Forum Post: Why taxing the rich won't work.
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 10, 2011, 1:34 a.m. EST by tpaine2012
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This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Taxing the rich WILL NOT WORK.
Taxation in any form is a static solution to a growing problem.
To understand why this is the case, you must also understand that our currency demands exponential debt growth to maintain its very existence. (When the treasury makes a bond to sell, it demands interest. That interest demands debt. Since we have no money to pay that debt, we pay that debt with more debt.) We're paying off our credit cards with new credit cards.
From this, we can draw the conclusion that, to keep our nation from defaulting, we must create more debt perpetually, every single year.
As proof of this in illustration,
Here's a graph showing an exponential function, next to it is a graph of the national debt, notice any resemblance?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Exp.svg/200px-Exp.svg.png
http://www.michaelmatthews.com/images/US_National_Debt_Chart_2011.gif
This means two things
1)We will have to print ever increasing amounts of money, as our currency demands inflation to secure its value, and existence.
By nature, our money will constantly depreciate in value until it is worthless.
As a consequence in the near future, even if you taxed 100 percent of income of all persons living in the United States, it would not pay for public services
We are quickly approaching this point.
"Taxation in any form is a static solution to a growing problem."
I don't believe that to be true. Every city has a fire department for example. If you want to eliminate taxation altogether, then the only way to maintain emergency services is to charge for their service. Everyone benefits from those services, but your proposed solution is to raise revenue only from those directly impacted and potentially suffering economic catastrophe imposed by, say, the complete destruction of everything they own.
Ending the Bush era tax breaks isn't new. It may not even be a long term solution. Yet it stands to reason that pooling our money together provides far greater opportunity to accomplish things like:
recovery from hurricanes and other disasters
providing food and drug safety
policing the banking system, and providing an equitable regulatory structure on which that policing can be based.
consumer protection
all of which the repelicans insist we stop funding.
They even want to privatize social security! And that despite the complete market meltdown!
Repelicans just want ever greater opportunities to exploit the income potential of the general population, and part of the means to do so is through tax restructuring.
Not that we don't need to restructure the tax code - we do - but not in the name of ever greater opportunity to exploit the public. The whole country has become unstable enough already.
Further instability is going to be very very ugly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_Q1SiRN-A
I'm on dial-up so I really don't know what that means.
Yes, I know what youtube is.
"even if you taxed 100 percent of income of all persons living in the United States, it would not pay for public services " NOT TRUE Go to the IRS website and look at Individual and Corp Tables. You will find: A. "40 Million Households earning $50,000+ paid ZERO Income Taxes. If they all paid 15% of their Adjust Gross Income US would collect $1,000 Billion or $1 Trillion more per year." and, B. If 'S' Corps and Partnerships paid 10% BEFORE distributing profits, US would collect another $1,000 Billion or $1 Trillion per year. FIRST, US Balances the Budget, SECOND, Begin Paying Down the National Debt, THIRD, Expand Opportunities for Pursuit of Happiness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_Q1SiRN-A
I respectfully disagree. Raising taxes on the rich and the corporations will make them work harder to make the profit they are used to. In the case of a corporation, it will make them work harder and grow more (and thus hire more people) to keep the numbers up to please the shareholders.
It's economics 101, actually.
I own a small business and I can say for certain that every tax increase or regulation cost that we have had for the last 10 years has been passed on the consumer. Our profit margins have stayed the same. You would be naive to think that large corporations don't do the same thing. Ultimately all taxes are paid by the consumer. Maybe that was in economics 102.
And that is what makes the business owner and the nontax paying poor person the same; they both pass their obligations off on someone else. you should be calling the poor, innovators because of the way they are able to pass the buck more efficiently than the Bankers, who use loopholes and tax havens. actually i believe the poor are smarter because they don't have to pay a lawyer a percentage of their, supposedly, ill gotten gain. next time a business owner passes his tax liabilities off on the consumer with out eating it so as to capture market share, you should ask yourself whether or not industries are in cahoots.
I don't understand your last statement about industries being in cahoots.
If I owned my own business and all my competitors raised their prices or lowered their wages once the fed raised taxes, I'd allow my profits, which are hundred times greater than my subordinates, to go down so I could capture market shares. the fact that this does not happen in the corporate world, but instead they all "independently" choose to stick it to the consumer tells me they are not competing, but are in cahoots.
Oh I see what you are saying. I don't think it is collusion though, it is just maintaining profit margins. Places where the competition is the fiercest (like Target vs WalMart) already have very thin margins so they are not likely to give much of the margin up. Some industries are not very competitive so it is just common sense to raise prices. That is the case for me. We re-evaluate our fees yearly and tax increases get lumped into other increases like utilities and suppliers costs when we determine prices.
I used to believe that, my professors even profess that, but when you look at the date and see that the middle class is eroding, the working class is swelling and the 1 percent's profits are soaring, you just can no longer take that seriously.
You mean that there is no collusion?
yes.
I am sure it happens. It isn't the norm though. Competitors keep an eye on each other's prices, but that is not collusion. It is just knowing the competition.
I guess they just have not had a group of citizens exercise their Constitutional right to civil disobedience so they have had no incentive to be fair. I hope for the longevity of this nation they are getting the massage that they should be as conscious of their workers' plight as they are of their competitors' rates.
It's kind of like stores that advertise price match on the same item. If you look closely they may have the same identical item but the model number is slightly different.Hence they can say it isn't the same item and they don't have to match the price. I noticed this years ago while buying appliances. Identical items with a slightly different model number(quite often only one digit or letter difference).
How naive, it will cause more and more corportions to move operations to low tax countries. The 1 percent will buy homes and relocate to low tax countries as well and file as non resident US citizens. The world economy is global and extremely mobile
Yep, the world economy..where capital moves wherever it wants to, whether it's good for America or not. That's exactly why countries need to get control of their banks and corporations..Before it's too late and it may be already. This is like something out of "Rollerball" where the corporations have taken over the world.
To the 1% who will be the first to abandon the county that provided them the atmosphere to become wealthy...Good riddance...pack your bags now..The sooner you get out the quicker we can recover and then bomb you in your low cost hangout.
They will leave for part of the year, just enough to declare non residence status and then not have to pay high US taxes. Probable will spend time in the southern hemisphere during the winter months. Corporations are beholding to their shareholders who are based all over the world. That will not change and as more wealth is created in China and Russia, more shareholders will be chinese and russian
Actually the game is almost over for all of them...
What game? If you confiscated all the wealth of the 1% it would not even make a dent in paying down our country's debt! Not even a dent. We have to have dramtic spending cuts and broad based taxes to get out of this mess. The taxes have tonbe phased in as the economy recovers so we do not create a deeper depression.
economics 101 is a failure, didn't you get the guys basic point of money creation? For every dollar created you need to create another 7 cents in order to be able to pay back the borrowed federal reserve note. The System is fucked. Please get your head out of your proverbial economics 101 ass
You can't just say something that isn't true and call it economics 101. It will not make them work harder. It will make them work overseas, where labor is cheaper, and they don't have to pay taxes. If you want jobs to be in america, you have to compete with conditions offered to them in other markets. Namely China.
That sounds like treason on the part of the producer. imagine If I colluded with another nation because I did not like the policies my government was implementing, i'd be tried and imprisoned.
Sorry but you're wrong.
Economics 101 is micro-economics and deals with supply and demand curves, price, and a few marginal functions. What you're talking about is theory and one that isn't backed up by anything but your opinion.
You've just shifted the cost of manufacture. What happens to price when you do that - whats your marginal cost? What happens to output? - that would be econ 101.
You seem to be writing out of your ass.
Regardless, if you watch actual corporate practice, corporations pass on tax increases to the consumer. Mooks is right, that is always the way it had been done to make things easiest for the company.
The incidence of taxation has to passed to someone - corporations the entity can't really be taxed at all. The Supreme Court has mandated that the board must only make decisions based on returns to investors or face criminal and civil liability. Corporations produce goods or services and there are four inputs: consumers, investors, employees, or suppliers. When costs are raised (through taxes or any way) some combination of those 4 has to actually carry the incidence and consequences of those higher costs.
Its not that its "Easiest for the company" its reality because those are the inputs a company has. Its like you want the negative consequences to be placed on a thing that does not actually exist - in order to make the negative consequences of taxation to just go away. In reality they don't just go away - someone has to bear them and no amount of law or talk is going to change it.
So which group should suffer most for increased taxes? Workers Investors Suppliers Consumers?
Whichever group can afford it and still wants the services to be supplied.
But from a legal stand-point, Corporations are people, so do they fall into one of these categories now? Or must we create a new category for them?
But that is likely different in every business and like different in each subdivision. One investor might be a single dad trying to put two kids through college and need good returns to pay off his mortgage. Another may be someone with a job who is playing with the market as a distraction. One supplier might be a young enthusiastic start up with great ideas but high costs because of the size of the operations - another might be a large conglomerate that is heavily subsidized and thus hugely inefficient...and on and on for each category for each company.
Who would decide this for each case - who would pay them to decide this?
Do you see what kind of resources it would take to manage this and how wasteful it would be?
These are the roads one must go down from the questions one must always ask of themselves when they wish to create rules and support policy. What are the consequences of these actions I support - who feels them - and is it fair that they do?
I really don't know. I can see that the issue is pretty complicated. But really, it is easiest to place most of the responsibility on the consumer. Perhaps it should be divided equally across the board. If taxes are in place, each of the four groups is responsible for paying for these taxes, as each of the four groups are benefiting from the production.
Well I don't see as benefiting from the production as a bad thing. We all need produced goods in this world unless we are all ok with going back to a hunter gatherer society and trying to fashion our own tools, traps, and clothing.
I really don't see how it is moral to increase the costs of people living in order to hire bureaucrats to administer the tax system. Wouldn't we all - especially the unemployed and working poor be better off if our goods cost less? We could save more easily and make our dollars go further.
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If you raise taxes on the rich it gets trickled down to everyone.By saying you want to raise taxes on the rich you are essentially saying that you want the poor and middle class to pay those taxes.
Wow, so you'll just sit there and allow producers to stick you with their tax obligation. If we were a real free market, competition and self interests would oblige the producer to eat the tax and gobble up market share.
they wouldn't eat the tax, they would lower wages to maintain profitability, or raise prices
or lower quality products & services
But if i was not governed by an industry standard, but by free markets, I would eat the tax, meaning I'd allow it to come out of my profits, after all they are 90 to a hundred times greater than my subordinates'. This would ensure that i grow my market share because every one else is doing what you suggest. not only would I have Highly paid, loyal workers but i'd have lower prices. If only we had a competitive market.
Any tax on labor and capital produces a dead weight loss in the system. You can't just arbitrarily raise taxes and hope for the best. You also can't lower taxes arbitrarily either. You have to set taxes that capture the economic rents; this is the surplus from speculative activity. Here's some ECON 101 because what you said was bogus.
The theory of economic rent has been around for some time, but land taxation has seldom been implemented throughout history. It is well known that the factors of production are composed of land, labor and capital. Land, in the economic sense, can be explained as anything with a productive capacity that has not been created by men or women, but has value created by the community. Labor is any human energy spent , whether by the mind or through brute force, that contributes to a means of production. Capital is mainly what is spent from savings for future production. Under the current system, mainly labor and capital are taxed, while the landed elite make out like bandits with the rents that are created by the community! It is no surprise that civilizations have suffered from vast inequalities since the founding of the first governments.
What we need to fight for is a redistribution of these economic rents for the sake of the people, while at the same time reducing the tax rates on labor and capital. These rents from land are the source of all wealth and are presently held by a small number of wealthy people who will speculate and slow there productive capacity in order to increase profits.
This demand goes out to the people of OWS! If there is one thing we need to change in order to promote equality, environmental protection and job creation through increased productive capacity, this is the solution we need. Please read about economic rent and land taxation in order to fully grasp the concept.
You're completely ignoring the fact that the currency is terminally inflationary. You're also ignoring the fact that in a commodity based currency market, capital isn't capable of being manipulated for gain, so most of the conditions demanding the solution you propose wouldn't exist. You're trying to treat symptoms rather than the disease.
No, what I am proposing does in fact go after the heart of the problem rather than the symptoms. Whether you want to believe this or not, every ounce of wealth in the world has it's roots from land and the great wealth disparity throughout the ages has come from monopolization of land. This is not my opinion let me add; this is based on the law of productivity. If you don't agree with me on how to capture land value for public use, I can respect that. But it is a fact that all of the suplus wealth in the world comes directly from land and that is not debatable. Economists for the past few hundred years have recognized that land is entirely separate from capital and labor and that this surplus is created by the entire community, but all profits go to the land owner. Land is not just the ground, but it includes anything that generates wealth without the need for additional human labor. The elecrtomagnetic spectrum was not created by humans, but whoever owns rights to a certain frequency is entitled to all of the profits. Humans didn't create oil, but whoever owns the oil field gets all of the profits. This list goes on and on. I am not proposing we stop the the functionality of the market, but instead allow people to keep what they worked for and use the rest for public funding. I am oversimplifying this so it's easy for anyone to understand, but I suggest you read this book to get an in-depth analysis before you make any judgement.
http://www.henrygeorge.org/pdfs/PandP_Drake.pdf
and what currency will support it? ALL THE WORLDS CURRENCIES ARE BASED ON THE U.S. DOLLAR! It is going to implode by nature, what then?
This we can agree on. It is inevitable that any currency in existence will eventually fail because they only exist from debt. There is absolutely no way to ever repay the debt because there is always more debt than money. Along with the tax system I mentioned, the world needs to move away from debt-backed currency as well, but that is a seperate topic. I don't claim to know how to get the world to move towards a static currency, but I do know that this form of taxation is far superior to the income tax. That's the only thing I am arguing here and I agree, there are many more problems we need to address. I only hope we can come together on this one topic.
Sorry, a finite commodity based currency market.*
Worse than that, he forgot to do the math. Do the math: it would mean a land tax of at least 20 thousand an acre to meet our yearly obligation (debt divided by total number of acres). And in many places of the US, land is not worth that much meaning much of the land would return to the municipality. Both the local government and the Fed would crash. And eventually all the land in the US would be owned by a network of uber-rich.
The entire GDP of the U.S. is roughly 14.5 trillion dollars and the acreage of land use is about 2.3 billion acres. This is a little over $6000 per acre. The average income in the U.S. is about $45,000 per year and at a marginal rate of 25% for earners below $50,000 per year, the average household pays $11,250 per year in taxes. So this means, for the government to take in the same tax revenue, the average family will pay about half of the taxes they currently pay under this system. This is a conservative estimate and doesn't include lower costs to collect taxes, higher tax revenue from increased employment by reducing market speculation and an array of other positive benefits. You do the math with an open mind.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB14/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
I think the better idea is to put a large tax on the unions.
We live in the new gilded age. Didn't anyone see Colbert throwing up his $1000.00 eggs, $1000.00 pizza and $1000.00 ice cream? Back in the 1970s, the middle class was strong and the rich were paying big taxes. It worked...
Your argument means that taxing the rich won't work alone. We also need to cut spending. It doesn't mean that the rich shouldn't pay their share of the taxes.
90% tax rate for super-rich
Tax wealth and income.
Get a minimum 9% Tax from the 1/2 of Income earners making $100,000+ that currently pay ZERO Income Tax. We are talking over $500 billion more revenues per year. That will pay for New Jobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_Q1SiRN-A
Well, we should move away from the whole dept based system and away from capitalism / free market.
However for those people believe that they can some how fix the system/economy, taxing the rich should be on the top of their agenda. Because with out it the system will fail that much sooner.
But remember the current economic theory, the one that got the Nobel prize was developed by a man with schizophrenia.
He could see both sides of the issue simultaneously, LOL.
at this point,
the rich would prefer being taxed over having all the loans everyone owes them taken away
The Revolution has a theme song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGaRtqrlGy8&feature=related
http://occupywallst.org/forum/make-a-stand-join-the-clan/
The Revolution starts here! No one can silence the Revolution!
Yes it will. We are on the left side of the Laffer curve.
Well, seems like my ACTUAL point has been made. It takes very little to derail you and set you all off on a nice waste of time semantics tailspin.
Get your heads screwed on, please... there are real problems that we need to unify on.
For real.
If we don't lose the semantics and keep to the big picture we're ALL screwed. Can we all agree on that at least?
If we don't knock off this "internets friendly" "I have to win my argument at all cost" attitude, we're ALL going to lose.
We have a velocity of money problem. Monetary stimulus alone will only flood in dollars into the system that will end up paying off debt or in speculation by the larger banks.
The ONLY way to solve the problem is to get money into the hands of those who will spend it in a revenue neutral fashion. The mechanism therefore must put more dollars into the middle and lower classes....where it is necessarily spent....and take this money from the top 20 and 10% of the population where spending is less likely to occur.
It is the Robin Hood solution. It is the redistribution of wealth. It is class warfare.
But, in the end, it is necessary (in addition to fiscal stimulus) for both the wealthy and the not so wealthy. If you are rich and want to stay rich, then you need to preserve the system that made you wealthy.
That is why the revenue neutral changes must occur.
Today, income redistribution occurs in some form in most democratic countries. Progressive income redistribution diminishes the amount of income one individual or corporation receives, while at the same time benefitting others. In a progressive income tax system, a high income earner will pay a higher tax rate than a low income earner. .........http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_of_wealth
If you look back into history there was a time when capital gains taxes were at 25% +- 2%, and during that time (I think it was a 40 years span) there were NO boom and busts in the market.... also, when capital gains taxes were lowered, a recession soon followed, when they were subsequently heightened, a recovery occurred... There is an inforgraphic on this site somewhere which should be neat to look at.
I think what we should be doing is making an stable an efficient tax code... i.e. an optimal one.
Since we do not know how to calculate the optimal one... I say we start preforming a method called simulated annealing to find where the system is most stable. If you believe in the Laffer curve, then there must exist this optimal solution. Once this is found, it will likely need to be adjusted as market dynamics shift.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_Q1SiRN-Aread.
Correlation is not causation... it appears around the beginning of the Bush administration, we were beginning to level off. Then we started two wars, that did not cause a subsequent increase in taxes, i.e. we put them on the credit card. Worse yet, we gave out huge tax breaks.
Personally I would tie quanity of money to population size. You print as much money as it would take so that the average GDP would provide a standard of living life associated with your country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_Q1SiRN-A
I would like to go back to green backs, with the quantity of money controlled by population size and keep a more eglaritarian society by progressive taxation... as I cannot see a way to encourage financiers to loan to someone without collecting interest..
I understand exponential curves, I understand that human population cannot continue with the current system and not expect a natural negative feedback loop... So I proposed a solution. I dont see tieing our currency to gold as a viable solution because gold is a finite resource, population growth rates grow as a country becomes wealthy and sometimes goes negative... so it makes sense to tie quantity of currency to population.
I agree just taxing the rich will not work, if we want more things from government we need to tax everyone more, and at the same time reduce services. Government doesn't need debt and through cuts in programs and increases in taxes could provide for what people say they need. Those graphs won't look any better if we keep going the way we are. End social security, medicare and medicade, and cut the military. Instant surplus. Next pay for what you want. Want an aircraft carrier, taxes go up. Want government health care, taxes go up, and so on. It won't happen, we want things free and want someone else to pay for it and debt it the politician's way of trying to please everyone.
Pay for what you want. Republicans want big Defense. Let the Republican Districts voting in favor of Defense PAY for it with a Surtax to their District. And, you know what Democrats want. Let Democrat Districts PAY for their Priorities with a Surtax. The Budget is Nearly Balanced.
Can't run a country that way, are you advocating letting each state go its own way? Just tax for what you want.
Apply a sales tax to financial instruments. Say 8.5%. I pay 8.5% on a sock, now pay 8.5% for stock.
Variation on Your Idea: A). 0.1% Fee on all High Volume Transactions (buy, sell, short, etc.) for an insurance bailout fund. B). Collect immediately 30% from Profit (for IRS) on all Stock Sales Held Less Than 2 Years.
Gee, seems like people like you said that in the early 90's when Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
But those rates led to the longest economic expansion in our nations HISTORY.
People like you were wrong then and your wrong now.
Get a minimum 9% Tax from the 1/2 of Income earners making $100,000+ that currently pay ZERO Income Tax. We are talking over $500 billion more revenues per year. That will pay for New Jobs.
It is estimated that the Buffet tax idea would generate about 50 billion a year which would take the Government about 10 days to spend.We need to shrink the Fed. not tax the rich.
I'd say we need to compromise and do both. I worked for a small government office and the waste was appalling. I couldn't believe they had that kind of money to throw away at a local level. I think the government should be at least as frugal with their money as I am in my own home. They most definitely are not. This thing needs to be attacked from the bottom up and the top down. I do however think that it is reasonable to expect those who accumulate more wealth to contribute a higher percentage towards the tax base. We all work to promote this Capitalist environment which allows businesses to generate these large sums of money. I think they should, like Buffet...hell...even Stephen King...be willing to give something back.
I agree. It is not right that 26 American citizens own/control 591 billion dollars in assets/net worth. Their wealth has gotten out of hand. I didn't have time to calculate the collective net worths of the other 376 of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans, but I'm sure this would only emphasize the point.
Let them continue to generate and enjoy wealth, just make sure an increased percentage of that goes back to the country that makes it possible (and keep the money away from our politicians!).
Thank you! This is all we are asking. Just make sure an increased percentage goes back to the country that makes it possible, and keep money away from our politicians -- and media! Money should not control what is reported.
Thank you for saying exactly what is needed.
I run a small company with 12 workers. They work and live in San Francisco, but I am constantly bombarded with offers and bids for contract work from east europe that would save me a lot of money. Nevertheless I do like my team.
If you raise my taxes, I will fire them and offshore their jobs. It will take me about 1 week to make the transition.
If you lower my taxes I will be able to hire one additional local engineer and scale up a little bit.
I know this is anecdotal, but it is 100% true for my situation. I do prefer to hire Americans, but I will keep my business profitable.
You are not the target of Occupy Wall Street proponents, believe me. You aren't for instance among those 400 wealthiest Americans whose collective net worth is over a trillion dollars, who are taxed at the .1% rate, with only 15 percent of their capital gains taxed, and who usually end up deducting everything, paying no income tax, and in fact receiving refunds and subsidies. You are not in that category of wealth.
Your analysis is seriously flawed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_Q1SiRN-A
Excellent post, forget the idiots who don't understand the way the world works.
time to read manfred max neef so you can understand the economic system
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Your probably right, but our entire unregulated capitalist concept is in basic disfunction. Taxing the rich is also an ethical thing which is a good place to start.
How about stopping some wars. That will save and stop tons of money from flowing out of our country.
no shule, taxing the rich is not ethical. First off, what makes rich people want to sit around and get taxed? They'll just sell their businesses and leave the country, killing more jobs in the process. Stop wars? are you retarded? Look at that graph, they NEED wars to accumulate debt to maintain the existence of the currency. All of the spending and war and debt is a symptom of a paper currency loaned into existence. The solution is a commodity based standard. When your money has real value, the market regulates itself with risk of failure.
Surely you must be joking Mr. tpaine.
No comments cause no one understands money creation?
I thought your points showed more insight than any of your detractors
I think you're scaring people away. I started my reply with "I respectfully" and had my face slammed into the wall for my ideas. I'd rather have a dialog than a pissing contest.
I'm just going to let you be right and move on if you don't mind. I have better things to do than argue over semantics.
If you took all the wealth of the 1% it would not even make a dent in our country's debt. Not even a dent! We need dramatic spending cuts and broad based taxes. The taxes cannot be raised until the economy improves or we will have a deeper recession or worse.
Ha! I can solve that, every few years when inflation gets so bad people are dropping like flies you rename the currency! That's right, we call them Dullars and you can exchange your dollars at 10-1 for the new dullars and we start all over again! Free shit forever!!!
Deflation is the problem now. Money is worth less every day. But the same concept could apply.
I'll just leave this here:
http://www.brianrogel.com/the-100-percent-solution-for-the-99-percent
And you guys can go on planning for your next Gilded Age.
Oh. Debt. What is debt? Something about revenue vs. spending? Revenue. What is that?
Is that YOUR site ? It's pretty good !
Notice how the rich started taking off when we introduced computers and robotics?
that is when we should've exercised our civil disobedience, and got our slice of the pie. at least that is how history tells me the forty hour week was obtained. The technological revolution was a product of the civil disobedience during the industrial revolution. If no one fights for their cut, their cut gets gobbled up by those who participate in politics.
Read Vonnegut's 1952 novel "Player Piano." You can get a summary here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano , I'll simply point out what is plain for all to see once we open our eyes....
In my workplace, we used to have a secretary for every 10 people or so. They edited memos, typed, filed, and so forth. Now we have one for every 100 because everyone uses Microsoft Word. We used to have a department called "publications" that made our transparencies, now we use Power Point. We used to have a department of drafters who did drawings, now we use Computer Aided Design (CAD). Many of the lower level design jobs have been absorbed into the "helpers" of our design tools.
We can never reach a human anymore when we call somewhere, it's always a computer. Robots are building our products. Go to the ticket counter at the airport and notice there's now only 1 human, but 20 auto-mated check-out stands. The guy who used to collect my parking fees at the downtown parking lots is gone, replaced by computers. The local theater wants me to buy my tickets from an computer. Banks use ATMs and employ many fewer tellers. At my grocery store, people now self-check on computers and the manned lanes are empty. These are all jobs lost, and it's getting worse.
IBM's Jeopardy winning Watson software, able to understand and answer difficult human-language questions, wasn't created to win Jeopardy, it's being marketed as a replacement for technical support applications. Foxconn, China's largest manufacturer, which makes all Apple products and those of many others announced it is planning to automate. Thus, even the people in India who took our technical support jobs and those in China who took our manufacturing jobs are soon to be replaced.
The demand for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) majors is being driven by the need for more and more advanced technologies to aid in replacing more and more workers. We're creeping up the chain and doing more and more sophisticated tasks with our machines. Engineers like myself are becoming the "elite" upper-middle class, and everyone else is out of luck.
Perhaps all these displaced people will work in service industries supporting the engineers out for a dinner, but that too is likely to change. Some restaurants are already using computers on the table to allow direct ordering and payment, so the waiter/waitress jobs are at risk. MacDonald's has demonstrated a fully automated facility, and people love it because it's fast, polite, reliable, and fun to watch. That technology will soon proliferate down into other restaurants. Even what service jobs remain will pay poorly as these are comparatively low skilled positions filled with commodity labor traded based on lowest cost alone in the labor markets.
Just above the elite top class are the Capitalists. Armed with a slave workforce that doesn't get sick and works for food (electricity) alone, they reap unprecedented profits, and they really don't need anyone else but their engineers to continue their growth. Note that productivity and wages started diverging just as computers and robotics came on the scene, and the gap continues to widen. That gap is filled by the computerized slaves we engineers continue to make and the public continues to use with pleasure thanks to the convenience.
We are in the midst of a socio-economic paradigm shift with huge ramifications for civilization. We can slow it down by refusing to do business with computers wherever possible, but the change will continue. Perhaps we can make it to a Utopia where the "products" people sell to earn dollars are simply art and ideas, but many are no more capable of art than they are of engineering. We can "tax" the slave workers and simply put more and more people on welfare, but we've seen time and time again that this is not particularly good for the human spirit.
It's hard to see where this will all end, but we better start thinking about it so we can plan the transition lest we wake up to violent revolution outside our doors one morning.
A guaranteed annual income, with good neighborhoods (created by urban planning, building codes, libraries, environmental quality, parks, recreation, schools, civic centers, and museums, etc.) is what we need for the human spirit. Give people their health, a clean, safe space, and time, and we can appeal to the human spirit. There is always a way to evolve.
Well I suspect we'll get to see within 100 years or less.
I wish EVERYONE would seek Self-Actualization, but we have ample evidence that only a small segment of society does so. Forks could finish Kant in the amount of time they spend talking about Kim Kardashian !
Agreed. I know the name of this actress (?) but that's all. I think communism must be re-thought in today's context of electronic communications and transparent market information. Since everyone knows everyone else's markets, information is no longer the issue it once was. We can create truly "free markets" that work for everyone's benefit, not just the benefit of those who own the majority of the world's assets. And why not?
No, it's this guy: http://occupywallst.org/users/BrianRogel/
I'm just promoting his excellent work.
Thanks ! It's always nice to see some actual numbers ;o)
The voices again?
Money stolen from the people at gunpoint by the government.
That also ignores terminal inflationary nature as well. Address the actual thread please.
The "terminal" inflationary course of our debt was set into motion by Reagan's tax cuts, which is directly addressed by that piece. Debt is a function of insufficient revenue. Everything you're freaking out about follows.
lol no, the terminal inflationary course is a result of our currency being loaned into existence. 1971 when we closed the gold window, check the debt graph brah.
In what scenario does the government have to sell bonds?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3_Q1SiRN-A
Well almost everything he's freaking out about.. The rest can only be addressed by pointing out that Ayn Rand was a hypocritical, antisocial whore.
The desire for a one-sided social contract is little more than childish self-indulgence.
Do you expect people like this to understand that?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osvQ4XXusZ4&feature=related
I bet taxing illegal aliens would work since there's so many of 'em here.