The American Dream

[Peter Parka]

Lol they asked for it.

Spoken like a true child.

 

[Boomer]

Heres the real question. Kimmy, what the hell do you do for a living? Cause you're finding flaws in all these systems and these folks are doing this wrong and this is bad and needs to be reformed and blah blah blah. So what are you? An executive at some company or something? I swear if you say you're a delivery driver or some other minimum wage job I'm going to shit myself. lol

 

[KimmyCharmeleon]

From a proper argumentative viewpoint, it is actually a fallacy of irrelevance to ask about someone's personal life rather than debate on the actual topic at hand in the argument, and try to use it against them. This thread is just about the system, not what I do to make money.
But, if ya wanna know, I'm a customer service supervisor. I wouldn't call it minimum wage but, it's pretty good pay

 

[KimmyCharmeleon]

Spoken like a true child.

For you <3

 

[Boomer]

From a proper argumentative viewpoint, it is actually a fallacy of irrelevance to ask about someone's personal life rather than debate on the actual topic at hand in the argument, and try to use it against them. This thread is just about the system, not what I do to make money.
But, if ya wanna know, I'm a customer service supervisor. I wouldn't call it minimum wage but, it's pretty good pay

blah blah blah on that shit right there cause I could give a fuck what the fallacy of irrelevance is. My point is, if you're so smart shouldnt you apply yourself to changing these things? For the good of the people of course.

 

[Maldoror]

blah blah blah on that shit right there cause I could give a fuck what the fallacy of irrelevance is. My point is, if you're so smart shouldnt you apply yourself to changing these things? For the good of the people of course.

that is absolutely irrelevant.

 

[Boomer]

that is absolutely irrelevant.

Its a fucking question. Simple as that. How would you fix the issue since you obviously know something is wrong?

 

[KimmyCharmeleon]

It's irrelevant and evasive, no point arguing over my job. I need a job to live, sadly. One day I'll probably be a well paid researcher though.

 

[Boomer]

Its a fucking question. Simple as that. How would you fix the issue since you obviously know something is wrong?

This is the question. Where does it mention your job?

 

[cam elle toe]

Heres the real question. Kimmy, what the hell do you do for a living? Cause you're finding flaws in all these systems and these folks are doing this wrong and this is bad and needs to be reformed and blah blah blah. So what are you? An executive at some company or something? I swear if you say you're a delivery driver or some other minimum wage job I'm going to shit myself. lol

aaahh...right here Boomy.

 

[KimmyCharmeleon]

What about it?...

 

[Boomer]

aaahh...right here Boomy.

Yeah, but she already answered that one. I was moving along. lol

 

[Boomer]

What about it?...

Yeah, I would expand on it, but I'm done with this thread. I am no longer interested in it, honestly.

 

[Minor Axis]

The American Dream is alive and well for big business and wealthy individuals a small minority of U.S. citizens. For average American it's dieing. It could be dieing for average people around the world. Let the Republican Party tell you that premise is a liberal lie while they do their dirty work in the background.

In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

The guest was Alan Greenspan on Meet the Press, a Sunday morning program on NBC.

This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”:



In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.

But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.

Read more here: The Rise of the Global Elite- Atlantic Magazine.

 

[Minor Axis]

Holly Peterson and I spoke several times about how the super-affluence of recent years has changed the meaning of wealth. “There’s so much money on the Upper East Side right now,” she said. “If you look at the original movie Wall Street, it was a phenomenon where there were men in their 30s and 40s making $2 and $3 million a year, and that was disgusting. But then you had the Internet age, and then globalization, and you had people in their 30s, through hedge funds and Goldman Sachs partner jobs, who were making $20, $30, $40 million a year. And there were a lot of them doing it. I think people making $5 million to $10 million definitely don’t think they are making enough money.”

As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: “They started saying, ‘If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing’”—this is a service offering “fractional aircraft ownership” for those who do not wish to buy outright—“‘and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.’”

The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”

This goes back to my original argument- how much money do you need to live a good life? Does freedom mean, you live like a king while those less successful grovel? Should there be any individual limits placed on an economic system? This is probably before most of your times, but there was a time in the U.S. where the top tax bracket was up around 70%. Since the 1960's tax rates on the wealthy have dropped dramatically because 'it was not fair'. Who the hell says it's not fair? Why your local Republican who acts as the enabler for the wealthy.

CBO Provides New Evidence That the 2001 and 2003 Tax Cuts Have Only Modest Economic Effects And Do Not Pay For Themselves . So who pays for this? Not the people who can afford it, but the people who can't afford it.

 

[Minor Axis]

Not enough info to elicit a reply? Here is some more:

Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

Wilson’s distinction helps explain why many of America’s other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global “nation” in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine—indeed, it’s thriving. As a consequence of this disconnect, when business titans talk about the economy and their role in it, the notes they strike are often discordant: for example, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein waving away public outrage in 2009 by saying he was “doing God’s work”; or the insistence by several top bankers after the immediate threat of the financial crisis receded that their institutions could have survived without TARP funding and that they had accepted it only because they had been strong-armed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Nor does this aloof disposition end at the water’s edge: think of BP CEO Tony Hayward, who complained of wanting to get his life back after the Gulf oil spill and then proceeded to do so by watching his yacht compete in a race off the Isle of Wight.

Just how much loyalty is there to home grown workers? Think about it.

 

[Minor Axis]

The American Dream is decidedly focused on a minority. Charts for your displeasure:

This one is spending by the Chamber of Commerce in districts where their pro-outsourcing policies have resulted in over 1M job losses.

 

[Minor Axis]

U.S.A Social Mobility Stats

Social Mobility: The ability to be born at one level and rise to another socioeconomic level. For all the screaming in this country (U.S.A.) about becoming "socialists", how is that countries that are closer to "socialism" are doing better than we are? And is socialism the real evil?

Is this because the opportunites are still there but Americans are just lazy? What does this say about the American Dream?

Social Immobility: Climbing The Economic Ladder Is Harder In The U.S. Than In Most European Countries

A new report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) finds that social mobility between generations is dramatically lower in the U.S. than in many other developed countries.

So if you want your children to climb the socioeconomic ladder higher than you did, move to Canada.

The report finds the U.S. ranking well below Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Spain in terms of how freely citizens move up or down the social ladder. Only in Italy and Great Britain is the intensity of the relationship between individual and parental earnings even greater.

 

[MoonOwl]

Every time I see the title of this thread I think of George Carlin's last special on HBO talking about the American Dream and how you have to be asleep to believe it.

 

[Minor Axis]

Every time I see the title of this thread I think of George Carlin's last special on HBO talking about the American Dream and how you have to be asleep to believe it.

I think the dream exists, but it is being severely diminished by very bad people. I've probably said this before, but what is ironic in regard to this statement, all the liberals are thinking of conservatives and vice a versa.

There is a lot of talk in this forum about the transferring the wealth. YES it is happening at an alarming rate while the conservatives scream about how they are being screwed.