I don't buy that. It's a statistical thing. I think to survive the status quo just need continue. Things getting worse will simply increase the likelyhood of its survival.
Odd thing is, I would VERY MUCH like for things to get better and OWS die. That would make me happy. Are the powers that be likely to actually do something to fix anything? That's the important question.
I honestly don't think most politicians give a damn about anything or anyone except the people who pay for their campaigns and what the people who pay for their campaigns want. Sadly most campaign money comes from those who want the status quo. Those who don't give a rats ass about people out of work.
God forbid that the rich should sacrifice one goddamn dime more than they already are. Because we all know that for the rich there is no such thing as enough.
How do we fix it though? Why
aren't they fixing it? There must be a reason right? Let's see if we can figure out what it might be that's causing all these problems that aren't getting fixed. I read through most of this thread, and it seems like you like numbers, I like what's behind the numbers, what they
mean.
First off, as that chart posted earlier showed, the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer. It wouldn't make any
sense if it worked any other way, would it? Shouldn't it be easier to make money if you already have some to start with? So complaining about that doesn't do much good, it's not a zero-sum game, and that money made whether spent, invested or saved contributes to the economy one way or another. Unless of course they're sending that money
overseas, that's bad, it would be much nicer if they were investing it here, wouldn't it? Why aren't they?
Probably for the same reasons banks and financiers are sitting around scheming up new ways to make pretend money before it all falls apart. Go ahead, pass the
Volker rule that'll only hurt a little bit, what's a billion dollars anyway? Probably a billion reasons for them to sit around dreaming new ways to make it back, but nevermind about that, maybe it will do some good, but it won't solve the problem, will it? Why aren't banks making money the way they normally do? Why are they trying to nickle and dime people with annoying fees and Enroning it the rest of the time?
Why aren't they lending money to businesses and homeowners existing or prospective to stimulate the economy, usually banks are the
good guys, annoying as they can be sometimes. Maybe it has something to do with the reason that capital above is fleeing? Maybe it is related to why interest rates are in a trough? They can't make much money lending it anymore, and no one seems all that anxious to borrow it, that's not how it's supposed to work, is it? With interest rates so low people ought to be just smacking their lips at the opportunity to borrow money and invest it in new goods and services,
but they're not.
The hell with them both, let's just
take it! Why if we liquidated the
Fortune Four Hundred, who had a very good year in 2010, we could pay the budget deficit for an entire
year! Actually no, probably not, it's probably not all fungible and in the process of crashing the stock market we'd lose some there, and as noted before some is overseas already. So we'd only partially pay off the budget deficit, in exchange for crashing the stock market, but who cares about
that, they're the
rich anyway, aren't they?
So don your
sans-culottes and grab your
pitchfork, we can take it
all! How much can we get if we take everything we can from the top 1%? Let's see, as of the second quarter of 2011 it appears the total net wealth in the US is on the order of 60 trillion
dollars, traditionally the top 1% has about a
third of that, so let's say 20 trillion as a nice round figure. Since we already soaked the richest 400 for 1.5 trillion and crashed the stock market, maybe we'll have enough to pay off the federal debt at
15 trillion! No, probably not, again most of those assets probably aren't fungible anyway, but let's give it to you anyway.
So now we've paid the federal budget deficit for one year, paid off the national debt, however we still have a budged deficit on the order of 1.4 trillion...oh...wait. That top 1% has no money anymore, we ate it up! This is going to cause a problem, because they paid a wildly disproportionate share of
total income tax revenues. That's OK, they only paid 28% of
total federal revenues, there's all sorts of other ways the feds raise revenue. So the annual budget deficit will probably only go up what, 600 billion as a conservative figure, giving us a 2 trillion dollar annual deficit? Of course that doesn't account for all the jobs lost and (mainly) payroll and income taxes lost from the corporations and associated businesses that were charbroiled so we could eat the rich.
So what has been accomplished other than to take the money out of the hands of the best producers and managers of money in the nation and hand it to the most profligate spenders who simply cannot manage money responsibly and whose assets and liabilities (!) outweigh what the rich can earn and what they actually own in fungible assets? Was this necessarily a good idea? I know the idea isn't to do this all at once, but it's to do it gradually, isn't it? What makes you think this is wise economic strategy even in piecemeal? Is it greed, envy or hate, the purest of human motives?
It seems to me our problem is that we need to get the economy moving, the classic Keynesian formula to get out of a recession is to cut taxes and increase government spending, except we've a problem, we've discovered a corollary to Keynes' theorem:
'government spending is not adjustable in a downward direction.'
(page [22) Now it has finally reached a point where we
can't let interest rates rise, as look at this
chart and note how manageable that debt servicing seems to be. 250 billion? Pah! Except there's a
problem, it's not
real, and it can't
last. Interest rates now are so low that outside factors beyond our control from a variety of
different sources could cause interest rates to rise, and raising them as monetary policy would be dangerous, that debt servicing could triple in short order.
If we cut taxes, the easiest way to do that is to lower income taxes, but if you've followed those links, any significant tax decrease will go to the rich, because they're the ones that actually pay the vast majority of income taxes, that is the top 10% of earners. If you want to cut payroll taxes, which would help everyone and increase consumption, you run into wailing from certain quarters about the accounting fiction that is the 'social security and medicare trust funds,' I don't know if you realize it, but that's simply imaginary, all payouts to social security, medicare and all other entitlements come out of the general revenue, but it's a popular scare tactic. Other taxes such as the gasoline tax might help, but still to actually get the economy moving in the right direction vast amounts of capital being freed up and invested in new and existing businesses provides the most bang for the buck, and that means cutting taxes for the rich, which might put you and your friends into apoplexy.
Other problems have arisen due to about 50 billion dollars a year being sucked out of the country from the most vulnerable sector of the economy, low-end jobs filled by guest workers and the like taking jobs from entry level employees and forcing wages down where it hurts poor Americans the most.
Page 6 shows the money flowing out, (remittances) and the 'contributions' to the economy is neutral as that would be filled by a person who
wouldn't be sending ~50 billion per year out of the country, thus it judges the economic impact of these programs, almost 500 billion per year, driving down wages and filling jobs. If the unemployment rate is baseline, then it's not a problem, if its been above the natural unemployment rate, then it is, do we need more wage deflation in that sector? However no one wants to do anything about that for political reasons.
Another problem is we've been running mass trade deficits for so long we don't realize that another
500 billion or so per year is headed overseas. That's a boon in one respect, we get cheap crap from China and elsewhere, but it makes manufacturing in the United States a very risky proposition, which is why the share of the
manufacturing economy has fallen so steeply. That costs jobs and also lowers wages for the working classes. However we can't do too much about that if you read those links on the government debt, look who owns so much of it, and were we to try a Smoot-Hawley, we might just find our interest rate raised for us overnight as billions of dollars of treasury bonds are dumped into the market. So we might just be afraid to do something about that also for political reasons.
So, how does blaming the banks help all this, or for that matter the rich? It's like your car broke down and you're banging on the engine with a monkey wrench and asking for a blowtorch. It won't do any good, it will likely send the economy back into recession and what it needs right now is growth before the inevitable rise of interest rates cause that debt servicing to explode. Ask the government to solve some of the structural problems of the economy instead of giving you a bogeyman to hate.
