Obvious. They don't live in socialist or communist countries.

Cry me a f+cking river.

chemical_angel: Cry me a f+cking river.

Then build me a bridge over it. Made of gold.

Other countries don't have billionaires on account of the fact that other countries hate capitalism.

We should go take their stuff now, before they lose it all.

You know what would fix this problem?

Tax cuts.

Mentat: You know what would fix this problem?

Tax cuts.

YES! I'll be a millionaire in no time then. And then a billionaire right after that.

That's the way the magic tax cut fairy works, right? I heard it from every Republican since Ronald Reagan so it must be true.

Wah wah wah my ears are popping and there's no way to console me! Wah!
Maybe I'm teething? Maybe I'm hungry, who knows? I'm a billionaire!

I'll think about them in the morning.

Why is this news?

/Think about that

Billionaires employ people. fark that. I'm union--8 eggs and 4 measures of grain a day.

I hate you, but want to be you as well. Just a step closer, mate.

t, for time to leave...

That story makes me want to vomit.

So, if we pooled all of their money together and dispersed it evenly...?

Eh, I'm doing alright.

It'd be really funny if they took their money to another country, because all the Democrats want to do is take their hard earned cash and give it to people who didn't earn it.

/I'm sure China will love the investments
//they already do enough

Eureka! I found the class-envy thread.

Yes, I'm thinking of them... Thinking about all of them dying in a fire.

/i keed, i keed
//i'm actually thinking about each one of them giving me $1 million

BlastedToMoosh: So, if we pooled all of their money together and dispersed it evenly...?

We could at LEAST afford a few Rehabilitations (including Dildozers).

I'll think of them when they think of me. I could use some funds so I could finish college... Let's see some of that excess cash, and then I'll start up the world's smallest violin concert.

puffy999: BlastedToMoosh: So, if we pooled all of their money together and dispersed it evenly...?

We could at LEAST afford a few Rehabilitations (including Dildozers).

It's too big.

stirfrybry: Eureka! I found the class-envy thread.

Oh, Joy! Now I shall certainly win the Bullocks cup! Let us go punting on the Thames out of season on a lark. Such chicanery! I'm certain to burst. Too hoo hoo hoo.

boobsrgood: Oh, Joy! Now I shall certainly win the Bullocks cup! Let us go punting on the Thames out of season on a lark. Such chicanery! I'm certain to burst. Too hoo hoo hoo.

He said class envy, not Limey envy.

My buddy's father was a pilot for luxurious private jets. He's been out of work for a couple years now because of the recession.

When the ultra-rich don't spend the money they usually do, that's a bad thing for all of us. Some of you people are too blinded by envy to understand that.

Epiphany: , because all the Democrats want to do is take their hard earned cash and give it to people who didn't earn it.

you realize many American billionaires are Democrats right?

stirfrybry: Eureka! I found the class-envy thread.

you got your class-envy thread in my, soon to be, Hate on poor people thread.

fricasseeing rabbit: When the ultra-rich don't spend the money they usually do, that's a bad thing for all of us.

If I recall right the biggest users of private jets are corporations, they pay for them as a perk for their CEO's and such. As for rich individuals, many could give a fark about private jets.

WhyteRaven74: Epiphany: , because all the Democrats want to do is take their hard earned cash and give it to people who didn't earn it.

you realize many American billionaires are Democrats right?

and many are philanthropists who donate large sums of money to charity

WhyteRaven74 :
If I recall right the biggest users of private jets are corporations, they pay for them as a perk for their CEO's and such. As for rich individuals, many could give a fark about private jets.

That was more of an example, I'm commenting on the way that subby and a lot of commenters seem to think that billionaires having plenty of money and the confidence to spend it is somehow a bad thing for the rest of us. It's jealousy, simple as that.

BlastedToMoosh: So, if we pooled all of their money together and dispersed it evenly...?

You shut your communist whore mouth! Every single billionaire made every penny of what they had through hard work and bootstrappiness! Think of the poor rich Waltons, who aren't totally riding their dead dad/husband's coattails!

fricasseeing rabbit: My buddy's father was a pilot for luxurious private jets. He's been out of work for a couple years now because of the recession for turning Ron White into the authorities in Florida.

/ftfy
//at least, it would be funny if I did

fricasseeing rabbit: billionaires having plenty of money and the confidence to spend it

You don't really know much, do you?

fricasseeing rabbit: My buddy's father was a pilot for luxurious private jets. He's been out of work for a couple years now because of the recession.

When the ultra-rich don't spend the money they usually do, that's a bad thing for all of us. Some of you people are too blinded by envy to understand that.

yeah, sorry, not worried about niche markets. When 90% of the population can't spend money like they usually do, that's a bad thing for all of us. High end luxury markets don't drive the economy.

fricasseeing rabbit: When the ultra-rich don't spend the money they usually do, that's a bad thing for all of us. Some of you people are too blinded by envy to understand that.

Quite right?

And is it just me, or are they breeding the proles lumpier? I swear, I was walking from my Bentley to my summer home, and it was like I didn't even have servants laying on the gravel walk. I wonder if someone offers prole smoothing services...

I think Forbes is bad for rich people.

The magazine/culture encourages a code of behavior where wealth creation is a game where money represents points, and each rich asshole tries to amass a larger fortune than the other rich assholes, destroying the lives of millions of working class families in the process. If a rich guy gets richer, it means there are whole segments of the population who are not better off.

Yeah yeah, I know I know: Wealth creation is not a zero-sum game, but there's no such thing as creating wealth in a vaccuum. No fortune is an island: If your bankroll rises significantly, it affects the bannkrolls of everyone else, and the social economy of the nation as well.

I think all our problems stem from the gap between rich and poor. The wider this gap is, the more a system is broken, the more suffering there is. All things stem from this gap: Crime, corruption, moral decay, etc... whatever you want to call it, the vices and ills of society, comes from the polar opposite classes of the obscenely rich, and the disgustingly destitute. It all comes from the size of this gap. The smaller this gap, the better everything is.

Now, that doesn't mean the goal is to eliminate this gap completely. You can never get rid of the gap, and for economic prosperity's sake you don't want to get rid of it. That's communism, and it leads to stagnation, misery and despair. We've all been there. Likewise, you don't want the gap to get too large. That leads to feudalism, human property, and likewise misery and despair (except for a chosen few). We've all been there too.

The trick is to find a happy medium by which the rich can stay rich enough to foster investment, growth and employment, but not too rich that they suck up all the money and the poor are literally dying of starvation in the streets (see, France, 1789). This is starting to happen in America.

Now, the poor: They may be poor, but they need to have money. In fact, poor people should be as well off as possible without driving up the prices of things. When Henry Ford built his first factories, he did something crazy: He paid his workers $8/day, which was an incredible amount of money in those days. His friends in the business sector were aghast, and threatened him to reduce the wages. They feared that he would drive up the median income of all workers, and that was just CRAZY. At the next business summit Ford calmly told them "Gentlemen, if I do not pay my workers $8 a day, there will be no one with any money to buy my cars."

Henry Ford understood that the poor people need money to buy the consumer crap the rich people hired them to make. So you want affluence on both sides of the divide, and the way to do that is to have a really fat middle-class.

Because in economics it doesn't matter who has the money or where it goes, so long as it keeps moving. The purpose of money is to change hands; it's supposed to be spent. When money is not spent, when it stays in the same place and doesn't do anything or help anyone, things are bad. This is why Reaganomics was such an repulsive failure: The abject belief that if you give money to rich people, some of it will trickle down to the poor. That didn't happen. Instead, the rich people kept it all. And it widened the gap.

Other countries have rich people, but they aren't as rich as American rich people. Also, America has far more of them. Before the economic collapse, America had over 1000 billionaires. That is an obscene amount of money. I don't think other countries, except for a few high profile exceptions, have more than one or two.

When there's this much money at the top, that means there is less and less money at the bottom -- really the best place where money can do some good and make a difference. There is no change in a person's standard of living between 1 billion and 2 billion dollars. But the difference between $10,000 and $20,000 can completely change someone's station in life.

The rich in other countries have the sense enough to realize that, 1 billion is more money than any man could possibly need, so racking up more billions is neither helpful nor beneficial to himself or society, so they tend to stop right there. They simply do not need the extra money, and are generously philanthropic when more comes their way. This mentality does not exist in America, at least not as a collective entity.

But in America, the rich need to score more points in the Space Invaders Game of Life (as if they think that the first guy to 100 billion gets a free life or something. There is no 1up waiting for you, guys. This is all you get)

For the truth is, to a rich man in America, what's important isn't how much money he has, but how much more money he has than everyone else. It's a proportional thing. Go up to a rich man and give him a choice:

1) You can have a 500 foot yacht but everyone else in the world will have a 450 foot yacht

2) You can have have a 30 foot speedboat, and everyone else will have a little hollowed out logs that they must paddle around with their hands

The rich man would choose the speedboat. Why? Because its not what he has that matters to him, it's the disparity between what he has and what everyone else has. The gap between a speedboat and a log is far more evocative than the gap between a big yacht and a slightly bigger yacht.

Gap. Disparity. An inequitable distribution of affluence. The money has been in one location for far too long. All problems stem from it.

If you want to solve everything, start eating the rich.

fricasseeing rabbit: lot of commenters seem to think that billionaires having plenty of money and the confidence to spend it is somehow a bad thing for the rest of us.

I've read this about 6 times now and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.

Ishkur:

TL;DR


If I had a dollar for every word you just typed....

Baryogenesis: Ishkur:

TL;DR


If I had a dollar for every word you just typed....

You'd have $1,008!

Or $1,047. Or whatever the "real" number is... depends on what program does the counting.

puffy999: Baryogenesis: Ishkur:

TL;DR


If I had a dollar for every word you just typed....

You'd have $1,008!

You know, I guessed 1,000 (nice round number that seemed close). What could I do with 1,000 dollars at 2am? Hookers and blow?

Baryogenesis: What could I do with 1,000 dollars at 2am? Hookers and blow?

Blow and one hooker.

fricasseeing rabbit: confidence to spend it

And you have the confidence to kiss their ass.

/hint, most of those of whom you speak hate that

Baryogenesis: TL;DR
If I had a dollar for every word you just typed....

Cole's Notes version:

Rich people have too much money.
The poor don't have any.

Economy grinds to a motherfarking halt because poor people can't afford stuff.

Solution 1:

Rich people can stay rich, but at more reasonable levels. Tax the shiat out of them, give the money to poor people, watch the money trickle back up to the rich when they start buying things. Crisis solved.

Solution 2:

Start a world war. Use rich people's money to fund war machine, send poor people to die in battle, cull the herd, Everything resets afterward. Crisis averted?

Ishkur: Start a world war. Use rich people's money to fund war machine, send poor people to die in battle, cull the herd, Everything resets afterward. Crisis averted?

Get out of my head!

Also: Forbes is bad because it encourages the worst intentions of rich people, turning wealth creation into a video game. Rich people compete to see who has the most money, farking over the lower classes in the process.

Ishkur: Solution 1:

Rich people can stay rich, but at more reasonable levels. Tax the shiat out of them, give the money to poor people, watch the money trickle back up to the rich when they start buying things. Crisis solved.

Or give them the choice to donate their money to charity. Both Gates and Buffet have donated massive amounts of their fortunes to charity and to setup the Gates Foundation. I wish this kind of philanthropy was unremarkable.

fricasseeing rabbit: My buddy's father was a pilot for luxurious private jets. He's been out of work for a couple years now because of the recession.

When the ultra-rich don't spend the money they usually do, that's a bad thing for all of us. Some of you people are too blinded by envy to understand that.

You did read TFA article, right?

"Billionaires' total net worth rose 50 percent to $3.6 trillion. "

They're not tightening their belts. They're using the excuse of the global financial crisis to throttle the rest of us with their bootstraps and lining their pockets even more than usual.

We'd still have modern media without Rupert Murdoch. We'd still have personal computing without Bill Gates. In fact, we'd probably have better media and PC's. Some of you people are too blinded by the "trickle-down" propaganda the likes of Murdoch ensure is fed to us 24/7 to understand that.

Trapper439: fricasseeing rabbit: My buddy's father was a pilot for luxurious private jets. He's been out of work for a couple years now because of the recession.

When the ultra-rich don't spend the money they usually do, that's a bad thing for all of us. Some of you people are too blinded by envy to understand that.

You did read TFA article, right?

"Billionaires' total net worth rose 50 percent to $3.6 trillion. "

They're not tightening their belts. They're using the excuse of the global financial crisis to throttle the rest of us with their bootstraps and lining their pockets even more than usual.

We'd still have modern media without Rupert Murdoch. We'd still have personal computing without Bill Gates. In fact, we'd probably have better media and PC's. Some of you people are too blinded by the "trickle-down" propaganda the likes of Murdoch ensure is fed to us 24/7 to understand that.

All told, anyone looking for all of the U.S. dollars in the world in July 2009 could expect to find around $8.3 trillion in existence.

Baryogenesis: Or give them the choice to donate their money to charity.

They've had that choice since the beginning of human history. Most of them choose not to, and their choices have a detrimental effect on the general well-being of society.

It's no longer a choice. It's now mandated as public service. We claim any earnings over $1 billion as eminent domain.