Rich People Don't Create Jobs...

Dude, like, I'm totally responding to the dumb title of the video. The title of the vid is designed to produce a philosophical response.

 

And you were wrong. That 401K income IS taxed eventually. It is only DEFERRED. BTW, 401Ks are largely invested in public stocks which are sold by large corporations. Those corporations ARE investments for the middle class. Go ahead and tax the 'evil corporations' and you'll be taking income from honest Americans.

There are too many loopholes for rich Democrats.

Close the loopholes...but wait....maybe that's why our economy has been able to withstand Obama....

Sorry I don't consider myself to be a victim. You have fun with that though.

Government programs don't have to make a profit therefore, they get their funding on a needy basis and, the more needy the more tax dollars they receive. We just need to decide which government programs we deem to be valuable enough to lose money on. Taking care of the elderly, sure seems like a good one to me.

But they are less likely to squander it on silly socialist programs and policies.

 

Ok

To keep post on topic, investing in something without someone to buy...is kinda stupid. just my limited experience. There are legal cheats an loop holes, but for those without the know, (and financial means)...they just don't know.

 

There is an option - go live in the jungle completely away from civilization and fend for yourself like Robinson Crusoe - what's stopping you? lol

 

I see. So if you believe in a concept, and that concept is in danger, it is "perfectly justified" in your mind to defend that concept even to the extent of wiping out countless lives, even innocent ones. Many people believe that the survival of their race requires purification and genocide. Would you now argue that they aren't perfectly justified in ensuring the survival of their race? How about religion, is it perfectly justified to take civilian lives in order to ensure the survival of a particular religious sect?

Honestly, if it's perfectly justified, then it's also perfectly justified to ensure one's survival by destroying a warring state and all of the civilians within it. Therefore, it's pretty much perfectly justified to kill anyone for any reason, so long as one has a reason one thinks is good.

Why not luxury? Who are you to decide that the survival of a particular person is not predicated on their having more than just the basic necessities? Give me on objective reason why it's wrong to take more than one needs, and how you would know exactly when a person, or a group of people, crosses the line.

I asked you why you don't start your own community. Now you blame others. I think that's why you don't. You expect someone else to do it for you. Most people live their lives every day with almost no regulation. According to you, that's impossible. We need to be coddled, swaddled, and dandled, 24/7 or we can't survive.

Because people like you could never stand for success, and if we take away the productive, there will be no one to support you. That's when you start lobbing bombs. As you've said, it's your right to take from others if it's for something you think that you need, even if you have to kill those people to get it. Your entire principle of right and wrong is founded on might is right.

 

I've seen smart dumb ppl and dumb smart ppl

 

Sounds like a feel good claim. Not that I'd expect any real analysis. I don't have an opinion on either matter. If the money is invested, we are all better off. So if you have evidence that the millions receiving tax breaks will use it to invest, and that billionaires won't, then I'm with you. However, I think you still believe in the incorrect notion that consumption creates wealth, and therefore people spending money will lead to more economic growth. Which is interesting, because why would it matter if anyone gets the money, as long as it is spent?

 

it's common sense, if the rich have the money they do not have to create jobs to get the money

the working class on down are more likely to spend their tax cuts thus help the economy.. job creators because of increased demand... create jobs to get that money

the more hands a dollar touches before it sits in the banks, the more it improves the economy.....

.

 

So what would you call the guy in the video? Rich but smart dumb, or Rich but dumb smart?

 

Correct. If people didn't believe this then the US should have surrendered in WWII rather than take a single innocent German life just to "preserve their own democracy".

That's incorrect because that isn't "survival", that's eugenics. Survival means retaliating against a direct threat of harm. If you kill an armed attacker, that's survival - if you kill a black person because you think blacks are "destroying your race by race mixing" - that's not survival.

Nope, because survival of a particular "belief", "skin color", etc is not equivalent to physical survival.

Nope, destroying "all civilians" would not aid survival, since it is the state which is imitating the war, therefore destroying the warmongers is all that would need to be accomplished to end the direct threat.

That would be like saying it is necessary to nuke Boston to stop the Boston Bomber.

Nope, only if it's a reason which objectively aids physical survival.

There's plenty of biological and historical precedent, and common sense to distinguish between needs and wants. Everyone knows the difference between a starving person needing to eat, and a rich person who prefers to eat caviar and lobster.

People live with unwritten social regulation - state regulation is just an extent of normal social regulation that's existed since the dawn of man. There's really no difference between a "government" and the "parental hierarchy" within an individual family - except the scope of it.

We only need state regulation to ensure basic survival - I'm a consequentalist libertarian, as opposed to a "capital L" one. But the point is that hierarchical social structures are an inevitable reality no matter what because that's how our biology is designed.

No, because there will be no one to support the "productive" when they're stranded on that island away from civilization - that's why they need "us" way more than we'd ever need "them" - nothing's stopping them from it but, "they" apparently prefer to use public roadways and attend public universities while at the same time saying "the state shouldn't exist".

And most of "them" if you mean the rich, fact is the majority of rich don't feel as strongly as anarcho-capitalists do about this anyway - since by your ideology 99.99% of the population is "socialist/communist".

It's founded on what's shown to be true according to biology and sociology - in other words, facts, not fiction - humans are biologically cooperative and are only individually competitive to a certain degree, and human instinct naturally drifts toward hierarchical structures to an extent.

"Might" isn't right, but if might achieves what's right then it's perfectly fine.

Your idea on the other hand is basically no different than religion since it's not based on facts, just on blind faith and ignores all of the evidence that your perfect utopia would never work except on very small, individual scales. And there's no "proof" that would ever convince you otherwise.

 

Value to society is not and has never been in human history determined by the size of one's paycheck - currency never even existed until recent history, considering that humans have been around for 10,000s of years. This idea is one of the degenerative results of modern industrialization, since men no longer can hunt for game, or defend their tribe in combat, they equate the size of their "paycheck" with their actual practical contributions.

Value to society is determined by one's overall social contributions. By your logic Miley Cyrus has more "value to society" than a Navy SEAL simply because she has more income, but I think most people would agree that defending your country is producing more value to society than making bad pop music or "twerking" in a Youtube video.

Income is not a measure of objective social value - it's just a measure of what someone somewhere is willing to pay for it. Some woman paid $50,000 for a grilled cheese sandwich on Ebay which looked like the Virgin Mary, but that doesn't mean the sandwich is "objectively valuable to society".

By the same token then if society decides to put your head under a guillotine - then they just "determined" your value - lol

Nope, in practice no one cares about what you think - whether the homeless guy on the streets or Warren Buffet. And you're gonna continue to work, and have taxes removed from your paycheck until the day you die - and when you're too old to work you'll pull an "Ayn Rand" and go onto Medicare rather than make good on your word and voluntarily starve rather than taking a penny too much in Medicare costs

Your only option is to renounce your US citizenship and go live in a Somali jungle or somewhere - and people who talk your talk wouldn't last 30 minutes there without running back home to their "totalitarian state" - since spoiled Westerners couldn't last a minute without the modern conveniences produced by the labor of "poor people" which their ancestors lived without, but which they couldn't live a day without

Truth is that successful people did not get there "by themselves" - they got there by convincing others to do these things for them. If you moved to that jungle away from civilization, there's a million other people who could easily take your place - but you wouldn't be willing to last a day there once you found out that you wouldn't be able to lay the brick and mortar to build your house, or forge the metal to build your car, or craft the circuitry to build your Xbox with your own bare hands, regardless of what you could "do" by handing people a green piece of paper with a dead President's face on it. Fact is people who think like you do need "them" more than they'd ever need you.

That's your only claim to being a social contributer? That you can *gasp* actually go into a store, and *gasp* buy stuff with money?

That would be like thinking you're a "genius" because you can beat a guy with Down's Syndrome on a HS math quiz

That's not how "evolution" works - you're falsely equating biological evolution with the concept of "social Darwinism".

And if from a purely biological, reproductive perspective - a guy who sleeps around with 100s of women and doesn't work or support any of them is still more of a "social contributor" than you - since he contributed more to the gene pool, if you're talking the "evolutionary" route.

 

Since your arguement is for no government, It would be interesting to hear you description of a system of governance with no government.

 

You do understand that if corporations have record levels of cash, which they do, then the government rules can't be moving more money to the benefit side of the equation leaving little to spend on the other side . Your arguement is logically inconsistent. Record levels of cash are created by record corporate profits which are after all expenses like benefits, wages, etc.

 

P

Socialism has not worked any better anywhere it's been attempted.

 

" Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeasaaaaaaahhhhh " - Hank Williams jr.
Cuz like we all know'd because of all the TV we done watched, that guys like
Fred Sanford - Sanford & Sons - are really big employers.Got lots guys
workin' fir 'em.Besides Lamont,there's Bubba and Grady.Sometimes even
Aunt Ester,who's as tough a guy especially on Sunday { day of rest }.
Yeah ... You right.

 

What specifically is your criteria for measuring the effectiveness of a political system. GDP growth, number of wars, life expectancy, happiness of the population, education levels, or what? Be specific.

 

[MENTION=17203]Iriemon[/MENTION] made the claim that "You cannot have an ordered society without government and you cannot have government without taxes." However, without any supporting argument, it is nothing more than a bare assertion.

 

You are basically saying that the rich earn what they consume by investing and that we are all better off for it, but this is not true. If it were true we should allow people to counterfeit money so long as that money is spent on “investments”. If it were true it would be theoretically possible for whole societies to exist where nobody worked and everyone lived from their investments. If it were true, then you should be able to make 5o,000 clones of Bill Gates, put them on an isolated island where they would all (according to you) own learjets, yachts, mansions and clean toilets but somehow manage to never get their hands dirty.

The fact is, that in a free market environment capital is suppose to make LABOR more productive and therefore increase WAGES. This doesn't happen under capitalism and that is a dead giveaway that capitalism interferes with the free market.

 

I think some folks believe banks need deposits to make loans. They don't. They make loans and then look for reserves.

 

You do realize that benefits come at the expense of wages, which is basically my argument here. Which is why we have take home pay flat over the last fifty years but the total package benefits and wages are up significantly. However fewer employees work full time hours as well and part time workers make less money. So over all wages are flat benefits are up and corporate profits are unaffected largely because they are hiring fewer people.

 

No, because (putting aside that inflation has been very low) even if prices were higher that would be reflected in higher expenditures over all.

But as we've seen, overall spending is growing at 1/2 the rate it was in the 1980s.

The problem isn't prices, it's that the middle class doesn't have the income and money to spend. Because virtually all the real growth over the past 35 years has gone to the top 10%, and most to the top 1%.

This has been demonstrated in numerous ways.

- - - Updated - - -

If it makes sense to replace employees with machines, it makes sense to do it regardless of the tax rate. Because business tax is not a cost item. You (and many others) don't seem to understand this fundamental principle.

 

No one is going to invest to expand production if there aren't people with money to buy the additional goods and services.

Today, most mainstream economists reject Say's law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law

If Say's law were accurate, we should have booming production and a booming economy.

 

That presumes they have the money to buy. As we've seen, since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution, the great engine of spending, the middle class, has
not shared in the growth and expansion in the economy, and thus, proportionally does not have the same amount of money to buy something.

 

Unlike the middle and lower classes, the very rich tend spend only a portion of their income.

Thus the proportionally $1.5 trillion more going to the 1% every year instead of the bottom 90% meas hundreds of billions less spending in the economy every year.

This phenomenon, along with austerity policies, is reflected in the lower spending growth data I've posted.

Irrelevant anecdote.

 

What do you think happens to the products those jobs create?

You do know that Say's Law was pretty much disproved during the Great Depression, don't you? You really think if Chrysler could just make more cars, people would buy them?