DrLeftover said:
So how did Mister Gates' marketing something that was very successful not warrant him earning a great deal of money?
Because it was simple luck, and I don't believe that him being in an ideal environment (his access to computers back then was far more than anyone else) warrants him to have as much money as the bottom 40% of the population many of which struggle for food, who spend much more of their week working hard, underpaid, barely getting by...
He was not born into a fortune, he, at one point, was a college dropout. Then he had this idea. And it worked.
Yes it did, lets all strive to be college dropouts like Mister Gates. Great way to reward his hard efforts in college eh?
How many of the noble poor don't even want to get off the couch and go to work and yet think you should send them a check every month out of your earnings to buy them cigarettes and pizza?
There is no god-damn incentive to work. If they work 60 hours a week at a minimum wage job then they can pull together almost as much as they would get from welfare.. You mock the poor and yet who are you to judge? None of these people were born in the kind of home that Bill Gates was. None of these people could have ever gotten the kind of access to the new invention, computers as he did. Should we really be doomed to work at minimum wage for the rest of our lives just because of where we come from?
The majority of people with low, or no, income do not pay taxes and yet receive services from the government. How is that fair to those that work for a living and pay their fair share, and then some, of the taxes that support those social programs?
Holyyy shit. Do you really believe this? More than their fair share? By God this fucked up system has given any of the top 5% far far more than they have earned by their work. And I'm not talking about hardworking middle class folks that pay taxes, I'm talking about the top 5%.The top five percent in this country after all own 62% of the financial wealth.
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How richâand powerfulâhave todayâs rich become? Some numbers can help tell the story. In 1974, the most affluent 1% of Americans averaged, in todayâs dollars, $380,000 in income.
Now letâs fast-forward. In 2007, the most recent year with stats, households in Americaâs top 1% averaged $1.4 million, well over triple what top 1% households averaged back in 1974âand, remember, this tripling came after adjusting for inflation.
Americans in the bottom 90%, meanwhile, saw their average incomes increase a meager $47 a year between 1974 and 2007, not enough to foot the bill for a monthâs worth of cable TV.
The bottom line: top-1% households made 12 times more income than bottom-90% households in 1974, 42 times more in 2007.
The numbers become even more striking when we go back a bit further in time and focus not on the top 1%, but on the richest of the rich, the top 400, the living symbol of wealth and power in the United States ever since Americaâs original Gilded Age in the late 19th century.
In 1955, our 400 highest incomes averaged $12.3 million, in todayâs dollars. But the top 400 in 1955 didnât get to enjoy all those millions. On average, after exploiting every tax loophole they could find, they actually paid over half their incomes, 51.2%, in federal income tax.
Todayâs super rich are doing better, fantastically better, both before and after taxes. In 2006, the top 400 averaged an astounding $263 million each in income. These 400 financially fortunate paid, after loopholes, just 17.2% of their incomes in federal tax.
After taxes, as a group, the top 400 of 2006 had $84 billion more in their pockets than 1955âs top 400, $84 billion more they could put to work bankrolling politicians and right-wing think tanks and Swift Boat ad blitzes against progressive candidates and causes.
How could Americaâs super rich have so little, relatively speaking, back in 1955 and so much today? What has changed between the mid 20th century and the first decade of the 21st? We have lost, simply put, the economic checks and balances that so significantly discouraged grand concentrations of private wealth in the years right after World War II.
Among the most important of these checks and balances: steeply graduated progressive tax rates. Over most of the quarter-century between the early 1940s and the mid 1960s, Americaâs richest faced at least a 91% federal tax rate on âearnedâ income over $400,000. By 1974, that top rate had dropped, but only to a still steep 70%. The top rate today: 35%.
Sam, Pizzigati. Why Should We Tax the Rich? Because They Have the Money!. Dissenting Democrat (2009): n. pag. Web. 4 Jun 2010. <http://dissentingdemocrat.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/why-should-we-tax-the-rich-because-they-have-the-money-or-score-ultrarich-110-the-people-0/>.
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The income inequality in the United States is something no one should really stand for. It hasn't always been this way, the ruling class of the United States used the conservative movement during the eighties to regain their supermassive wealth, and it has truly cost the middle class, which really doesn't exist anymore. The lower class, unlike the rich who have seen huge increases in earning from the mid-twentieth century to today have seen no such rises, their incomes have stayed the same, barely keeping up with inflation.
It is wrong. This wealth distribution is terrible, horrible and a disgrace upon humanity. When the poor have so little and are struggling so much, they have no opportunity, if they work, it is for very little, and they likely only buy food with it because that's all they can afford.
But this problem expands beyond the poor, because the middle class have slowly and steadily been losing their money over the past 50 years. They've been giving it up to the rich that earned it. (Even though the super rich don't work near as hard). And the problem is that trickle down doesn't work, the super rich have so much money and power, they are able to give themselves tax cuts and they don't do with the money anything like ideal economics would have them do.
No one has earned the right to be that rich. No one is a thousand times more able than someone else. And should Bill Gates really have all that money for getting lucky? Or should that go to work training programs to get people out of poverty? Should it go to people that are starving and struggle day to day to get food. If you are homeless, how the hell are you supposed to be able to get off the street? If you can get a job (which is nearly impossible) then you can probably pay for the bare necessities, but unless you live with nine other people, there is no way you can afford a house payment. The rich don't give a fuck. But this system is wrong.
So you want to be a communist?
No, that doesn't work in a society with values like the ones we have (exploitation, whoever screws someone else deserves all they can get from them, hire whoever you can to work the for the cheapest possible, if you've got yours theres no reason to care about anyone else etc.) but we don't even need a socialist state to achieve this. It can occur within a capitalist society, what we need is some significant financial regulation and reform, as well as a significant raise on the taxes of the super rich.
