teamosil
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2009
- Messages
- 6,623
- Reaction score
- 2,226
- Location
- San Francisco
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
You don't know what you are talking about. How much 1/3rd of the GDP?
Are you asking what 1/3 of our GDP is? Just under $5 trillion/year.
Life is about making choices. You don't like a company, don't buy from them. You have yet to tell me how someone got rich while making someone else poor or middle class? Where is your initiative to become one of those evil rich people so you can give all your money away like you want others to do. Do you think that someone else should give their money to you?
Conservatives are so naive... You assume whoever has the money automatically has some special magical right to it. Like god went around declaring how much money people would have. In reality, who has what money is largely determined by a whole series of rules we set up as a society. What tax rates we set on this and that, what sorts of costs that companies create we make them bear and what costs we let them push off on to society, what national resources we charge them for and what ones we let them use for free, what types of anti-competitive practices we allow and what ones we don't, how members of boards of directors are selected, how performance reviews are structured, what information companies need to make public and what they are allowed to keep secret, how schools are funded, how health care is paid for, etc. Yet for some reason when those rules are tweaked in a way that pushes more money to the top, you're ok with that, but when they're tweaked in ways that push more money to the rest of the people you get all upset and start talking about taking people's money away. It's some strange type of doublethink. Right now the rules are dialed pretty much all the way towards pushing money to the super rich. They've won just about every one of those battles in legislatures, board rooms, stock exchanges and in employee negotiations and at this point everything is set up to suck money out of the rest of the country and dump it in their laps. We want to turn those dials back to a more sensible, traditional, level, that's all. If they're making such great choices they'll certainly continue to do fantastically well even on a more level playing field I'm sure.