The Rich Are Superheroes, it's that simple!

Like they the rich get richer and the poor get poorer which is true in life.

And so ...

How can one like or dislike the numbers with no context? As an example Moore is comparing networth, not income, and people together with households.

The easiest way to fix the poorest households and instantly lift roughly 80% of them out of poverty is simply have them get married or let them get a couple years older.

See when you graduate from high school or college, and are sharing an apartment with your buddy while perhaps paying off your first car loan or perhaps a student loan or two, you have a negative net-worth. It's called age and there is no way around that fact. What do you think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg were worth at 20 years old? They were adults. They were households. Every 20 year old out there right now is counted the same way. When I graduated at 23 my net-worth was negative as are most college graduates. I had no retirement accounts, no assets like property or houses, no real savings, no stocks, and I owed student loans and had to buy a car. 17 years later by default I am thousands of times richer just even starting with a net-worth of $10 for then. (which would have been very generous)

Why are many other households poorer? They are poorer because regardless of political correctness, one person cannot be two and as a general rule, a single mother either supporting herself still entirely or unable to support herself and using government programs to varying degrees makes and owns less than a couple who are married. The largest determiners of wealth are marriage and education. Our household contains two college educated adults. Our household if pitted against a household consisting of a single high school graduate be it male or female, would earn several times more. There's no greed or heartlessness involved in those numbers, it is reality.

Number one risk factor to determine whether your child will end up in prison, is do they come from an intact home as opposed to a single parent home.

The rich aren't superheroes, they just are smart enough to know that education pays, that one person can't be two people and that with a little bit of work and brains what you are going to be worth at 40 and 60 should be a whole lot more than what you were worth at 20.

EDIT: Interesting point, this leaves out the 50.66 trillion dollars that the non-Forbes richest and middle class enjoy. Why fixate on the rule when you can deal with the extremes? You wouldn't want to find the rule and apply it because, well that would be useful and informative.

Wingnuts are awesome!

Easy to "fix". Just lower the poverty threshold and eliminate a lot of those "impoverished" people.

In reality,the rich may keep getting richer, but in the USA, the poor keep getting richer as well. We raise the poverty level to keep them "properly" classified, but if you'd spend some time traveling around other parts of the world, you'd find that the USA (and western Europe) has very little real poverty.

They aren't classified as living in poverty because net-worth and income aren't the same thing.

My points was already explained. Go read it again if you didn't see it the first time. Likewise most of the net-worth of these individuals is tied up in the stock of their companies. It isn't day to day money. It isn't sitting like some pile of gold in a bank vault. It simple represents the value of what is being provided to customers and if it stops providing that value then the wealth of the stock becomes worth little or nothing.

This isn't Europe where some Baron is sitting on a plot of land while you lease some small portion due to having the wrong bloodline. If people stop playing Farmville or stop updating , sending pictures, checking in, etc to Facebook, then Mark Zuckerberg goes back to being a guy in a dorm. If the world decides tomorrow they don't want a single Apple product then almost $300 billion of value could disappear or transfer. We know it won't under the Obama administration though because it will be deemed "too big to fail" and Obama will tax the grandchildren to give him back his money via crony capitalism.

Likewise wealth is not a zero sum game. It is continually being created. Google didn't steal money from someone else nor did Facebook. There was new wealth created by them. Adding value and providing service is how wealth is created and accumulated. Those who fail to create or accumulate wealth either are too young to do so (they are kids or in school) or they are adults that do not desire to add value to anything or service anyone. Being pissed off and calling names won't change that fact.

This gets to the core of the deepest and most profound mental error made by most on the left (and, honestly, some on the right.) You are absolutely, 100% correct. Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Period.

You can also typically recognize those who believe it is because they say things like we should "spread the wealth around." This is usually a dead give away of someone who, incorrectly, believe that there's a fixed amount of wealth in the world.

*Unfortunately, not always. Sometimes it is being destroyed. This is being done by the US government (and others as well). But, in the free, private, voluntary sector...yes you must create value and wealth in order to survive and prosper.

No one is stopping Warren Buffett from paying more. He can go here if he feels strongly about it.



While he may be a good investor, this tidbit demonstrates his ignorance of economics.

It looks like it is the Hands Sandon Trivia Hour.

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I was talking this with a friend of mine. He's utterly convinced that if someone obtains some wealth it's only because others were exploited. It's hilarious.

Are you admitting your own shame or are you categorically equating having wealth to shame?

It would be hilarious if it weren't a fact that the middle class in the US are getting poorer in terms of their ability to afford their own homes and their own health care and retirement.

If the middle class were in fact gaining wealth in this way, I wouldn't have a problem with the rich getting richer. I do realize that it's possible to have a scenario where the rich get richer and the poor get richer, too. Unfortunately that's not what's happening in the US.

Why don't you find the figure for what percentage of Mr. Buffet's workforce is unionized.

Tell him to simply pay himself his compensation as salary instead of stocks and dividends and his problem is solved. He is the one making that choice. Tell him to change it for himself first before demanding it of others.


It isn't hilarious. It is sad and destructive. Our entire "stimulus" was largely just wealth transfer payments. We spent a trillion dollars and hardly any of it was money spent on infrastructure for example.


Incomes have not gone down even for the poor or middle class as individuals. There is a reason they keep focusing on "households" rather than individual incomes. The proportion of households made up of single women with children keeps going up and by focusing on it, they can manipulate numbers rather than tell the true story.

Read my post again. Incomes in terms of a family's ability to afford health care and housing have absolutely gone down for the poor and middle class. It used to be that a full-time employee straight out of university could afford a mortgage and would have health care and dental care for the whole family as well as a retirement fund provided by their employer. Is that the case today?

Hold on... so what you're saying is that given the choice between taking advantages in loopholes in the tax code available only to them, like low capital gains taxes, and paying slightly more, the rich will choose the loopholes? And if they could choose to extend some of those loopholes to their employees, at little cost to themselves, they wouldn't necessarily do so? You're a genius!!! You've finally figured it out. You've singlehandedly argued exactly why 'trickle down' theory has failed for the last 30 years! Brah fucking vo!!!!!

I would like to see you prove your assertion there. As with all things what the person studied and the job related to it is what determined the salary and benefits. Am I supposed to feel bad that someone drops $60k getting their degree in "Chicano Activism" and can't get a job that wants to provide them health care and retirement? Try again. It is your assertion so prove it.


It isn't a loophole. I believe this has already been addressed. You're clearly being intentionally obtuse about this matter. No one who is what you or President Obama would declare to be middle class makes the type of money to be taxed at an effective rate above 15% which is what Buffet gets taxed on his capital gains and stock dividends. People who do start getting taxed at that higher rate often seek to mitigate this, unless of course they work for Mr. Buffet in which case they apparently make $250k+ a year and stick their thumbs up their butt and grin and take it.

The rates are right here. It clearly shows you can't even touch the 25% bracket as a single person until you are making $35k and as a household until you are making $70k. Again that presumes not a single deduction. No mortgage deduction, no IRA, no deduction for health insurance, or in Tonton reasoning, no "loopholes."

To be taxed at an effective 30% after your deductions you have to be earning about $250k or in Obama terms, you have to be RICH. Your argument is that Buffet is declaring it isn't fair that his rich friends pay more taxes than his super rich friends.

Perhaps his rich friends should get some tax planning or perhaps they don't give a crap because their billionaire boss is clearly "trickling" some massive income their way for answering phones and filing papers.

Our tax system is progressive. You can't even get to being taxed at 30% unless you make well over $175k as a single person. Since only the money over that amount is taxed at 33% you have to make a fair bit over that to raise the effective taxation rate from 28% as your average to 30%, aka right between 28 and 33%. This of course assumes zero deductions to lower your effective tax. If you add in deductions like IRA's. mortgage interest, paying for health care in pretax dollars, etc then you lower your taxable income and thus you have to make even more income to be taxed at the same rate.

Stop trying to claim the poor have it bad because some people making a quarter million a year and who work for Warren Buffet apparently can't afford a little tax planning. Buffet jokes he doesn't use any special tax planner but obviously knows to compensate himself in ways other than salary.

Assuming for the moment your claim is correct...why do you think this is? Why do you think that the cost of healthcare and housing have gone up faster than incomes have?

Oh my God. The drama around this would put a middle school girl to shame. They cut $38 BILLION dollars. Wow. The Federal budget is around $3.5 TRILLION. Let's look at that:

Cut: $38,000,000,000
Spending: $3,500,000,000,000

Proportion?

1%

One fucking percent and this is the weeping and gnashing of teeth we get?! Good God. You'd think we were nearing anarchy. I can't believe people are even buying this. This is nuts.

What's at issue is that no one has the balls to take on any real budget cuts. You want to get the budget under control? End the warfare and the welfare state. Period. That's the problem. And it needs to be spending cuts. Higher taxes are only going to make the problem worse.

First of all the top 50% of all individual wage earners already pay 96% of all income taxes.

Second, you can go after corporate profits and tax that if you want. You know how much you might get? Almost nothing. If you took every single dime of profit from the Fortune 500 companies you would get only $350 billion. The 2011 budget deficit (just the deficit) is projected to be over $1.6 TRILLION! Of course you'd also destroy the US economy over night if you did that.

Government spending is the problem. And, specifically: welfare, entitlement and warfare spending.

"Behind every great fortune there lies a crime". Honoré de Balzac.

But the prevailing American religion, being materialism, won't allow us to make the above, universally true, connection.

Maybe the connection isn't being made because this isn't a universally true proposition.

Actually they never were able to afford those home until congress forced the GSEs to buy up the sub prime and liar loans. This flooded the market with cash and caused the housing bubble.

I've got to tell you that I'm amazed people like Hands are still beating the drum for soaking the rich and corporations. It doesn't seem to matter how many times it's shown that the government stealing more of people's money doesn't make ANYONE richer. It doesn't matter how many times it's shown to simply not work. They still keep screaming about it. Quite interesting.

Well you know it's just not fair and someone outta do somethin'. And by that I mean suspend the constitution, confiscate private property, and socially engineer a workers' utopia.

Lowering taxes for the rich doesn't provide a miracle trickle down effect, either. We have 30 years of evidence to demonstrate that idea is complete bullshit.

Actually we had plenty of economic growth and wealth creation in that time.

What we don't have after 40+ years of great society programs and declaring war on poverty is any less poverty.

You're a riot.

Think. We have wealth creation. We don't have reduced poverty. So on one hand you can see that the wealth that's been created hasn't gone to the poor. On the other hand this proves that wealth creation is not the key to reducing poverty. Bingo!

Again and again you keep confirming that trickle down doesn't work. Well done.

Well, when you have massive government welfare programs that actually retards economic growth and wealth creation from what it truly could be...

What do you expect?

When you have massive government welfare programs that pay people for not working and being productive (not to mention subsidizing other poverty inducing behaviors and situations) and create generational dependence...

What do you expect?

When you have things like the minimum wage creating unemployment among the poorest, least skilled, least experienced people in the workforce...

What do you expect?

When you have massive amounts of money being pulled out of the private sector into useless and wasteful government programs instead of being put to use creating even more jobs (and wealth)...

What do you expect?

Wealth creation is part of the answer to poverty. But when you have government welfare programs working against it, this is what happens. It's like trying to ride your bike into the wind.

The "Great Society" has been an abject failure.