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[Max™]

Hydraulic fracking.

Economic Fracking is a fantastic description.

(sarcasm=on, mode=strong)

But then the affluent would not feel so affluent, only average! This isn't about actually fixing problems, it's totally about feeling superior to somebody, and without the absolutely destitute, there would be nobody to feel superior toward! Everyone wants to be one of the 1% who has everything, even if they have much more in common with the vastly larger demographic of the highly impoverished! This whole notion of uplifting the whole of society to more equal status-- It totally ignores the psychological motivations behind wealth accumulation!

(sarcasm=off)

EG, The rich perform actions that make themselves feel empowered.  When they perceive a threat to that power, they will play lip service (like the afore mentioned "Pledge"), but this ultimately still leaves them vastly disproportionate to the rest of the society, their inclination to accumulate wealth remains, the inequality continues roughshod, but now they have a talking point to say 'See! We totally care about your poor, poor people! (aren't I such a GOOD rich person!)"

The very existence of rich and poor exemplifies the problem, which is inequality.  People seek to become unequal, because they seek disproportionate power and status for a variety of reasons.  Some are ultimately more successful than others, and this results in winners and losers, which then evolve into populations of rich and poor.

This cycle will continue forever unless you can find a way to successfully reprogram humans to simply enjoy being alive, instead of having insatiable fixations on increasing status; or at least, find creative ways to redirect that fixation so that it benefits the whole of society instead of just the status fixated. (EG, I acknowledge that things like electricity, running water, the internet, and pals are all borne from wanting more, and finding ways to get it-- however, those are things that EVERYONE can have. The goal is to convert the notion of "I am better than these people..." to "There has to be a better way than this...", which is no small task.)

Hey, I fucking hate windows and shit and totally buy that most wealthy philanthropy is motivated by just the sort of cost benefit type of analysis mentioned above, but I really think Gates is motivated by concern for others, the involvement and such really does seem more like a case of "well fuck I have so much money I couldn't even give it away manually, but I bet I could throw huge amounts of cash at problems that need it" than not.

I meant that since trickle down does not actually trickle down, the only way for it to work the way the theory says would be to force it down via some mechanism.

Say, how about having the Federal government take a bigger chunk of the rich person's income and handing it back out by providing services to poor people... 

Local city and state taxes get used to fund things, sure, but why would a federal government which issues a currency need to collect it to fund itself? The justification behind federal taxes as a means to encourage/discourage certain activities while maintaining the cash supply/value around a certain level makes sense, the idea about tax dollars from citizen A somehow moving through the system to end up used to pay for welfare for citizen B is a handy lie to spread to get people worked up in a nice righteous froth so they'll be willing to support shit which indirectly or even directly harms them.

[Starver]

Say, how about having the Federal government take a bigger chunk of the rich person's income and handing it back out by providing services to poor people... 

Local city and state taxes get used to fund things, sure, but why would a federal government which issues a currency need to collect it to fund itself? The justification behind federal taxes as a means to encourage/discourage certain activities while maintaining the cash supply/value around a certain level makes sense, the idea about tax dollars from citizen A somehow moving through the system to end up used to pay for welfare for citizen B is a handy lie to spread to get people worked up in a nice righteous froth so they'll be willing to support shit which indirectly or even directly harms them.

Save for thinking I was being obviously facetious, there's also the counter-idea about untaxed dollars from Citizen A somehow moving through the system to end up in the pockets of citizen B so that he doesn't need welfare, which is a handy lie used to get different people to support a different shit that shits on them instead.

Money is sticky. If you have a lot, more globs onto it. If you don't have much, it gets hoovered up by someone/thing with a bigger glob that you likely necessarily have had to come into contact with.

My non-facetious idea was not to fund federal budgets with the money from the citizens, but to encourage privately organised charity, or else abdicate the responsibility to one or other layer of government.  Poor people already have no choices where their meagre (but significant, to them) tax contributions go, the rich can and do choose which territories (if any!) get their miniscule but still hard-pressed squeezings of blood from their own particular stone. There's room for equalising, there, if there's a will for it. (There won't be, of course. I'm just saying there could be.)


(If everyone who shopped at (say) Walmart within a jurisdiction privately declared their spending there, then those moneys could not be hidden in Walmart's complex financial machine as not income earned at whichever of city, state or national levels might rightly claim a concern. Ditto, if a food bank or homeless shelter or a medical centre accepted Walmart support (whether as cash or kind, suitably given a value) then that could be shaved off the Tricklability Tax margin, saving the effort of the Government Machine from having to (perhaps) pay Walmart back their own taxed-dollars in order to provide bedding for the shelter or whatever else might be the current need. But note that I'm not au fait with the current layersbof administratium in the US, and I'm still just as sure that there's no simple path from wherever-you-are-now to wherever-it-is-I'm-trying-to-take-you...)

[SalmonGod]

I'm pretty sure the only path is the rich need to be scared shitless.  They're not going to willingly do anything to improve the situation for anyone but themselves, unless their lives depend on it.  And they're going to need a lot of convincing that their lives depend on it.

[redwallzyl]

I'm pretty sure the only path is the rich need to be scared shitless.  They're not going to willingly do anything to improve the situation for anyone but themselves, unless their lives depend on it.  And they're going to need a lot of convincing that their lives depend on it.

I do sometimes get the impression that this can only all end a few ways and one of them is with pitchforks.

[smjjames]

I'm pretty sure the only path is the rich need to be scared shitless.  They're not going to willingly do anything to improve the situation for anyone but themselves, unless their lives depend on it.  And they're going to need a lot of convincing that their lives depend on it.

TBH, I'd rather it not happen at gunpoint, or pitchfork-point as redwallzyl says.

[sluissa]

I'm pretty sure the only path is the rich need to be scared shitless.  They're not going to willingly do anything to improve the situation for anyone but themselves, unless their lives depend on it.  And they're going to need a lot of convincing that their lives depend on it.

TBH, I'd rather it not happen at gunpoint, or pitchfork-point as redwallzyl says.

Short of managing a democratic clearing out and starting over completely with new hard line campaign finance and lobbying reforms with a new set of politicians held to them... not sure there's another way.

[Zangi]

No way in hell is the Murican gov't gonna pass such reforms. 
There are too many cogs that want their grease fix, the incentives is toward the status quo and/or making it easier for money to talk.  And money already speaks loudly.

[JoshuaFH]

I don't want to be the guy that tries to play advocate for the mega-rich, cause god they don't need it, but I don't think angry mobs and pitchforks makes for either a healthy democracy or a healthy capitalistic system.

[Teneb]

I don't want to be the guy that tries to play advocate for the mega-rich, cause god they don't need it, but I don't think angry mobs and pitchforks makes for either a healthy democracy or a healthy capitalistic system.

You can only have one of those two. Healthy democracy tends to stifle capitalism. Healthy capitalism tends to stifle democracy. Because they have rather conflicting goals.

[smjjames]

I don't want to be the guy that tries to play advocate for the mega-rich, cause god they don't need it, but I don't think angry mobs and pitchforks makes for either a healthy democracy or a healthy capitalistic system.

Agreed, going all French Revolution on the wealthy isn't going to lead anywhere good, at least not in the near to mid term. Long term is also questionable.

That said, I saw in a politico article that 2017 resembles 1890 in a lot of aspects, so, it seems like history is repeating (not repeating exactly, obviously) and the pendulum of parties switching power never stopped and appears to be swinging hard in the direction of the Democrats.

[scriver]

It's almost as if it would be neat to have some sort of bond between people that made one feel a sense of obligation and responsibility towards another. Something akin to family, but I'm a larger scale.

Yeah, that would be nice.

[misko27]

Jeez, it reminds me of Marat/Sade in here sometimes (incidentally, excellent play, highly recommend).

In my opinion, the problem isn't the rich being scared shitless. They've been that scared in our lifetimes (my ultra-critical-of-wall-street-former-wallstreet-lawyer economics teacher in highschool said that during the crisis, the banks would've accepted any deal they were given, and that the government coulda pushed much harder). The problem is that there are people in government that are absolutely determined to object to anything whatsoever that doesn't fit with their shitty economic doctrines. And even beyond the ideologues, there's a bigger problem: The Republican party's entire attitude to economics right now can't be reformed because it's not policy-based: its just shit. When Obama was in charge they screamed bloody murder about debt and the deficit (Remember?!? Pepperidge farm remembers...). Now in power, they completely dumped that position and moved on to passing a shitty tax bill that will balloon the deficit for unclear gain to anyone but the rich.

The problem is the government isn't even run by thieves, it's run by idiots.

[Rolan7]

It's almost as if it would be neat to have some sort of bond between people that made one feel a sense of obligation and responsibility towards another. Something akin to family, but I'm a larger scale.

Yeah, that would be nice.

Communities can be great (and also, like families, awful in certain ways) but they don't exactly scale to nation-level.  "Suffering kinda hurts to directly observe, usually, for most people" is about all we've got.

[redwallzyl]

Jeez, it reminds me of Marat/Sade in here sometimes (incidentally, excellent play, highly recommend).

In my opinion, the problem isn't the rich being scared shitless. They've been that scared in our lifetimes (my ultra-critical-of-wall-street-former-wallstreet-lawyer economics teacher in highschool said that during the crisis, the banks would've accepted any deal they were given, and that the government coulda pushed much harder). The problem is that there are people in government that are absolutely determined to object to anything whatsoever that doesn't fit with their shitty economic doctrines. And even beyond the ideologues, there's a bigger problem: The Republican party's entire attitude to economics right now can't be reformed because it's not policy-based: its just shit. When Obama was in charge they screamed bloody murder about debt and the deficit (Remember?!? Pepperidge farm remembers...). Now in power, they completely dumped that position and moved on to passing a shitty tax bill that will balloon the deficit for unclear gain to anyone but the rich.

The problem is the government isn't even run by thieves, it's run by idiots.

It's neoliberal capitalism. The cancer that's killing the world.

[McTraveller]

I don't want to be the guy that tries to play advocate for the mega-rich, cause god they don't need it, but I don't think angry mobs and pitchforks makes for either a healthy democracy or a healthy capitalistic system.

You can only have one of those two. Healthy democracy tends to stifle capitalism. Healthy capitalism tends to stifle democracy. Because they have rather conflicting goals.

Wait what? That sounds like a confusion of concepts.  Democracy is simply "power is proportional to population that shares a common idea" and I'm assuming your defining capitalism to mean "power is proportional to wealth".  They are just vote-allocation schemes, and they aren't entirely independent.

Neither democracy nor capitalism as systems say anything about what decisions are made - they just determine the weighting mechanism used to make decisions.  It's debatable whether the fact that neither of those weighting mechanisms has any kind of moral quality to it is a feature or flaw.

That is, nothing about either method says anything about if a decision is "right or wrong".  For instance - you can't really say a population that does vote for something "voted wrong" - you can only say you don't like the result of the vote.  You need something in addition to democracy or capitalism (or any other socioeconomic -ism) to make value judgments.