9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

It really sucks that money distribution is so oddly distributed between all the countries. America should share a bit with the rest of the world.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

oh god

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

Share what money lmfao.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

If you honestly believe that, you're an idiot.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

13 trillion dollar debt lul

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

The public debt outstanding is $13 trillion. But when you factor in liabilities like Medicare (which is MASSIVE, almost $77 trillion), Social Security (probably around $15 trillion now), and retirement prescription drug plans (around $20 trillion), the sum total of all debt and liabilities (including unfunded obligations) comes out to around $125 trillion dollars. That's over $400k per citizen.

The Baby Boomers fucked us, man.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

Yeah they should give me some

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

They should throw it out of a blimp and have us all fight over it. Whoa that would be a mess!

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

It's such a weird thing to think about. All of this money is way over anyone's head and is all basically just conceptual at this point anyway. If everyone in the world decided that we weren't in debt anymore and made the records conclude this then we could just start over.

Although this would totally ruin the value of our economic system.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

It's not really conceptual -- it's liability. It's money that will need to be paid back out.

We can't just forgive/eat the debt all-around. It's like saying that I borrowed $1000 from you and then suddenly decided that I couldn't pay it back. You wind up eating a $1000 loss and that has some pretty serious consequences. Money is equivalent to real goods in our market -- and so to forgive money is also to forgive promised goods, which to many is not negotiable (say if they require drugs/medications/housing/food/etc).

It's like the subprime mortgage crisis -- people were given loans they couldn't technically afford, and so when house prices went the other direction, insurance needed to be paid out, but no capital had been set aside to do it, resulting in a massive hole in the economy. You have to do *something* with this hole -- usually in the fundamental way of borrowing from someone else to afford the payment. This is why our global economy would have basically collapsed to nothing had AIG not been bailed out. People don't realize how close we were to that collapse happening, lol.

The problem occurs, naturally, when you start running out of places to borrow. The holes get bigger and bigger, and the holes are ultimately caused by incredibly inefficient wastes of resources.

But you can't say that everyone in the world should just forgive and forget all debts, because people are still eating massive costs. We're in the situation we're in now because of financial irresponsibility -- and it's everyone's fault, both banks and citizens alike (ultimately, though, we *can* place more blame on the banks because, well, they know better... or so we'd hope). It's harder to blame a stupid person for making a stupid decision than it is to blame a smart person for making a stupid decision.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

If I decide X person should pay their debts, I can force them to by leveraging the power of the community over them. Because the legal system has more power than the debt owner, he will have to pay back.

Lets say that someone decides America should pay its debts. How do you force America to pay its debts? Nothing has more power than America, or at least not so much that it could painlessly take down America.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

What the ****?

That is horribly, horribly wrong.

America is not some kind of "we hold power over everyone so we'll tell you to take our debt and shove it" nation. A lot of our value is tied up in synergies with other countries through relations and trade. America may have borrowing power to help pay debts, but ultimately, after a certain point, the borrowing is too great and the debts become so large that credit runs thin -- it becomes less likely that you'll be able to pay things back, meaning either loans will become scarce out of fear or they'll become scarce because there's nothing to lend. You can always try to print more money but that doesn't really solve anything when the underlying goods are simply not present.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

Don't quote me on this, but I've heard somewhere that if all resources in the world were distributed evenly, all people would be upper-middle class.

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.

What, you thought it would be lower?

Obviously it's going to be higher. What Rubix said is true. And you can't honestly think that they're going to put down the real deficit on a public website.