Wealth
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How do you all classify wealth? How much money does one need to make to be considered rich? What criteria does one have to meet to be rich? Is it money left over after all essential living expenses are paid? Or is it measured by how much income one has? Does the currency paid make a difference?
Is someone who works in London making the equivalent of $200,000 rich? What if he has a family to support? What if his job requires him to be around London, therefore making his expenses sky rocket?
Or is wealth defined by the luxuries you surround yourself with? Or is it decided by an indivuals bottom line? -
My definition of wealth is for someone to have enough money to support his family's financial needs and status and has money left over to satisfy himself without putting his family in danger of a financial crisis.
For example,
A family that has two kids, and has enough money to put both of them through school or whatever and feeds them, clothes them, and support them with whatever they need (you know them teenage mooch off your parents years) and still has a back up for any emergencies (like mutual funds incase one of them has a tumor in the brain or some extreme type of surgical things) and still has money to spend things on getting the two kids brand new nice Benz and has time for those parents to go to vacation every couple months for a "retreat"
That's my example.
However,
I am not like that, I never been a man that was tied down by money. Sure I'm poor as fuck, but I don't let that affect any type of decision I make. Money isn't a big problem for me, how I look at it is that as long as I make back what I've spent or if I can pay off my bills before I do spendings, I am ok with it. I've always been in financial problems, my family has always been after my dad left. Since he never gave us much child support like he was supposed to, I've always been on my own.
When I started getting checks from my dad, because he realized that his own kin are what he has left/sleep.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="-_-" border="0" alt="sleep.gif" />, I kinda didn't know what to do really. I saved portions of it, and spent the rest on bills/recreations/whatever. Since I grew up kind of poor and without much (during school years my parents refused to get me a gaming system and a computer. I had to give them an arm and a leg to get both of them. Well an N64 was a birthday present so I got lucky with that but that's the only system they gotten for me ever since). In my own world I'm wealthy. because I can spend on whatever I want and at the same time pay off what is needed.
That's just me though. -
I think just having discretionary income does not a wealthy man make. I believe it takes a certain amount to break middle class levels. However, I think that everywhere, even within a single state in our country could have a different number value tacked onto a definition of wealth. Absolutely, wealth in upstate New York is not wealth if you live in Manhattan. I do think, however, that it shouldn't be too hard to think of a criteria that can be applied across the board to identify the wealthy in a particular area.
More than likely, wherever you are there is a person who owns a home there, and owns a second home elsewhere, perhaps at the beach. If owning two homes doesn't stretch the person too thin, then that is surely a sign of wealth, for example. Again though, it's hard to think of a 100% rule. -
It's a pretty relative term for me. If you go to Africa and ask around there, I'm rolling in dough. But I don't consider myself wealthy. I do think that I'm lucky to be where I am in the world.
I'm gonna break this into a brief description of lower, middle, and upper class.
Lower class - struggling to make ends meet, but accomplishing it.
Middle class - a little bit broader spectrum including a range from occasional financial problems to being able to shop somewhere other than walmart and having a car made after 1990
Upper class - This is where I consider wealth to be located. The world of BMW, Porsche, and multiple homes, or some other kind of substantial investment. -
There is a HUGE difference between being able to shop at places other than walmart and being "wealthy" in this country. Though these days the number of people occupying upper-middle class is diminishing, and they aren't moving up. And lower class goes much below making ends meet, to having to give kids up for adoption, living on food stamps and looking for a job, ANY job to stay on welfare, finding yourself working a 9-5 at the Taco-Bell inside of the walmart where the middle class is buying their clothes with no hope of upward mobility.
Wait... brief description. Gotcha. You more or less got it IMO.
I'd say that since the first 95% of wealth is relatively flat, that one COULD empirically define the point at which the curve starts to climb as being the boundary of "wealth". Especially considering that over 90% of the wealth in this country sits above that line, with 5% of the population. -
Andrew, what do you propose as the solution to this scenario? You've been speaking a lot about it, and no one has been denying that it is the case, but I haven't seen a solution mentioned. Do you have a good one or are you seeking one?
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How about looking at places and times that have effectively managed to increase class mobility, decrease the wage and wealth gap, and raise the level of the flat part of that curve up eh?
Sweden's pretty nice.
It would also be nice if we could balance our labor force such that the workforce by sector was roughly equivalent to production per sector.
Of course, I'm no expert, but what we're doing now ISN'T working. It's making things worse. And we have to stop it as soon as possible (which may not be for a while with this crisis)
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If we had perfect people, we wouldn't need a perfect system.
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QUOTE (Jedd @ Oct 21 2008, 06:51 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>If we had perfect people, we wouldn't need a perfect system.
Capitalism is probably about the closest to perfect a system is ever going to get for our primitive society. It allows people that have the ability and drive to succeed to do so, while those that just want to latch on for a free ride through life have to struggle for their handhold. It works sort of like natural selection.
The problem is the world has too much baggage. Thinks like racism are and were a reality. The African American population is still getting over slavery. The government has made adjustments to the 'system' in an attempt to even out this baggage, and it bogs the system down. It's like a server with too many mods. But multiplied in scale by a million.
Where this problem becomes a real issue is from the in-fighting, everyone has a strong opinion about the group they represent and care more about what they can do for themselves regardless of the impact it has on the overall system. Competition in America is no longer healthy by nature. Instead of competing against others, the current tactic is to compete against the 'system' to get what they want. I'm gonna go out on a leg here and say Democrats are famous for this.
What if instead of welfare, minimum wage was bumped up to 10$ per hour? Instead of filtering the power's that be money through the government and then into the hands of those that need it via welfare, it would go directly to people as a result of their labor. I realize this has a drastic impact on economy as a whole, as everyone would simply outsource their work to mexico (made in china much?) but like most of what I say, its just idealistic. And I like discussion and argumentative ideas. -
Looking up minimum wage to see why it hasn't been raised more I found this on wiki:
"Some critics of the minimum wage argue that a negative income tax or earned income tax credit would work better than a minimum wage, as it would benefit a broader population of low wage earners, not cause any unemployment, and distribute the cost widely rather than concentrating it on employers of low wage workers. A negative income tax or earned income tax credit based on a broad tax base would also be more economically efficient, as the minimum wage imposes a high marginal tax on employers, causing high deadweight loss. The ability of the earned income tax credit to deliver a larger monetary benefit to poor workers at a lower cost to society was recently documented in a report by the Congressional Budget Office."
Higher minimum wage is "bad" because it is actually increasing the taxes for small business owners. A guy hires 20 people. He pays them each $7.50/hr now. That's $1200.00/month/person for a total of $24,000.00/month. When the gubmint comes in and says he has to pay them all $10.00 then that businesses operating costs go up from $24,000.00 to $32,000.00 for an increase of 8k per month. That's more wealth redistribution than an earned income tax credit which is being labeled as socialism now. -
The increase is actually more than what Andrew just pointed out because the employer has to spend more money on employees than the face value of what they pay them. For instance, they pay 50% of your social security tax on top of your wages. Yet another reason I hate social security -- if you're a private contractor, you have to pay twice as much toward social security as the average worker (because you are technically your own employer).
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