French economist Thomas Piketty is raising a ruckus

[Amberchgo]

Paying less than their fair share.

I have to assume your trolling at this point.

Absolutely not. Saying someone is "cheating" means they're evading the law. I'm trying to find out which IRS rules they're breaking.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Tax cheats go to jail. How are they cheating?

Usually by using lobbyists and campaign donations to get the tax laws written the way they want. The crime is that that is no crime.

 

[Amberchgo]

Usually by using lobbyists and campaign donations to get the tax laws written the way they want. The crime is that that is no crime.

So they're following the laws Congress wrote.

 

[KingOrfeo]

So they're following the laws Congress wrote.

Not exactly. They're writing the laws for Congress to rubberstamp. The crime is that that is no crime.

That's not limited to tax policy or the federal level, either; see ALEC.

 

[Amberchgo]

Not exactly. They're writing the laws for Congress to rubberstamp. The crime is that that is no crime.

That's not limited to tax policy or the federal level, either; see ALEC.

Right. So the law allows them to write the law.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Absolutely not. Saying someone is "cheating" means they're evading the law. I'm trying to find out which IRS rules they're breaking.

No, cheating does not mean evading the law.

They are clearly avoiding the spirit of the law while adhering to the letter.

It's kinda like when your parents asked you did you take the cookie from the cookie jar and you said no, when your brother took two cookies from the cookie jar, one for you and one for him and gave you one. You didn't break the law (assuming said law was don't take cookies from the cookie jar) but you were wrong, and you knew it ad you simply took advantage of the verbiage.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I'm reminded of this old Cold War propaganda toon from the '40s or '50s. The one who posted it says "Cartoon predicts the future 50 years ago. This is amazing insight!" And he's mostly right in a way he will never understand. Everything the Farmer, the Worker and the Statesman envision being done to them by the Ismist State now has been done to them -- by the Capitalist!

 

[Amberchgo]

I'm reminded of this old Cold War propaganda toon from the '40s or '50s. The one who posted it says "Cartoon predicts the future 50 years ago. This is amazing insight!" And he's mostly right in a way he will never understand. Everything the Farmer, the Worker and the Statesman envision being done to them by the Ismist State now has been done to them -- by the Capitalist!

Ummm. Yea. I was thinking the same thing "???????????

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

statistKing0 vs. neoGump...

...inevitable.

Post #14

Moron

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I doubt he is -- see post #33 -- what matters is not earned income but income-producing assets.

What matters is that you refuse to look at any rebuttal material so you cannot compare and contrast, you know, actually think about the topic, so you like what you are reading, therefore it must be gospel truth, the problem being that it is not.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

In 1974, the former French president, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, said: “Any rate above 40 percent for mandatory levies is socialism.” In 2013, the tax burden rose again, reaching 46.2 percent. But despite this crazy fiscal policy, French economists, who are rather statist and Keynesian, ignore the Laffer curve and the inefficiency of taxation. Instead of admitting the disastrous effects of taxes on capital accumulation and growth, there has been a debate about taxation of labor and capital. Indeed, some economists, such as Thomas Piketty, wrongly affirm that, in France, labor is more taxed than capital.[2] This shows how disconnected to reality the debate has become. Pascal Salin, an economist belonging to the Austrian School, demonstrates that contrary to Piketty, income from capital is far more taxed than income from labor.[3] However, nobody cares about overtaxation of capital because they think that equates to taxing the rich, and those inspired by Keynesianism think that consumption, and not capital, is the key for economic growth. But as burning your own furniture is not the best way to heat your home, reducing the amount of capital is not the best way to create growth! As Ludwig von Mises wrote:

The essence of Keynesianism is its complete failure to conceive the role that saving and capital accumulation play in the improvement of economic conditions.[4]

Louis Rouanet

http://mises.org/daily/6733/The-Big-Bad-Market-A-French-Psychosis

 

[KingOrfeo]

Paul Krugman on "The Piketty Panic."

Mr. Piketty is hardly the first economist to point out that we are experiencing a sharp rise in inequality, or even to emphasize the contrast between slow income growth for most of the population and soaring incomes at the top. It’s true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge, demonstrating that we really are living in a new Gilded Age. But we’ve known that for a while.

No, what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.

For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them “job creators.”

But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?

What Mr. Piketty shows is that these are not idle questions. Western societies before World War I were indeed dominated by an oligarchy of inherited wealth — and his book makes a compelling case that we’re well on our way back toward that state.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

He read Marx's Communist Manifesto and noddiing with such enthusiastic agreement he left a sizable dent in his upper chest.

Me, or Piketty? (I've only skimmed the thing myself.)

 

[richard_daily]

If you dont take from the rich and give to the poor, then how would you suggest to solve the "huge issue"?

You clearly don't understand income inequality.

What's going on now, is "take from the poor and give to the rich".

 

[Amberchgo]

You clearly don't understand income inequality.

What's going on now, is "take from the poor and give to the rich".

And your solution?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Socialism


We have evolved as evidenced by our technology and this time, this time, it will work.


The technique of these parties is based on the division of society into producers and consumers. They are also wont to make use of the usual hypostasis of the state in questions of fiscal policy that enables them to advocate new expenditures to be paid out of the public treasury without any particular concern on their part over how such expenses are to be defrayed, and at the same time to complain about the heavy burden of taxes.
The other basic defect of these parties is that the demands they raise for each particular group are limitless. There is, in their eyes, only one limit to the quantity to be demanded: the resistance put up by the other side. This is entirely keeping with their character as parties striving for privileges on behalf of special interests. Yet parties that follow no definite program, but come into conflict in the pursuit of unlimited desires for privileges on behalf of some and for legal disabilities for others, must bring about the destruction of every political system.
Ludwig von Mises

 

[RobDownSouth]

"Ludwig von Mises was an ignorant asshole" - Abraham Lincoln

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The problem with Piketty is an old one, one shared by even such a preeminent school of thought as the Chicago School and developed by the Socialists of the Chair in Germany from 1880 and onwards and that is a top-down understanding and view of economics, one that can be modeled mathematically (Historical School) as a set of inputs and outputs but one that can never get the future right for all of its advanced modeling because looking backwards, you can fiddle with the inputs to achieve an output of what actually happened in a chaotic system (hint: think glowball warning modeling or Zandi's housing mortgage derivative modeling). The problem is that economics is not a branch of the math department, but an adjunct of the Sociology Department and is actually the sum of the bottom-up inputs of individuals in the marketplace and how they act and behave in one market, time and place, cannot guarantee that in the future, their feelings and behaviors, the mob psychology, so-to-speak, will match that of those in the past and they will thwart most, if not all, top-down machinations and manipulations of money supply, including redistribution, with substitute goods, services and money-like objects...



"The more communal enterprise extends, the more attention is drawn to the bad business results of nationalized and municipalized undertakings. It is impossible to miss the cause of the difficulty: a child could see where something was lacking. So that it cannot be said that this problem has not been tackled. But the way in which it has been tackled has been deplorably inadequate. Its organic connection with the essential nature of socialist enterprise has been regarded as merely a question of better selection of persons. It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry."
Ludwig Heinrich Elder von Mises

 

[RobDownSouth]

"Ludwig von Mises was an obscure hack that Lew Rockwell and his merry band of racists resurrected to provide intellectual cover for their derp" - Abraham Lincoln

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Good morning bucket of hate.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Oligarchy in the 21st Century
Who runs the world? The liberal elite.
Matthew Continetti, NRO
APRIL 26, 2014

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” In front of my nose as I write this is a copy of last Sunday’s New York Times. I have opened it to the business section. Below the fold is one of many Times articles on Thomas Piketty, the French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which argues that America has entered a second Gilded Age of vast inequality, inherited fortunes, and oligarchic politics, where the shape of public discourse and public policy is determined by a wealthy few. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the Times says, “follows in a tradition of works on political economy” that includes The Wealth of Nations, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Principles of Political Economy, Das Kapital, and The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. They’re not kidding.

Above the article on Piketty is another profile, headlined “Comcast’s Real Repairman.” Its subject is David Cohen, the executive vice president of the communications giant Comcast, who wants the government to approve the proposed merger between his company and Time Warner Cable. The deal would make Comcast the largest cable provider in America, with some 30 million customers.

Last year Cohen made about $14 million. He began his career as chief of staff to Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. And while he backs some Republicans, mainly Pennsylvania politicians who stand to make life easier for his Philly-based conglomerate, Cohen leans left. His political giving favors Democrats, as does the overall giving of his company. President Obama, who appears frequently on Comcast-owned networks, has golfed with Cohen’s boss. Obama has been to Cohen’s house. “I have been here so much,” he said during a 2013 visit, “the only thing I haven’t done in this house is have Seder dinner.” There is always next year.

If the business editors of the Times were aware of the irony of lamenting the political influence of great wealth on one half of their page while handling it with kid gloves on the other, they gave no sign. “Mr. Cohen says he understands the criticism that he has access most citizens do not,” says the article, before handing Cohen the microphone. “But I also don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” he said. Two paragraphs earlier, he had said, “My priorities in political giving are Comcast priorities. I don’t kid myself. My goals are to support the interests of the company.”

There you have it: A wealthy Democratic donor admits he funds candidates to improve his bottom line. And yet I hear from the Senate floor no denunciations of his attempts to buy American democracy, no labeling of him as un-American. I have not received a piece of direct mail soliciting donations to fight David L. Cohen’s hijacking of the political process, nor do I wake up every day to investigations of the Cohen political and charitable network. Why?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Here are some stats and these are Census Bureau numbers. "More than half of all adult Americans will be at or near the poverty line at some point over the course of their lives." More than half. Now, I don't know about you, but I have been three times. I have been broke three times in the 1970s and '80s. I was at whatever the poverty line was. And according to the research here more than half of us will be either at the poverty line or near it at some point over the course of our lives. I've been there three times.

"Seventy-three percent will also find themselves in the top 20 percent," at some point in their lives. Not forever. They're going to have good years, bad years, a couple of good years in a row, three, four good years in a row. The bottom will fall out. But 73 percent of Americans will find themselves in the top 20 percent of income earners. These are important numbers. These are not insignificant. "Thirty-nine percent of Americans will make it into the top 5 percent for at least one year." Thirty-nine percent. That is a large number of people to make it to the top five percent for at least a year.

But what does that mean? It means that people who get there don't stay; that many of them fall out of it. Because income is not something that's steady. You don't earn the same amount every year. It's tough to get people to agree to pay you an amount of money that's big. In many cases to earn that kind of money you have to be in business for yourself, or you have to be surviving on commission sales of some sort. There's more to this, folks, too, it gets even better.

...

Seventy-three percent of us will find ourselves in the top 20 percent. Thirty-nine percent of us will make it in the top five percent for at least one year. "Perhaps most remarkable, 12 percent of Americans will be in the top 1 percent for at least one year of their working lives.

...

Here is the final bit of data here from Mark Rank of Washington University, which is the best counter to this Thomas Piketty book. We left off with the fact that top one percent are such an unstable group of people, that people move in and out of it. You think of the one percent as Warren Buffett and the Koch brothers and Bill Gates. That's the 1/10th of one percent. The one percent, 12 percent of the America are going to be in that group at least one year of their lives. It's small, but at least 12 percent are going to move in and out of it. But you can't study it. You can't make any definitive socioeconomic claims about them because they change too often.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The campaign against inequality and the call for higher taxes and the regulatory burdens placed on extractive industries further the self-interest of the liberals who rule our world partly because those liberals are already established in society and have already made their money, partly because like David Cohen or Tom Steyer or George Soros or Elon Musk or Warren Buffett they stand to benefit financially from their preferred outcomes, but also because there are fortunes to be made, there is status to be gained, in justifying the continued expansion of the welfare state, in designing plans for the redistribution of tax dollars, in demonizing those sections of the elite, and that minority of Americans, which dissent from the ruling ideas.

Seven of the ten richest counties in the country voted for Barack Obama in 2012, many of them by huge margins. Six of the ten are in the Washington, D.C., metro area, which has benefited from government employment and payment regulations, from government contracting, and from consulting, lobbying, and lawyering for clients petitioning the government. The median income of Falls Church City, Va., is $121,250 dollars. In 2012, Falls Church City voted for Obama 70 percent to 30 percent.

Democrats represent eight of the ten richest congressional districts in the country. Democrat Carolyn Maloney represents the district with the highest per capita income of $75,479. Outgoing congressman Henry Waxman represents the district with the second-highest per capita income of $61,273. The only two Republicans on the list are Representative Leonard Lance, whose New Jersey district ranks seventh, and outgoing Representative Frank Wolf, whose Virginia district ranks tenth. The average per capita income of Democratic House districts is $1,000 more than Republican ones.

Congressional Democrats have a higher median net worth than congressional Republicans. House Democrats have a higher median net worth ($929,000) than House Republicans ($884,000), while the median net worth of Senate Republicans ($2.9 million) is higher than that of Senate Democrats ($1.7 million). But it is not like the Senate Democrats are hurting financially. They have lost some wealthy members in recent years (Herbert Kohl, John Kerry, Frank Lautenberg). Of the ten richest members of Congress, only three are Republicans.

The top 20 entries in the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans include conservative bogeymen such as Charles and David Koch (tied at number 4) and Sheldon Adelson (number 11). But these men are overwhelmed by Democratic fundraisers such as Warren Buffett (number 2), Michael Bloomberg (number 10), Jeff Bezos (number 12), Larry Page (number 13), Sergey Brin (number 14), and George Soros (number 19), as well as by billionaires who have donated more evenly between parties, such as Bill Gates (number 1) and Larry Ellison (number 3). Members of the Walton family, who fill four of the top ten spots, have also donated to both parties, but in recent years have leaned Republican.

That does not include the Waltons’ charitable giving, however, which includes sizable donations to the left-wing Tides Foundation and Obama aide John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Indeed, the partisan makeup of the super-rich is less interesting, and less important, than their ideological unity. The issues that the richest Americans care most passionately about, from gay marriage to comprehensive immigration reform to gun control to drug legalization to foreign aid, are liberal issues. Only the Kochs and Adelson are famous for making defiant and public stands against the spirit of the age.

The list of the 20 most highly compensated CEOs contains many Republicans, and some conservative ones. But it also contains plenty of Democrats and liberals. Ticket-splitter Ellison, who was paid $78.4 million in 2013, tops the list. Next is Disney CEO Bob Iger, who received $34.3 million in compensation in 2013, and is a generous Democrat. Other highly paid CEOs whose giving since 2009 has favored Democrats include outgoing Ford chief Alan Mulally, Larry Merlo of CVS, Kenneth Chennault of American Express, and Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm. When you make more than $19 million a year, the line separating Democrats from Republicans becomes hazy. Is Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs a movement conservative? Is GE’s Jeffrey Immelt?

Eight of the ten largest private foundations are liberal. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest foundation with $37 billion in assets, to which Warren Buffett has pledged his trust, has delivered grants to the Tides Center and the Center for American Progress. So have the Ford Foundation ($11 billion in assets), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($10 billion), the Hewlett Foundation ($8 billion), the MacArthur Foundation ($6 billion), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ($6 billion). The Kellogg Foundation ($8 billion) has donated close to $30 million to the Tides Foundation and to the Tides Center, and the Packard Foundation ($6 billion) has chipped in another $30 million to Tides affiliates, as well as founding, at a cost of $71 million, the environmentalist Energy Foundation.

Of the top ten foundations, only number 7, the Lilly Endowment (with $7 billion in assets) leans conservative. Other notably liberal foundations in the top 100 include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Kresge Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, and Soros’s Open Society Institute. The notorious conservative foundations that constitute the “counter-establishment” do not even crack the top 100. The Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation, the largest conservative foundation, has assets of $640 million. The Charles G. Koch Foundation in 2012 had assets of $277 million. Conservative foundations are out-gunned.

So, too, are conservative media. The right has talk radio, Fox News Channel, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and a bunch of plucky websites. Liberals have the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, MSNBC, BBC, the Huffington Post, Slate, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, the Daily Beast, GQ, Esquire, Time, Vogue, and many, many others. Not a single prominent institution of higher education, not a single prominent institution of high culture, can be described in any way as conservative. New York magazine admits that the “vast left-wing conspiracy is on your screen.”

The campaign of Barack Obama outraised the campaign of Mitt Romney. Overall, in 2012, the “red team” slightly outspent the “blue team” by a little more than $100 million. It made no difference. Not a single one of the top “all-time” institutional donors between 1989 and 2014 tilted Republican, according to a list compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Senate Democrats are winning the 2014 money race. Even as they denounce Supreme Court rulings that loosen restrictions on political speech, liberal billionaires pledge gifts of $100 million and $50 million to Democrats in the 2014 election, and meet anonymously and in secret to coordinate giving to the multitude of organizations that make up the professional left. So effective has been the fundraising of hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer that President Obama, having delayed the Keystone pipeline yet again, is likely to kill it.

“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality,” Piketty told the Times last Sunday, “and such extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information.” In fact the mechanisms of democracy seem to be working precisely as the capitalist and petty-bourgeois liberals would like them to work: the question among Democrats these days is just how permanent their majority is likely to be.

What we are in danger of losing because of the “extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information” are the classical liberal values of negative freedom, of religious liberty, of equality before the law, of free markets. The inequality of income our bipartisan ruling class sanctimoniously condemns is the very tool it uses to shore up the inequalities of power and communication from which it benefits. Affluent, self-righteous, self-seeking, self-possessed, triumphalist, out of touch, hostile to dissent — this is what oligarchy looks like in the 21st century. And it is all in front of one’s nose.

Matthew Continetti

 

[jeninflorida]

And your solution?

Richard, UD, Merc, Sean, king of Ass Tards....are not men. They do not want to work and feel that 'the man' is holding them down.

the people that I mentioned are less than human, and classic examples of failures

so be successful one has to be willing to do the work, most here on GB are not willing and give up before even getting out of bed