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Thread: Inequality Is Ruining Our Country

  1. #31
    Senior Member flowerseverywhere's Avatar
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    every day we support all the inequality. When we go to the grocery store and buy cheap food, as opposed to locally organically grown food and humanely raised animals we contribute to this. We endorse the use of factory farming with lots of chemicals, antibiotics, and low wages. When you go to a big box store and buy a pile of cheap clothing from who knows where (try to find clothes made in the US) or cheap plastic toys you are supporting the cause and effect. I still remember the days when you could find towels made in the US, clothes made in the US and your main diet was locally grown food, or food shipped for a few hundred miles, not many thousand. When I read these types of threads I always think we have met the enemy and he is us. we have filled our lives and houses with piles of cheap junk that we proudly display, packing our garages, attics etc. and to top it all go to another big box store and buy plastic containers to store it all in, and sometimes storage lockers. No value is having a few nice things, just lots of junk. Kinda Crazy.

  2. #32
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    Quote Originally Posted by flowerseverywhere View Post
    every day we support all the inequality.
    It bears pointing out that that doesn't take anything away from efforts that would tend to help reverse the trend and make things better for those most adversely impacted

  3. #33
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    Quote Originally Posted by freein05 View Post
    So true. CEOs making a million plus their salary is an expanse. Even those who get fired that get million dollar severance pay, the pay is a tax deduction.
    And so are the $20/hour machine operator's wages, sick pay and vacation pay and the company daycare center and the employer contribution toward healthcare/insurance, continuing education and wellness and the employee break room with free coffee and the employee's hardhats and...


    Quote Originally Posted by flowerseverywhere View Post
    When I read these types of threads I always think we have met the enemy and he is us. we have filled our lives and houses with piles of cheap junk that we proudly display, packing our garages, attics etc. and to top it all go to another big box store and buy plastic containers to store it all in, and sometimes storage lockers. No value is having a few nice things, just lots of junk. Kinda Crazy.
    Not sure if there is a direct link to inequality or not, but +1 for the statement anyway.

    It would be interesting to follow a few 'struggling' Americans for 10 years and calculate where they would be if they stopped buying unneeded cart fulls of Walmart plastic and fast food and instead invested the same amount in Google stock. My guess is there would be less of a gap. In my mind a lack of education and opportunity is the cause of inequality. We can't expect people to invest in their futures in any kind of meaningful way if they come out of public schools barely able to read. We can't blame people for lining up for $.99 cheeseburgers when they don't have access to anything better for less than $8.99, if at all.

    CEO pay is a strawman. It's meaningless in the big picture. I have Google in my retirement portfolio and have been quite pleased with the performance. If Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, became extremely wealthy by producing those results for several million of us shareholders, fine. That is not the reason there are people struggling with poverty and hunger in the US. His money didn't come out of their pockets or for that matter out of mine. And considering he is responsible for the future of $300 billion or so worth of investment in his company I'd say he probably has 350 times the responsibility of the average employee so to be completely "fair" he should make a lot of money.

    High profile targets like CEO's are used by the low imagination crowd to beat the "unfair" drum. What's unfair is having a peacetime military budget that could feed and clothe a nation and probably send most of them to college. What's unfair is that subsidy for food production goes to nutritionally deficient uber-agriculture rather than nutritionally dense local agriculture. The list goes on and on, but rarely if ever does it really have anything to do with what someone at the top makes. It almost always has something to do with the opportunity, or lack thereof, afforded those near the bottom.
    Last edited by Gregg; 8-5-13 at 11:15am.
    "Back when I was a young boy all my aunts and uncles would poke me in the ribs at weddings saying your next! Your next! They stopped doing all that crap when I started doing it to them... at funerals!"

  4. #34
    Senior Member Rogar's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yossarian View Post
    .... Most of the oil "tax breaks" are timing benefits, meaning they pay less in year 1 but have to pay more in later years.
    I'm going to have say bogus until proven other wise. The big tax breaks for big oil are depletion allowances and allow them to treat oil as if they were depreciating equipment so they can write off a percentage of each barrel produced. In other words, a gift from the government.

    It makes absolutely no logical sense in the modern economy and is just a remnant of days long ago that has been perpetuated with oil lobbies in congress, which has allowed further tax write offs.
    "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver

  5. #35
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    The big gift from the government to oil companies are drilling leases sold for pennies on the dollar. Without those there wouldn't be much income to tax regardless of which bracket they fall into.
    "Back when I was a young boy all my aunts and uncles would poke me in the ribs at weddings saying your next! Your next! They stopped doing all that crap when I started doing it to them... at funerals!"

  6. #36
    Senior Member Yossarian's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rogar View Post
    I'm going to have say bogus until proven other wise. The big tax breaks for big oil are depletion allowances and allow them to treat oil as if they were depreciating equipment so they can write off a percentage of each barrel produced. In other words, a gift from the government.
    Well, you need some kind of cost recovery system like depreciation for natural resources and depletion is it. If you want to limit the deduction to cost depletion instead of percentage depletion it's fine with me. But you'll have to stop tilting at big oil on this one, they haven't been able to use percentage depletion since 1975.

  7. #37
    Senior Member flowerseverywhere's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Gregg View Post




    Not sure if there is a direct link to inequality or not, but +1 for the statement anyway.
    what I was implying was that say as a loose example you find out you will be a grandpa and decide your gift will be a new crib for the baby. Your choices are to find someone who makes cribs and pay a nice sum of money knowing that this craftsman will create a family heirloom and make money to support his family. Your other choice is to go to a big box store for a piece that was made in some foreign country and shipped here, knowing that the big box ceo is taking a huge cut and you are supporting a system that does not pay living wages. You can also buy a shopping cart full of stuff for the same price as just one crib. Same with a local hardware store, more expensive but our local hardware store has employees that have worked there for 20+ years and wait on you. So we all make choices every day not to stand up and say I support the local economy and will only patronize businesses that I am sure are at least trying to do the right thing. I don't know how we can solve the problem of those that come out of school barely being able to read and write with no other skills. But I do know that the walmart and McDonald type jobs where workers cannot afford health insurance are not the solution. By the way, I have been reading many of those places now hire mainly part timers so they don't have to pay any benefits.

  8. #38
    Senior Member Rogar's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yossarian View Post
    Well, you need some kind of cost recovery system like depreciation for natural resources and depletion is it. If you want to limit the deduction to cost depletion instead of percentage depletion it's fine with me. But you'll have to stop tilting at big oil on this one, they haven't been able to use percentage depletion since 1975.
    The percentage depletion allowance was indeed eliminated for most of the big oil companies, but is still allowed for independent producers and royalty owners. It has been on the chopping block and apparently accounts for about a billion in tax credits. http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/26/news...bama/index.htm

    I recant only partially
    "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver

  9. #39
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    I think Jared Diamond said it best in his book, "Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

    He talks about how the wealthy have a mis-guided belief that they can remain unaffected by the problems of society around them - instead, they "found that they had merely bought themselves the privilege of being the last to starve." He goes on to describe that he lived for 5 years in Europe shortly after WWII, and then married into a Polish family with a Japanese branch, so he saw first-hand what can happen when parents take good care of their individual children but not of their children's future world.

    He said all of these parents - Polish, German, Japanese, Russian, British, Yugoslav - had bought life insurance, made wills, obsessed about their children's schooling, but their society ended up having children being orphaned, separated from one/both parents, bombed out of their houses, deprived of schooling, deprived of family estates, or raised by parents burdened with memories of war and concentration camps.

    "The worst case scenarios that today's children face if we too blunder about their world are different, but equally unpleasant."

  10. #40
    Senior Member Yossarian's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by bUU View Post
    When you see things in only two dimensions, it is easy to miss the reality of three dimensional life.
    I've lost track, which dimension does this cover?

    The Congressional Budget Office's 2011 report on income inequality trends offers a more precise accounting, dispelling the notion that the past three decades have been characterized by the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor while the middle class stays about the same. The CBO adjusts market income by subtracting taxes and adding the cash value of social benefits. When households are then divided into five equal income groups, the data reveal that average disposable household income has increased across all groups since 1979. The average household income grew by 40% for the middle quintile and increased by 49% for the bottom quintile.

    .....

    And how has the middle class fared amid the changing mobility? One might judge not well when compared with the top 1%. But consider everyone else on the planet: The American middle class boasts the fourth-highest disposable household income in the world. The U.S. finishes behind only Luxembourg (a country of 500,000 people), oil-rich Norway, and Switzerland, which stayed out of both World Wars and imposes the strictest immigration laws on the continent.

    The average U.S. family has 38% more disposable income than a family in Italy, 25% more than a family in France and 20% more than a household in Germany, when adjusted for purchasing power, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Inequality in the U.S. is not a struggle between the "haves" and the "have-nots," but a social friction between those who have a lot and others who have more.


    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...731093252.html


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