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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (323754)	1/31/2007 1:26:45 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573213

All put together to muddy up the obvious... There is nothing obvious to muddy up. Its muddy, and you can look at various data and ideas to try to clear it up. The data is very straight forward. Its your economists who choose to muddy up the waters. The most likely conclusion is that the rich are growing wealthier faster than the not rich. That's part of it. Which BTW isn't the same as or similar to your idea that they are becoming wealthier at the expense of the poor or the not rich in general. There is a pie of wealth....at any given moment, that pie is only so big. A company has a profit that equals a $100 million pie. The three principals decide to give themselves each a slice of the pie equally $33 million each. The pie is gone......the principals ate the pie themselves and did not share it with their workers. That means no pay increase for the workers. That's happening way too often in this country. Quite the opposite as much of the income of the wealthy is from productive work or productive investments, the existence of which help the not-rich. Wealthy individuals don't generate jobs......corporations do. The Paris Hiltons aren't job magnets; they are dilettantes. Any jobs Paris creates is by accident, not intent. Even the poorest of the poor, who don't have jobs received government transfers largely funded by the taxes on the income of the rich. The vast majority of those transfers are on the back of the middle class who also are not participating in the eating of the wealth pie. Well something must motivate you to fall on the side of the rich when its the poor that are getting screwed. 1 - Being in a bad situation doesn't mean getting screwed. If you double your income and I increase mine by 1% you didn't screw me. If I was poor that also wouldn't mean that I was getting screwed. The fact that some people are poor isn't an attack against them. You're working your butt off and you can't make ends meet. You don't think you would feel like you are getting screwed? And if you did feel that way, you would be right. Why should some shallow piglet get more money than he or she knows what to do with when there are others who at the end of the work week, don't have enough money for the essentials? The piglets are getting rich at the expense of the poor. Someone has to 'pay' for $30 million bonuses. 2 - Being in a good situation doesn't mean you aren't getting screwed. If I was a billionaire, and someone bilked me out of $10mil, I'd still be incredibly wealthy, despite the fact that I was just "screwed". I "fall on the side of the rich" because people, including you are advocating screwing the rich, and also because the screwing would not just fall on the rich, but on the upper middle class, and indirectly on most people. Ridiculous nonsense. Absolute poverty would be a far more important concern, as would any great increase in equality cause by a reduced level of income and wealth by those at the bottom (or more generally by the non rich). But absolute poverty isn't getting rich, and the poor are not broadly speaking getting poorer. The change is that the rich are getting richer. Finish the sentence...."at a much faster rate and the disparity between the two is growing significantly." The rich aren't getting richer in a way that's causing the poor to not get richer. The disparity between the two is growing a bit, but hacking down the rich, while it might decrease the disparity, won't help the poor, and in fact is likely to hurt them. You can say that over and over again but no one is buying it. When are you going to fess up to your bias?