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-   -   9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth. (http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/vbz/showthread.php?t=114445)

Vendetta21 10-12-2010 05:25 AM

9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.
 
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/det...h-distribution



Whoa.

Also



China is the world's middle class.

nordia 10-20-2010 08:30 AM

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.

MrRubix 10-20-2010 09:04 AM

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

Originally Posted by nordia (Post 3316742)
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.

oh god

AsphyxZero 10-20-2010 10:00 AM

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

Originally Posted by nordia (Post 3316742)
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.

Share what money lmfao.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Emo_Saur_ 10-20-2010 10:04 AM

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

Originally Posted by AsphyxZero (Post 3316774)
Share what money lmfao.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

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

25thhour 10-20-2010 10:07 AM

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.
 
13 trillion dollar debt lul

MrRubix 10-20-2010 10:45 AM

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.

leonid 10-20-2010 10:55 AM

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

Originally Posted by nordia (Post 3316742)
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.

Yeah they should give me some :)

kostkaskater 10-20-2010 11:15 AM

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!

Izzy 10-20-2010 01:09 PM

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

Originally Posted by MrRubix (Post 3316803)
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.

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.

MrRubix 10-20-2010 01:35 PM

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.

Patashu 10-20-2010 04:31 PM

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.

MrRubix 10-20-2010 04:47 PM

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.

dsadsadsa 10-20-2010 10:39 PM

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.

AsphyxZero 10-20-2010 11:35 PM

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

Originally Posted by Emo_Saur_ (Post 3316779)
If you honestly believe that, you're an idiot.

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.

Vendetta21 10-21-2010 01:17 AM

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

Originally Posted by dsadsadsa (Post 3317515)
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.

Yes, but the next step to take from that thought is what is a healthy wealth distribution. Distributing wealth evenly is impossible, but given what you or I understand about society what do we think would be the wealth distribution in a world that is Generally Good?

DossarLX ODI 10-21-2010 01:40 AM

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.
 
I'm pretty sure that in order to distribute wealth more evenly (not perfectly though), you'd have to make sure there aren't any oligarchies.

Vendetta21 10-21-2010 02:04 AM

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

Originally Posted by DossarLX ODI (Post 3317743)
I'm pretty sure that in order to distribute wealth more evenly (not perfectly though), you'd have to make sure there aren't any oligarchies.

Maybe true. Another (maybe even the same as your thinking) way is to change tax brackets so that the top 1% isn't lumped in with the top 10-30% and tax them heavier.

UberMario 10-21-2010 02:21 AM

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.
 
But my capitalismmmmmmmmmmmmm, Veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Vendetta21 10-21-2010 02:47 AM

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

Originally Posted by UberMario (Post 3317761)
But my capitalismmmmmmmmmmmmm, Veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Your capitalism already has progressive tax brackets, it just has badly distributed ones.

jesushaxyou 10-21-2010 03:03 AM

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

Originally Posted by MrRubix (Post 3317066)
You can always try to print more money but that doesn't really solve anything when the underlying goods are simply not present.

Don't ever try to print more money, that does absolutely nothing except lower the value of our money even more-so. Germany knows this, they tried to do print up endless amounts of money not realizing it's absolute detrimental impact on its own economy. Ultimately causing the hyperinflation that it was so wrought with. Eventually causing their own economic collapse and having to change the money system entirely.

It's kind of argued that they did it on purpose to pay back the war reparations, but they actually weren't allowed to pay back their debt in german money lol.


Long story short, don't make more money just get yourself out of debt.

leonid 10-21-2010 03:19 AM

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

MrRubix 10-21-2010 09:36 AM

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

Originally Posted by jesushaxyou (Post 3317776)
Don't ever try to print more money, that does absolutely nothing except lower the value of our money even more-so. Germany knows this, they tried to do print up endless amounts of money not realizing it's absolute detrimental impact on its own economy. Ultimately causing the hyperinflation that it was so wrought with. Eventually causing their own economic collapse and having to change the money system entirely.

It's kind of argued that they did it on purpose to pay back the war reparations, but they actually weren't allowed to pay back their debt in german money lol.


Long story short, don't make more money just get yourself out of debt.

There's nothing wrong with printing money assuming conditions call for it. It doesn't, in itself, create wealth (only underlying assets/etc create actual wealth), but you can think of it as acquiring time value through credit. You need to sometimes do it to counter deflationary pressures.

But let me just clear this up -- printing money doesn't mean the government just runs to the presses and hammers out a bunch of bills to repay their debts.

The Fed can raise/lower the supply of money in the system by changing the reserves that banks are required to hold. Holding onto more money = credit tightens. Otherwise, you can raise/lower the interest rates or go into open market transactions aka the government buying/selling bonds.

It all operates under the function of credit. Things collapse when you take on too much risk or debt. Printing more money IS issuing debt.

Eyes_Rutherford 10-21-2010 11:38 AM

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.
 
All of the debt caused by either war time or past war time reparations (i.e. Germany just barely paying off their debts from WWI) along with all of the New deal plans from FDRs time is what keeps the debt of not just the USA to go up, but the rest of the worlds (except for china)
But, I feel that the US has dug too deep of a hold to even climb out of at this point. The only thing that stabilized the economy was for it to crash and start anew.

jesushaxyou 10-21-2010 12:20 PM

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.
 
What ever happened to the talk they were having about possibly switching all of North America to one standard currency? Any input on that?

Vendetta21 10-21-2010 07:06 PM

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

Originally Posted by jesushaxyou (Post 3318242)
What ever happened to the talk they were having about possibly switching all of North America to one standard currency? Any input on that?

Lol I don't know who was talking about that but it likely would never happen. Besides Canadian to American and vice versa is par these days so it's basically already like that.

Vests 10-25-2010 07:44 PM

Re: 9% of the World owns 79% of the Wealth.
 
Fractional banking. Debt compounds more debt. Impossible to ever pay any of it off after the initial premium compounds interest. Created to fail... blah... blah... blah.


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