warren buffett - class warfare

[tonkovich]

thought this deserved a thread of its own.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html

[Billybob]

Originally Posted by tonkovich

thought this deserved a thread of its own.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html

"Published: November 26, 2006"

Couldn't find anything less than a four year old decontextualized single heresay reference to bolster your position that needed a thread of its own?

[Honus]

I'm not sure why you think the passage of four years detracts from Mr. Buffet's excellent quote. The longer the disparity between rich and poor continues, the worse off we are.

And the quote is hardly decontextualized. He linked to the article from which it came.

[Skid Row Joe]

Originally Posted by Billybob

"Published: November 26, 2006"

Couldn't find anything less than a four year old decontextualized single heresay reference to bolster your position that needed a thread of its own?

FOUR+ years old!

Now that's FUNNY!

[t walgamuth]

Mr. Buffet has a very generous point of view for a person of his wealth.

I agree with him totally. The rich are winning.

[Skid Row Joe]

Originally Posted by t walgamuth

Mr. Buffet has a very generous point of view for a person of his wealth.

I agree with him totally. The rich are winning.

Not just a "point of view," since he gives away nearly $2 Billion dollars a year of his own wealth.

[kerry]

A 2006 article might be irrelevant if there had been a truce and a peace treaty signed since then. To the contrary, the war still wages even though victory for the rich seems to have occurred years ago.

[Jim B.]

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist and he wrote,





.. in New York City, where a martini at a good bar is now $22.



why not spend as much as we want, on anything we want?

Can we really say that we’re showing fiscal prudence? Are we doing our best?

And a "New York City tip" is a penny in the bottom of a glass of water.

[raymr]

The new face of hope:

Hoping that the rich will create jobs, and spend their way out of recession and the deficit.

For some reason I have my doubts.

[tonkovich]

Originally Posted by Billybob

"Published: November 26, 2006"

Couldn't find anything less than a four year old decontextualized single heresay reference to bolster your position that needed a thread of its own?

couldn't address the issue, eh?

[Hatterasguy]

Buffett is spot on. Tax wise the worst kind of income is earned income, your screwed. The tax laws are written by and for people who don't make a living working for someone else, so they are favorable to other kinds of income. I have no idea why someone earning a middle class income (say under $80k) would buy the conservative BS about raising taxes since it won't affect them. Unless your an investor or business owner, than you have a vested interest in the debate. Taxes are a very hot topic and popular conversation topic in those circles.

OTOH raising the income tax bracket affects high income earners say $100k-$250k the most, they are screwed since they can't adjust their income. Their the ones who really get stuck in the middle. A business owner taking $250k a year as taxable personal income would just reduce it to the next tax bracket and have his company pay for some extra stuff, or form a company for "expenses". Lots of games you can play. Back in the 70% tax bracket days your company would buy your car, house, boat, whatever.

Its just become very political because the people who fund the politicians and the politicians themselves get the people who it really doesn't affect worked up.

[t walgamuth]

Originally Posted by Skid Row Joe

Not just a "point of view," since he gives away nearly $2 Billion dollars a year of his own wealth.

Somehow even though we clearly agree about mr. Buffett you managed somehow to turn it into an argument.

[cmac2012]

Originally Posted by Skid Row Joe

FOUR+ years old!

Now that's FUNNY!

What's funny is that you think anything much has changed in that time. S'matter, Buffett not your hero now?

[cmac2012]

. . . the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class - By Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

http://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/15/review-jacob-hacker-and-paul-pierson-winner-take-all-politics/

The underlying argument is straightforward. The sources of American economic inequality are largely political – the result of deliberate political decisions to shape markets in ways that benefit the already-privileged at the expense of a more-or-less unaware public. This is not necessarily original – a lot of leftwing and left-of-center writers have been making similar claims for a long time. What is new is both the specific evidence that the authors use, and their conscious and deliberate effort to reframe what is important about American politics.

First – the evidence. Hacker and Pierson draw on work by economists like Picketty and Saez on the substantial growth in US inequality (and on comparisons between the US and other countries), but argue that many of the explanations preferred by economists (the effects of technological change on demand for skills) simply don’t explain what is going on. First, they do not explain why inequality is so top-heavy – that is, why so many of the economic benefits go to a tiny, tiny minority of individuals among those with apparently similar skills. Second, they do not explain cross national variation – why the differences in the level of inequality among advanced industrialized countries, all of which have gone through more-or-less similar technological shocks, are so stark. While Hacker and Pierson agree that technological change is part of the story, they suggest that the ways in which this is channeled in different national contexts is crucial. And it is here that politics plays a key role.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2010/0916/Winner-Take-All-Politics

Ever wonder how it came to this: Republicans and Democrats behaving like Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, ever more gridlocked and unable to address national problems in a rational, bipartisan way? Or why the middle class is treading water, at best, while the super-rich wax inexorably richer? Here’s another poser: Why would the Republican Party, which lost the last two elections in dramatic fashion, react by continuing to grow, as it has for decades, ever more conservative and obstructionist, rather than giving moderation a chance?

In their bicoastal narrative, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob S. Hacker, Yale professor of political science, and Paul Pierson, the same at the University of California, Berkeley, tackle these and other questions in a well-researched, albeit occasionally repetitive, analysis. They build their ideological edifice brick by brick, pointing out things that most Americans, including this reviewer, may not fully grasp – at least at the level of historical and economic detail that the two authors provide.

The numbers they cite are arresting. Take 2009, for example. It was a simply awful year for almost all Americans – “almost” being a key qualifier. It was, in fact, a very good year on Wall Street, where the 38 top firms earned a total of $140 billion. Goldman Sachs had its best year since 1869, the authors write, paying its minions an average of $600,000 per person. Rather than melting down, GS somehow melted up, with some help from Uncle Sam.

The authors continue to pound away with economic data to prove the old saw that the rich get richer, with a nuanced twist that it is the über rich who are doing surreally well: “The share of [national] income earned by the top 1 percent of Americans has increased from around 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007.... The only time since 1913 ... that this share has been higher was 1928.” That, of course, was the year before the Great Depression commenced.

Now there is rich, and then there’s filthy rich. The top 1/10th of 1 percent of Americans has done even better: In constant 2007 dollars, the 15,000 American families in this rarified bracket enjoyed an average income in 1974 of about a $1 million – and $7.1 million in 2007. Want richer? The top .01 percent of us, or one in 10,000 households, soared in annual income from $4 million in 1974 to $35 million on average in 2007.

All of the above raises the questions: Did these unfathomably wealthy people earn all that additional income and are they satisfied with where they are, plutocratically speaking? No and no, insist the authors. The wealthy, whether their assets derive from inheritance, big business accomplishments, or working in the financial sector, have allied enthusiastically with the Republicans since the late 1970s to reduce their levies dramatically (whether on income, estate, or capital gains). They have also worked together to suppress the labor movement and to decimate government attempts to regulate the environment and fancy financial transactions like those subprime mortgage derivatives that brought the world to the brink of economic collapse.

[RichC]

The only way they can become richer is to make us poorer.

I hope people start to realize whats happening soon.

At no point in history has the gap between the rich and poor been wider.

And some of the rich arent even people,
but corporations that are financially larger than several countries put together.