Wealth Distribution in America

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Half Fast said:
1) Can't get rich working for someone else. Untrue.
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That would depend on how you define rich, and what you did with said money you made. Unless your semi-liquid (you can have cash in hand in 30-60 days) net worth is 10 million, I don't consider it rich. And I don't know anyone outside the C-suite that made 10 million+ from W-2's. I think 2.2M net worth is too low to consider someone rich.
 
TCABM said:
Several of the highest paid people I know are linemen. They tell me there’s not nearly enough apprentices for the jobs. Skill or will.
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There are hundreds of thousands of people who don't have the intellectual capacity for that job. Those are the ones I'm talking about.
 
172andyou said:
There are hundreds of thousands of people who don't have the intellectual capacity for that job. Those are the ones I'm talking about.
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Do they have any intellectual capacity at all? That’s just one of many examples I can think of off the top of my head where a formal college education isn’t required to have a well-paying job. But people will line up excuses as to why folks can’t make a decent living. Most if those fall into motivational factors and not ability to learn a skill.

For example, most companies provide training at a level designed so that anyone who’s completed the 8th grade has the cognitive ability to perform the skills necessary to perform the job. People usually don’t get terminated because they can’t learn the skill; people get terminated because they fail to show up.
 
172andyou said:
There are hundreds of thousands of people who don't have the intellectual capacity for that job. Those are the ones I'm talking about.
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Those are the people for whom we need a safety net.
We don't need a safety net for people like my nephew and his girlfriend that won't get married because they would "lose their benefits".
 
danhagan said:
Problem here is my retirement contribution costs have increased ... lottery tickets are TWO dollars now
:oops::)
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It’s $3 if you want the multiplier. You’re losing out if you’re not getting the multiplier.
 
EdFred said:
That would depend on how you define rich, and what you did with said money you made. Unless your semi-liquid (you can have cash in hand in 30-60 days) net worth is 10 million, I don't consider it rich. And I don't know anyone outside the C-suite that made 10 million+ from W-2's. I think 2.2M net worth is too low to consider someone rich.
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Sorry, I was using how the majority of US citizens define rich, not the EdFred definition. You are of course free to define it however you choose, but understand that when you have more net worth than 98% of the population a majority will likely consider you to be “rich.”
 
Half Fast said:
Sorry, I was using how the majority of US citizens define rich, not the EdFred definition. You are of course free to define it however you choose, but understand that when you have more net worth than 98% of the population a majority will likely consider you to be “rich.”
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I thought "rich" was anyone who made more than the person defining it, and we should tax them at 100% tax rate. :D

Seriously though, 2.2 net worth including non-dividend generators? You can't even run a 421 on that.
 
TCABM said:
Do they have any intellectual capacity at all? That’s just one of many examples I can think of off the top of my head where a formal college education isn’t required to have a well-paying job. But people will line up excuses as to why folks can’t make a decent living. Most if those fall into motivational factors and not ability to learn a skill.

For example, most companies provide training at a level designed so that anyone who’s completed the 8th grade has the cognitive ability to perform the skills necessary to perform the job. People usually don’t get terminated because they can’t learn the skill; people get terminated because they fail to show up.
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I never said college education. I acknowledged the reality that 50% of people have below average intelligence and some percent, whether it be 10%, 25%, 40% or whatever, are not intellectually capable of doing the jobs that currently pay a living wage. That percentage has gotten higher and higher as manual labor jobs got automated away while the number of people needing jobs remained the same. It is only going to get worse as increases in automate/robotics/ai continue to eat away at the bottom of the pile.
 
EdFred said:
That would depend on how you define rich, and what you did with said money you made. Unless your semi-liquid (you can have cash in hand in 30-60 days) net worth is 10 million, I don't consider it rich. And I don't know anyone outside the C-suite that made 10 million+ from W-2's. I think 2.2M net worth is too low to consider someone rich.
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And there we get back to my previous statement, moving the bar and changing definitions. Poor or rich is all a matter of relative perspective.
 
172andyou said:
I never said college education. I acknowledged the reality that 50% of people have below average intelligence and some percent, whether it be 10%, 25%, 40% or whatever, are not intellectually capable of doing the jobs that currently pay a living wage. That percentage has gotten higher and higher as manual labor jobs got automated away while the number of people needing jobs remained the same. It is only going to get worse as increases in automate/robotics/ai continue to eat away at the bottom of the pile.
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The only viable long-term solution is to place a higher market value on low- and moderate-skill service work. That's a cultural shift, but it may be the only way that we can avoid destructive nonsense like UBI.
 
EdFred said:
I thought "rich" was anyone who made more than the person defining it, and we should tax them at 100% tax rate. :D

Seriously though, 2.2 net worth including non-dividend generators? You can't even run a 421 on that.
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Of course you are correct, but the fact is that $2.2M in invested assets will spin off more than the median household income (4% => $88K). It's hard to avoid being labeled as "rich" or "wealthy" when you can sit at home and collect dividend checks that are more than most people have to work to earn.

Now, I would suggest that the vast majority of people who have amassed $2.2M or more aren't going to sit at home and clip coupons.....which is why they have the assets in the first place.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Of course you are correct, but the fact is that $2.2M in invested assets will spin off more than the median household income (4% => $88K). It's hard to avoid being labeled as "rich" or "wealthy" when you can sit at home and collect dividend checks that are more than most people have to work to earn.

Now, I would suggest that the vast majority of people who have amassed $2.2M or more aren't going to sit at home and clip coupons.....which is why they have the assets in the first place.
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Yeah, but that's a 2.2M portfolio. Gotta take out non-rev real estate and other tangible goods and that 88k goes down.
 
172andyou said:
I never said college education. I acknowledged the reality that 50% of people have below average intelligence and some percent, whether it be 10%, 25%, 40% or whatever, are not intellectually capable of doing the jobs that currently pay a living wage. That percentage has gotten higher and higher as manual labor jobs got automated away while the number of people needing jobs remained the same. It is only going to get worse as increases in automate/robotics/ai continue to eat away at the bottom of the pile.
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Objectively define below average intelligence.
Around 76 percent of Americans aged 25 to 54 have jobs, most of them full time
Most of the prime-age Americans who don’t work say they’re not interested in a job
The most common reasons for not working are caring for family or a household, and poor health
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www.minneapolisfed.org

Who’s not working in the U.S.? Learn the basics | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Most prime-age Americans work, and most of those who don’t work say they’re not looking for a job due to caregiving, health, or school
www.minneapolisfed.org www.minneapolisfed.org
 
StraightnLevel said:
The only viable long-term solution is to place a higher market value on low- and moderate-skill service work. That's a cultural shift, but it may be the only way that we can avoid destructive nonsense like UBI.
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Short term, probably.
Medium term, maybe.
Long term, human labor will become unnecessary. We don't have a plan for that. And long term isn't that long. Our grandkids will likely see it.

We are currently living through as big an economic shift as was the industrial revolution. That one reorganized people from rural life to urban life and allowed global intellectual capital to be spent on the creative processes needed to create the economy we have today. But everyone still had to work.

The next shift will be far more profound because it will create a world in which the need for human labor is reduced by 90% or more.
 
172andyou said:
FWIW, obesity among the poor *IS* an affordability problem. If you can't afford healthy food, you eat snack food, processed food, soda and other cheap calories.
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I've heard that before, but I don't think it's true. We've been poor, and we couldn't AFFORD snack food. I see a lot of poor people eating mainly takeout/drive-thru food, pizza, bagged snacks, etc. That stuff is expensive no matter how you look at it. I don't think they're eating that cr@p because they're poor; I think they're poor partly because they're eating it. And yes, I think a lack of education about finances and nutrition plays a big part in it too. Not "education" as in college, but "education" as in, neither their parents nor their school system succeeded in teaching them how to live. Same reason so many are eyeballs deep in debt.

StraightnLevel said:
It's an education problem, not an affordability problem.

"Real" food is not as expensive as junk food. A 5-lb bag of rice or beans goes a LONG way feeding a family and costs about the same as a 12 oz bag of chips. Tap water is healthier than soda and costs far less. A loaf of bread and pack of bologna costs about the same as a single fast food burger.

It's not affordability, it's being thoughtful, deliberate, and willing to put a small amount of effort into your lifestyle choices.
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Exactly that. We used to stretch a chicken breast to feed seven of us. Stir-fried veggies and rice help a lot.

EdFred said:
That would depend on how you define rich, and what you did with said money you made. Unless your semi-liquid (you can have cash in hand in 30-60 days) net worth is 10 million, I don't consider it rich. And I don't know anyone outside the C-suite that made 10 million+ from W-2's. I think 2.2M net worth is too low to consider someone rich.
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It's entirely a matter of perspective and opinion. Ten years ago I'd have thought anyone with my current net worth was rich. Now I think it's more "comfortable", but not "rich". The people I consider rich generally have another digit to the left of the decimal. Some of them, I'm sure, would say they're more "well off" but not rich. I'm sure a couple of our kids think we're filthy rich.
 
Half Fast said:
IQ < 100 would be one objective measure.
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Well that puts most Americans* below average then. If we want to use IQ as the standard bearer, less than 80-85 (85 is 1SD) is where the cut line would be. Percentage wise that’s somewhere around 8% of Americans and remains relatively constant percentage-wise in a normal distribution.

ETA: except the children in Lake Woebegone, who are all above average.
 
StraightnLevel said:
I think his statement is self-evident. The bottom 50% in intelligence are below the average.



Correct - the numerical mean is the definition of IQ=100.
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Except using median criteria is about as useful as the glass half-full/glass half-empty discussion. It omits the fact the glass has water, which is life sustaining.
 
TCABM said:
Except using median criteria is about as useful as the glass half-full/glass half-empty discussion. It omits the fact the glass has water, which is life sustaining.
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I suspect the original question should have been asked about "normal" intelligence rather than "average" since IQ=100 is the mean (average) of the distribution. "Normal" is somewhat subjective but typically it means 80<IQ<120 or maybe 85<IQ<115.
 
TCABM said:
ETA: except the children in Lake Woebegone, who are all above average.
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Well the women are strong, the men good looking, and the children are above average there , it’s close to my home …..
 
Half Fast said:
I suspect the original question should have been asked about "normal" intelligence rather than "average" since IQ=100 is the mean (average) of the distribution. "Normal" is somewhat subjective but typically it means
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Either way, macht nichts. IQ is neither correlative to nor predictive of earnings potential. Just look at Christopher Michael Langan.
 
JOhnH said:
And the driving force for automating many of the jobs at the bottom of the pile is a generous "minimum wage".
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I'm not aware of anywhere that has a minimum wage that is enough to live on. They are well short of "generous". They are not even survivable.

But, yes, the fact that machines can do work less expensively than humans is exactly the problem that an increasing number of humans are going to be facing as time goes on.
 
It says a lot about how divorced from reality most people are, that there are so many on here who think that a "poor" person is someone who is spending disposable income on short term luxuries instead of investing.

It reminds me of that state senator recently who justified his desire to cut funding for school meals by saying "Well *I've* never met anyone who's hungry, so clearly we don't need this."

The wealth gain of the top 0.1% absolutely does come at the expense of the majority; much of the wealth gain is coming from the record corporate profits which are the main driver of inflation. Companies are raising prices and raking in billions which goes straight to the shareholders (because there's no way they'd raise wages for the people actually doing the work), while everybody else is paying more of their income for the essentials as a result of these raised prices and profits. Competition does nothing to push prices lower because, as shown in a previous post, pretty much every brand is owned by just a few conglomerates.
 
PredragVasic said:
This rapid rise in inequality has resulted in large percentage of workers increasingly struggling to advance. In 1950s, a manufacturing job was sufficient to feed a family of four, pay mortgage for a comfortable 3-bedroom house, put enough away for annual family vacations and have enough left over for other fun hobbies (including aviation, for some), all this on a single salary. While the manufacturing has largely gone abroad, similarly paid professional jobs of today are mostly inadequate, and dual income is needed for a family to achieve similar standard of living. And this is mostly a consequence of the disproportionate rise in income inequality, accelerated by that SEC decision from 1992.
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Workers back in that day didn't advance any more than workers today. They just spent less. They ate at home, drove old vehicles, and had one TV with rabbit ears. Their medical choices were closer to medieval medicine than to today's medicine. They had one phone line. They didn't go on vacations like we do today - no jaunts halfway across the country or world on a jet, no resorts, none of that. They went to "the beach" or "the mountains" or whatever every year and occasionally went on a more impressive trip in their Belair or whatever they drove. When they took that trip they stayed at inexpensive motels or in KOA campgrounds. They lived very different lives than today's middle class.

The whole wealth inequality thing completely ignores the quality of life improvement the middle class (and lower class) has experienced over the last 50 years. That said, the middle class (and every class) has become rife with envy - keeping up with the Joneses is much more important than planning for retirement. That's why many in today's middle class are struggling to make ends meet. They overspend on lifestyle.

The interesting comparison would be how far middle class (or lower class) quality of life has improved since (say) 1950. Forget what others have, how has that segment's lifestyle improved?
 
Half Fast said:
IQ isn't indicative of much of anything. But the question was asked, and IQ is about the only objective measurement.
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Concur. I originally asked the question to the member making the statement that due to events in the future, the half of the population that is below mean intelligence would be poverty stricken due to an inability to work.

Since they didn’t answer, the point ended up getting made tangentially.
 
The very rich are not rich because they were paid a lot of money from corporate profits. They are rich because they own a significant portion of the company(ies) that they built and the value of them have increased. That wealth came from providing something of value to the public that didn't exist before. It is wealth created, not wealth transferred.
 
Larry in TN said:
That wealth came from providing something of value to the public that didn't exist before. It is wealth created, not wealth transferred.
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Sort of. It used to be that to create a lot of wealth you needed to pay people a lot to work for you. Now fewer people are needed and/or they pay is lower. The result being that the wealth (company income/value) is transferred to a few people at the top, instead of wages sufficient to live on for the people at the bottom.

I do take your point that the amount of wealth in the world is not static and that new wealth is created by these companies. But it's also true that the distribution of that wealth has been transferred from something quite a bit more flat to a few people at the top.

Tarheelpilot said:
Bring manufacturing jobs back to our labor force.
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Manufacturing jobs that don't pay enough to survive have no value. The ones that are specialized or otherwise skilled enough to pay living wages are the largely ones that didn't leave in the first place (there are many exceptions, of course). There will be fewer and fewer of these going forward, and yet people still need somewhere to live and something to eat.
 
I think when you start talking about what wages/net worths are wealthy vs poor things get really sketchy. What I would consider well off here in my rural area where you can still find homes in the $100k and sometimes under that range is going to be considerably different than what someone living in a major metro in NY or CA... or even Chicagoland would say.

It does make me wonder though... small town USA got left behind decades ago. I see a lot of people complaining that the suburbs are unaffordable. With everything being networked in the modern era why couldn't offices just be located in some of these small towns? Why couldn't remote workers telecommute from some little town in a flyover state to a NY or CA company?
 
Katamarino said:
It says a lot about how divorced from reality most people are, that there are so many on here who think that a "poor" person is someone who is spending disposable income on short term luxuries instead of investing.

It reminds me of that state senator recently who justified his desire to cut funding for school meals by saying "Well *I've* never met anyone who's hungry, so clearly we don't need this."

The wealth gain of the top 0.1% absolutely does come at the expense of the majority; much of the wealth gain is coming from the record corporate profits which are the main driver of inflation. Companies are raising prices and raking in billions which goes straight to the shareholders (because there's no way they'd raise wages for the people actually doing the work), while everybody else is paying more of their income for the essentials as a result of these raised prices and profits. Competition does nothing to push prices lower because, as shown in a previous post, pretty much every brand is owned by just a few conglomerates.
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There's a difference between poor and destitute. Just like there is a difference between upper class and wealthy.

The ones I see blowing money on lottery / gambling and other garbage are below national median income and/or on some assistance.
 
172andyou said:
Sort of. It used to be that to create a lot of wealth you needed to pay people a lot to work for you. Now fewer people are needed and/or they pay is lower. The result being that the wealth (company income/value) is transferred to a few people at the top, instead of wages sufficient to live on for the people at the bottom.

I do take your point that the amount of wealth in the world is not static and that new wealth is created by these companies. But it's also true that the distribution of that wealth has been transferred from something quite a bit more flat to a few people at the top.


Manufacturing jobs that don't pay enough to survive have no value. The ones that are specialized or otherwise skilled enough to pay living wages are the largely ones that didn't leave in the first place (there are many exceptions, of course). There will be fewer and fewer of these going forward, and yet people still need somewhere to live and something to eat.
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We will just have to disagree. I think you should invest some time looking into why the jobs were exported.

I won’t say any more due to the TOS.

Interesting thread…
 
172andyou said:
Sort of. It used to be that to create a lot of wealth you needed to pay people a lot to work for you. ...
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um, I don't believe that is true. A lot of wealth was created by paying a lot of people the least that they could get away with. (not being snarky, but geez, overpaying people isn't necessarily a good way to create weath)
 
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