" than the Euro. If Greece was standing alone their currency would be much weaker than the Euro...
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If you want to find fault with people overall for being greedy then fine. There are plenty more examples of it than in the mortgage crisis. But their actual motive isn't relevant to the outcome since the end result would have been the same either way. If they were desperate to "live the dream" - they took out an outrageously oversized home loan. Or, if they trusted the advice of their lenders - they still ended up taking out an outrageously oversized home loan. So the only difference is wheter they are moral upstanding people or puny little cretins that you can feel good about looking down upon. The CDS crisis would have happened anyways. DEAD PEOPLE were getting home loans for crying out loud!
johnp
Well-known member
OK, so what's wrong with Krugman's article?
I should have added that people's motives is not relevant to the solution either. If the collapse happened because most people are greedy then there need to be safeguards against it. If it was a result of unscrupulous lending practices then there need to be safeguards against that. Either way we're looking at tighter regulation. And that doesn't even begin to address any issues with investment banks, credit agencies, government debt loads, rate policy, and so on.
Did I say anything about their ECONOMY? No. I'm talking about their government. Their nation. You don't have retirement payments. You don't have that universal health care. You don't have unemployment protection. You don't have welfare. You don't have ANY of those things, without having a funded government.
Read what someone has posted and understand it, before you hit the reply button.
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