I believe in a minimum standard of living for everyone. This includes healthcare and a HS education that prepares students for a job with reasonable income to provide for one's family. This does not include 60" flatscreen TVs or Mustang convertibles.

How we get there, I'm not exactly sure. Some combination of education reform, spending cuts (including military), and taxes.

With that being said. Once everyone has a livable minimum, I see no reason why more useful/successful people can't or shouldn't accumulate as much money as they can. I see nothing wrong with that.

" This does not include 60" flatscreen TVs or Mustang convertibles..."

Hmmm...the unions in the US would disagree, my friend! lol

I look at my standard of living 20 years ago...which was an upper middle class living...and it is damned near poverty by modern standards.

We have *completely* lost perspective on what is "necessary" and what is "nice" in this country.

NAFTA, in fact, the scorn of Unions and (now) people of both parties, was actually intended to raise global living standards, and by watching the progress of manufacturing movement throughout the world (Made in....Hong Kong...scratchthat...China...scratch that...Phillipines...scratch that...etc...) we can see that wages are creeping up globally, and, in time, Nafta will indeed be a global success.

What we need to export is not manufacturing...but *unions*...and I mean that in the truest sense of the word!

I won't disagree that Unions often do more harm than good, but that really isn't the issue at hand.

The reality is this:

If every billionaire in the US paid $2.5million in taxes directly to households making under $50k a year, everyone in the US could have a comfortably livable income without actually inconveniencing the wealthiest citizens.

This is, of course, a very stupid way to solve the problem. This is only to illustrate that the money is there, if used properly.

Concentrated poverty in the US is actually quite bad. Combine it with racial disparities, and you def get third world conditions. Even without taking class into account, Black American life expectancy is worse than say the life expectancy of Algeria, Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka. If you look at somewhere like, say, being poor, black, and male in Detroit, you see life expectancies in the mid 50s, which is pretty much scraping the bottom of most of the poorest countries. It is a combination of much higher infant mortality, much higher violent crime victimization rates, and much worse health coverage among other things.

People need to stop saying things like "The US has mobile phones, so it isn't poor". Hell, mobile phone penetration into much of Africa is extraordinarily high, it is one of the primary ways of sending and receiving payments for example, but you can't eat a mobile phone (or sell it and buy much food either).

Poverty has little to do with having a phone (or even a TV) and much to do with access to structures of opportunity -- educational and employment for sure, but also the ability to live in a safe environment, the ability to access culturally competent health care. I think people from social democracies in Europe don't realize #1) how little of a social safety net the US has and #2) how many people we incarcerate in the US. Essentially if you are a poor man in the US, you stand a decent chance of spending time in prison.

I lived and worked in one of the most violent zipcodes in the US for quite a few years as a social worker. Absolute and relative poverty is quite dismal in parts of the US. It is another world, if you've never spent time in it and your only point of reference is that people can "afford" cellphones and cigarettes then you really don't know what you are talking about, sorry. (Hell, 200 years ago even the richest of people shit in outhouses or chamberpots, but that didn't make them less rich and powerful)

I support a guaranteed basic income (non means tested, everyone gets it) in both in-kind and cash benefits. And I think we are far rich enough as a society to make it worth it and the general happiness and productivity gains will more than offset any freeloading drag.

Fast food is also a stupid assertion. Fast food is often the cheapest food that there is, thanks partially to factory farming and government subsidies, and partially due to the incredibly mechanical way it is made, marketed, and sold. It also kills people. Access to only fast food and no affordable fresh food is actually a huge problem of poverty, not proof that it doesn't exist. Absolute starvation is not the only standard to measure poverty by.

Krellin, if your foot wasn't rotting off your body due to gangrene, your kids got more than 1 meal a day, you weren't exposed to violence on a daily basis, and you could see a doctor if you got pneumonia then your lifestyle 20 years ago had nothing to do with "close to poverty"

errr...
Disregard my last statement. I was off by 3 orders of magnitude.

The fact remains, there is still enough money to give everyone a much better minimum standard than they have now.

It isn't demonizing the wealthy to suggest that those who make more should pay more...

And it's asinine and not just a little self-serving to suggest that, in a fiscal crisis largely caused by greed and an unsustainable economic model which is absurdly top-heavy, the FIRST place that we should look to recoup our losses and pay out debts is from those who can most afford to take one for the team, as it were.

I do not demonize wealth or the rich--on the contrary, if they have earned their wealth, than bravo to them.

But to suggest that there is some sort of near-reverent holiness to the rich and wealth, to suggest such people are untouchable and that even the mere suggestion they should pay more or take on more responsibility is some sort of cardinal sin against the American Dream when, in fact, it's a stand against irresponsible business practices and for Common Sense--the term Thomas Paine sparked this country to life and to arms with.

To argue for maintaining the status quo on a sinking ship is easy to suggest when you're already in an gilded lifeboat.

Alright, doing this now (hopefully) correctly.

If everyone making $1mil or more was taxed $250k, then everything would work out. Again, not a good solution. Just showing the money is there.

erist....how old are you? My standard of living - in part simply due to the advancement of technology and the massive decrease in the costs of technology, food, clothing, etc...if I look what I had 20 or 30 years ago, it would be equivalent to what is defined as poverty in the US today.

You, sir, are simply wrong.

Ugh....I'm going to have a lot of reading and writing to do when I catch up to this thread later...

TC, is that you?

Abge - if you **confiscated** the entire wealth of the evil "rich"...it wouldn't put a dent in debt. It *might* impact the deficiet (for that single fiscal year)...and even then, probably not, because the politicians would just increase the spending with their new found windfall profit....and then next year would be twice as worse.

*do the math*...there simply isn't enough money to confiscate to keep current spending habits going.


But this isn't about the wealthy, really...it's *really* about the Western "middle class" that demands their pound of flesh from the "evil rich" while they trample the 3rd world for it's resources. If you middle classers can trample *anyone* to make sure you have internet access, smart phones and a pound of potato chips on your lap while you play XBox...and you think this is OK...then you need to seriously reconsider who "evil" the rich are that buy the luxury cars you build, and fly in teh corporate jets yoru service, and rent the hotel rooms you clean, and buy the clothes you sell in your botique, and sit in the stands while the lions get their asses kicked again, etc. etc etc...

@Krellin

If you reread what I wrote, you'd see I wasn't talking about reducing the debt. I was talking about millionaires directly subsidizing the poor. There *is* enough money for that, which means there should be enough money to do it sensibly if we had a functional government.

Abge - The rich subsidize the poor...er...HOW? Through direct payments? Or through the government? They directly subsidize them through *J*O*B*S*. They (fail to) indirectly subsidize them through government programs, that do more to enslave them to a politic system than free them to explore the possibilities of this world.

I specifically said I didn't know how. I was just saying that there's enough money that you should be able to do it.

I know how...remove government from the equation, unleash the economy to create J*O*B*S... :)

And, by the way, with a US Debt of ~$16E12 and ~5E6 millionaires, explain to me why you don't think there's enough money to wipe out the debt instantly.

Is abge advocating a proscription of all millionaires? I don't think even Putin goes that far.

(and do you have a source for figure of 5,000,000 millionaires? Is that by annual income or net worth? Lots - I daresay most - people with $1M of assets are not what most would call 'rich' by any means - they are people just entering retirement who saved during their whole working life and happen to own the house they live in and the car they drive.)

...

No, as I've said, numerous times now, I'm not advocating this type of "solution". I was merely pointing out that the money is there.

Guys, (especially Tolstoy) you need to seriously read abgemacht's comments more carefully. He was only crunching the numbers on a very basic level - he wasn't proposing any particular policy or action.

Thank you, Jamiet.

it's ALL debt, don't you get that? There isn't a $ in circulation that isn't DEBT. Our economy was designed to fail. It's been 100 years, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

You don't realize that whenever you buy an imported good, you're buying your own debt. that money goes to lets say china, what does china do with US money? Lend it back to the US, where people use it to buy more imported goods and so on. as long as the US is the worlds reserve currency the US's economy will NEVER fail.

ILN, that's what most people don't understand. We're not in "debt" to China. We can't get rid of our debt by sending a big check to China and wipe our ledger clean. China owning our debt is a good thing for both of us because we get income and China gets a secure investment. Its nothing nefarious, it just sounds bad in a newspaper because of the negative connotations that "debt" brings to mind.

exactly

Jumping off of ILN and 2WL, there's also the fact that the growing Chinese middle class doesn't want Chinese products. They want American products. And as their income increases, wages are driven up, and companies start to move back to the U.S. On a monetary and macro level, that's all fine. The only issue I have with China is more of the fiscal nature, but that's really a problem with our federal government.

Going back to the OP, you have to distinguish absolute poverty from relative poverty. Not many people in the US are living in absolute poverty. I'm talking less than $10 a day poverty. However, there are increasing amounts of relatively poor people, and the bar for that is not a static monetary measure, but is rather dictated by social norms.

On taxation...the tricky thing is that the top 1% accounts for 35% of private savings and investment in the United States. The top 10%? Closer to 70%. If you touch these people, you run the chance of crippling investment in the economy, and investment is the best figure for long term growth and prosperity. Its a double-edged sword and we must tread carefully. Taxing too much will simply drive them elsewhere or prevent them from saving. And its not like redistributing the income will have a net neutral effect on savings either. People will simply consume more.

MY nw IS well over a million, but my actual cash wealth is not that great. Of course, I have a problem seeing money sitting in the bank, so I tend to do something with it (investing usually) rather than let large sums accumulate.

GF, it's a myth that high taxation rates discourage investment. Besides, we're talking about a marginal tax rate, which is hardly the same as a flat 35% tax rate. Invesent income is already taxed at a different, lower rate than income.