Wealth Inequality in the U.S.

What is there to prove? People make more money than others, and its hard to make money. Congrats, the two simplistic points are proved with some diagrams and charts. What in the fuck are you saying here "The 1% may work hard, but no harder than the middle or lower class."...that assumption is BEYOND idiotic. Sure it is stupid to make generalizations about the lower class, but anyone can firmly state that the average member of the 1% works harder than the average lower class. Not saying that there aren't members of the lower class that don't work hard, but look at averages. Once again, you are being irrational. People get places by hard work and connections, so obviously success will not be attained through merit and merit alone. It's sickening that the successful and understandably exclusive group of America is portrayed as some scumbag trust fund babies that walked their way into their position. In reality, the majority worked their asses off, and now benefit the country more than you think, financially and philanthropically. /imout

well simple or not, that in all honesty is why people are butthurt.

Really interesting. It really is remarkable how unevenly the wealth in the US is distributed.

Dude if you outsource you could hire at least 30 people.

I think were referring more to the people on Wall Street. Doctors make a lot of money and I don't think anyone has a real problem with that. But when you have billions of dollars for you and your family that's a bit of a concern. That is an unreasonable amount of money for a person to have and you're most likly not even going to spend 50% of that in your lifetime. However you do have people who are getting kicked out of their houses because they can't afford to live there or buy food. If your family got kicked out of your house and isn't able to buy many thing that you can buy today do you really think that's not going to affect your job path in the future.

Not true. Its very rare that someone works their way up considering how terrible the us's social mobility is. We rank last among most western nations. I know personally many of the people that are top 1 percenters, like the former ceo of goldman sachs Europe and my friends dad who is in charge of one of the most lucrative hedgefunds on wall street. More often than not they were rich before they got there.

to a certain extent i get what youre saying, but lets take one of my friends for example. comes from an incredibly wealthy family, (owns a couple houses scattered around the country and outside this country), gets to go cycling in europe during the summers, attended expensive private college, generally doesnt have a monetary woe in the world.

are you going to sit here and tell me that someone growing up in rural america or the inner city of some metropolis has the same life choices and opportunities as my friend? because if you believe that youre full of shit.


i get what youre saying about making your own luck, and i used an example of extremes above. but even my life and by NS standards im probably poor, life is full of opportunities that so many people in the world dont have its ridiculous. I will give you there is something to be said for taking life by the balls and going for it. god knows ive done my best to seize the opportunities afforded me. but i dont shit myself into believing that opportunities are equal for all of us.

yes, but if it is preventing other people from getting money to live decently i fail to see a problem.

You mean like hire 30 Pakistanis to come work at a splash pool in Denver? Interesting idea :-\

Very simple rule for you to be able to afford something that means somebody somewhere can't. So if you have millions upon millions of dollars sitting in a bank account and not doing anything. That means you have a lot of people who have nothing in a bank account. And my saying millionaires should give away all their money away to these people No but you fail to see the problem that this creates.

Right on.

I'm right there with you on the personal level. /Not very rare, do some research.

Graph shows social mobility/prosperity ranking on a global scale

what. are you trolling?

So anyways about 25,000 people died today from hunger related causes.

obviously not a serious question.

i agree that the government program was part of the problem, but banks, rating agencies and mortgage bankers went full retard on it.

i know, free market proponents will always bring up the issue with how there never were any "real" free markets and that all the big crashes were a result of some intervention. but you have to understand that the counterparty makes the same argument, just that there was too little intervention. it really helps nobody to just blame the other side.

as i said, there needs to be a middle way. and first and foremost, limit certain derivatives and limit who is allowed to trade on what. commodities are a good example. yeah i know you can diversify with it and blablabla, but the commodity market is there (originally) for producers/traders of said commodities to hedge themselves. but now banks and funds trade their for speculation. i know there are these guys that say that speculation is good because it increases volume and thereby efficiency and so on, but i dont buy it. another example are these horseshit CDO^2, CDO^3 and whatever, where really noone who bought them (i am talking about funds and banks) had a clue what they were. rating agencies worried more about keeping customers than really saying, yeah, the best 20% of the worst 5% of the worst 5% are still fucking worthless dude.

thats just my opinion. obviously i am not an expert on it, just a banking and finance major (in 4 months), and thats not even a joke or irony.

I agree man with this. Finance major here I didn't even bother to argue this on here with ski resort majors. Anways the CDO was a pretty big problem which I think for the most part people are much more aware about. I wouldnt be suprised if we have another major crash in the market in the next year or two at this rate with the political system failing, as well as the market reaching all time highs. A bubble might form based on that

definitely possible.

and there comes one of my favourite quotes from one of our professors into play (hes definitely the best around here, was even at yale for a few years). he said that stock markets are one of the most dangerous tools in the world (apart from nuclear weapons, guns and murder and all that stuff). because if someone steals something, its not overly bad, because wealth was just shifted. its still there. stock markets flat out DESTROY wealth. and that has effects on everybody.

and thats why we have to find a way to keep it at bay. maybe perfectly free markets without intervention work. but at what risk? i for myself would rather have a "heavily" controlled market (obviously negating some of its strengths too) that has less variance and profits in it than this boom-or-bust type of thing thats dominating right now.

and maybe, markets have to evolve a little further. with all the new techniques, HFT and pretty much the "whole" world being traders, traditional markets might not be working. over centuries, there was almost no net inflation over several years as inflation periods were followed by deflation periods. now we just have a stable inflation almost always of a few percent. this "pressures" people to make debts, because they wont get any cheaper, and prevents people from having it at home or in a savings book. compound interests make it neccessary to grow every single year, because otherwise you lose wealth. what about a deflation every other year? what about no compound interests?



i know i was all over the place in that post, but my message is, that economies, exchanges, government and the financial service industry have to find a better way to solve all these complex issues because they have effects that trickle down to all kinds of social issues all over the world.

We have a winner!