The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism

It matters a lot when you multiply it over 30 years time frame ….

You make the same mistake when you bring up only 1 year in your other post about the taxes .

Compound effect ( or the lack of ) is a real thing over decades for wages too .

The dramatic wealth inequality getting bigger then ever years by years should tell you something

That's not the primary cause of wealth inequality. I mean, sure it would be if the people wouldn't just squander away that extra $500 a year or whatever on consumption. But they do or would. And now we have savings and spending data fron covid to debunk that whole Marxist exploitation dribble.

A couple externalities like future uncertainty and the limited options to spend their money and surprise the people got wealthier. Remove those factors and unsurpisingly the people got poorer. And the ones that didn't go on shopping sprees, instead of maintaing their current living standards, went on ebay and bid up real estate prices.

That's the cause of growing wealth inequality.

People aren't equal. In terms of ambitions and abilities, people are very unequal. Somewhat ironically, the more societies try to create equal opportunities the more glaring that becomes.

Ultimately those different forms of governance reflect how those who perform better than average wanting liberty and those who dont wanting equality. That's a human condition too.

No you don't. What are you talking about? The CEO pay ratios are simply the average ratio of pay, not the (sum salary CEO pay) : (sum of worker pay).

The pay ratio between the average CEO and average worker is now 14 times greater than it was 60 years ago and almost four times greater than it was 35 years ago.

It's probably the same for pro athletes. So what? Good for them. It's not affecting me.

It actually does.

.

And lets not forget. Musk owns twitter, ellison owns cbs, Zuckerberg owns Facebook, bezos owns Washington post.

More cracks

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/record-number-americans-tapping-401-091807364.html

Yahoo Finance

A Record Number of Americans Are Tapping 401(k)s for Emergencies — Should You?

The average American’s defined contribution plan retirement savings rate is at an all-time high, according to Vanguard data. Yet at the same time, more Americans are tapping their 401(k)s or similar plans for emergencies. In 2024, 4.8% of plan participants took hardship withdrawals, up from 3.6% in 2023 and 2.8% in 2022, according to Vanguard.

Ok hypothetically, let's take the billionaires billions. Most of their wealth is in stocks. So basically we create The People fund and now the people control the corporations and recieve dividend checks from the fund.

So what changes for the workers? They can't give themselves a raise or lower prices because that will just cut their dividend checks. But they can't really spend those dividend checks on additional goods because were pretty near production capacity, so there won't be any more additional goods produced. So they'd never to actually spend their dividend checks, ever.

The only way to get more stuff made would be to pull people out of r&d and put them to work in the factories.

Is that what do you think we should do, ie, sacrifice the long-ter.m for the present

Yeah, but just look at all the guns you can buy with that 1.52% of income the gubbmnt doesn't take from you.

Do you make a distinction between equal opportunities and equal results in your generalization?
Or it’s all the same to you ?

FWIW many successful people I listen too often says having a system that try to give equal opportuny to succeed is beneficial to society .

U do understand we live in a debt monetary based system and the principle to take any money from anyone to cover all expenses just don’t make any sense at all right ?

The problem isn’t about the amount of money the rich people got , the problem is the income coming from the economy just profits for a too tiny part of the population ….

That is what need to be changes and frankly it isn’t hard to do .
The currency is broken .
The tax system is broken .
The distribution of taxes is broken .
The distribution of income is broken .
The share of wealth is broken .

There isn’t a simple way to fix all of this but a little bit of many small actions on many problems would surely help tremendously.

Like biggerboat said it does and I’m baffled you think it doesn’t .
That money those athletes get paid cones from somewhere.

So you believe regardless how much people get paid, people would spend it all anyway and still be poor ?

Let’s say you are right .
All those 300-1 ratio of ceo and the rest goes back down to a more reasonable ratio of 50-1 for example.
People gets more wages instead ending up in the ceo pockets and the people end up spending it all .
How can they be poor with such activity in an economy it would create ?
Yes inflation would be higher (which the average inflation in the U.S. historically is higher then 2% btw ) but so the gdp, wage increases and the economy throughout the years .

Sometimes I believe smart educated people like you dont really realize what a billion dollar really represent .

A baby inherits 1 billion , Its spending 10000 dollar a day , every day for 70 years , dies give the rest to 1 kid , he does the same for 70 years , dies and give it to his kid , spend it for 70 years again everyday dies give it to his kid again and until is 70 years and it’s gone .

And that is if they just let the cash at the bank with 0 interest rates, just pure spending …and producing nothing and not working at all .
It’s almost 280 years of spending 10000 dollar day (easily representing the weakly life of 20 person per day in income !) .
And that is only 1 billon ….

No one deserve so much in 200 years in the future (!) while like half the country who own almost nothing .
And we just speak about 1 billion .
First “trillionaire “ coming quickly ….

Sure. I don't think in terms of literally equal, but sufficient opportunities.

Irrespective of what the non–value-adding economic parasites on Wall Street believe, finance is not economics. The metric isn’t Gross Domestic Money; it’s called Gross Domestic Product for a reason.

And at the end of the day, it’s the workers, current or retired, who consume nearly all the goods and services our economy produces.

So if we’re talking about improving living conditions for lower-income workers in any meaningful way, it’s going to have to come from higher-income workers, ie, professionals.

Banks created and benefited from the modern system more than anyone else. Let them burn their own game to the ground. No one's looking to them for another monetary system.

Government is basically a land bank. These entities provide nothing to humanity. They thrive off collective suffering.

Right, because humanity was really humming along nicely back when we were trading shells and dying at thirty.

Banks and governments are the reason large-scale civilization exists at all. In other words, they let us have problems more complicated than survival.

I think the nuance we are missing is that some attributes can be advantageous for a very long time and then reach a tipping point where they become disadvantageous.

Take cell division (mitosis) for an example. The human body's ability to create new cells is obviously a huge evolutionary advantage. But at some point, it's possible for cell division to become cancerous and get out of control, killing the host.

You are absolutely correct John .... the financial system that was implemented over preceding millennia and centuries was immensely beneficial to human progress and life expectancy.

Survival is an institution that has been around far longer than the global finance and banking system. The key attribute necessary to survive is the ability to adapt. And that means we need to be able to recognize when a formerly advantageous attribute transforms into a disadvantage if we want to survive.

All capitalism and socialism are, are answers to each other’s ills. What we really need is capitalism with guardrails to protect the group from the individual and socialism without blinders to protect the individual from the group.

The controls on individual consumption that we require to survive are so profound that we can not call them "guardrails".

We are drowning in the toxins of the individual liberty to consume the shared environment.

The first thing to fix is to make sure any productive individual earning a wage means the money he gets should be actually worth something .
Fixing the currency .
Sadly today , the debt is too high to make this a viable option .
So you end up having to reduce the debt beforehand.
And to do this you need inflation without hurting the bottom 50% too much .

Hopefully a new societal deal would emerge to fix this , agreeing to do things a bit differently .
But in the current political environment, it’s impossible .
Only a crisis forcing them to come together would Make this possible .
Basically the U.S. is facked one way or the other unless the oligarchs decided to help ….. good luck with that .

The financial economy makes too much money too easy like the early 2000s.
The end game won’t be fun .
Hopefully they won’t make the same mistake they did in 2008.

Is society "humming along" now fella? You do understand the world is run by demon worshipping pedophiles right? Record high mental health issues, endless physical health issues. We have more tech and bigger government than ever and every thing is total ****. Check raising you with shells might be a nice change of pace.