why is "billionaire" the cutoff for "wealth"? I know people are probably getting tired of personal anecdotes, but I went from living in the projects across from Liberace on WIC as a kid to being the first in my family to graduate college (followed quickly by my brother and 3 cousins) and make 6 figures. I'd be pretty darn happy (and consider myself pretty well-off) the day my net worth exceeds 1M--which is a pittance for some people I work and interact with. My little girl already has a college fund set up, and I'm hoping that she (and her soon-to-be-born brother) are one of those people 25 years from now who think that 1M is a decent signpost on the road to where their goals are. And so on. My parents weren't born with a silver spoon, but worked their butts off for me and my brothers, and get a kick out of seeing us succeeding in life and working hard for our kids.
Once again, you're not paying attention. How many of those people come back to donate things later, or volunteer to do work for the clinics, or help out at the shelter, or use that aid as a stepping-stone to something better. And most of those things were done from a religious organization. (edit: the scholarships and WIC weren't. But the ESL, clothing, food bank, prayer support, medical, optical, dental, resume crafting and interview prep were) (Further edit: We didn't help out those who were still abusing alcohol or drugs and wouldn't accept treatment. But religious affiliation didn't matter.)
It isn't. The cutoff, as you know well, is income of $250,000/year Wait, what? Liberace? You lived across from this guy? And he was on WIC? Yeah, I think my point was something like yours, actually. It's possible to improve your station in life over where you were born, but if you want to be fabulously wealthy, you'd better not start at the bottom. barfo
yeah, his mansion was kitty corner from our apartment block. Very weird, and I can't explain it 30 years later.
But even in Sweden or Canada or any other social utopia one would like to compare to, you generally can't become a billionaire from the lowest tier of their socio-economic stratus. Here in the US, there are plenty of things in place to help people who want to work hard to improve their station...as opposed to, say, being a subsistence farmer in Ghana. That guy's basically stuck there, and his kids are, or else they're moving into the slums of the big city. My contention in this thread, though, is that nowhere in our universe are you allowed to thrive and be socio-economically mobile without working hard for it. Additionally, it seems as if a large portion of America has chosen the instant gratification for less over working hard for something better. Which America gives them the right to do. But I think it stops short of giving them the right to have the "something better" taken from others and redistributed to them out of "fairness".
True dat, but no one in Sweden or Canada pretends that you can. I doubt people there go around saying "wealth is a choice". [Actually, I don't know, maybe everyone in Sweden and Canada does say that.] barfo
well, the top 1% (per the CBO) of Americans make ~380k a year. Even if you use that extreme definition of "wealthy" as "top 1%", I don't think it's unreasonable for anyone to say that you can go from baby left on a doorstep with nothing to making ~380k/yr in one lifetime. In Mook's post 9 the interviewee was talking about redistributing from the wealthiest 20%. mybudget360.com's graph shows that the 20% point is people making ~90k a year. I know for a fact that someone can go from poverty to making 90k in 20 years. And I don't think that those who have worked to do so have an obligation to those who didn't to supplement their quality of life if they don't want to work for it themselves. Edit: As I've pointed out, and I think Maxiep said, that doesn't stop someone for doing so for charitable reasons, or b/c we're helping out a friend, or karmic purposes or whatever. I'm saying that there shouldn't be a forced redistribution of wealth from those who've set up their lives for it to those who haven't.
Nor is it impossible for a poor person to win the lottery. It's just that it doesn't happen very often. barfo
you can't possibly think that there's a one in 192 million chance that a poor person can become a heart surgeon. Or a small business owner. Or a major-league athlete.
Well, obviously poor people can become small business owners. That hardly guarantees that they'll be in the top 1%. In fact, it would be interesting to know what percentage of small business owners are in the top 1%. And what percentage of the top 1% are small business owners. Heart surgeon? Could be. Pro athlete? Could be. Odds of 192 million:1 in a lottery? That's a suck-ass lottery, unless the payoff is really really huge (much bigger than you'd need to attain 1% status). barfo
more to the point, what is your reasoning for someone like me, who went from not much to "top 20% wealth" just 10 years out of college, having my money taken away to pay someone who might've been born into better circumstances but didn't do as much with it as I did? Or sacrificed as much.
I don't believe I was making an argument for that. And I'm not sure how it happened (maybe my fault because I mentioned $250K/yr) , but clearly we are misusing the word wealth in this thread. When people talk about concentration of wealth, they are usually talking about concentration of assets, not of income. And that's a much harder problem to overcome than income, actually. barfo
I'm not exactly being sarcastic, just trying to figure out where this "we need to redistribute the wealth" logic stops, and why.
I believe in borders, just that they should be open and free to cross in either direction. At least ours, anyway, since we're supposed to be a free country.
Your parents shaped your belief system by providing a good example. Unfortunately, the majority of the impoverished aren't so lucky. Through abusive parent/addict parent/single parent/dead parent/rapist parent manipulation they think differently and they act differently with regard to their place in the world, most often resulting in trends of failure because they don't know no better. How to cope with a terribly rough deal for example?
