sweasel.com

The head of Oxfam, incidentally, makes $500K a year. So, definitely in the one percent.

You think those bastards are seriously going to let their own wealth be confiscated? They’re rich. They have options.

I was raised by the mother who said, (when her four wretched urchins were howling, “But that’s not faaaiiirrrr,”) “NOTHING is fair”. So, I’ve learned to live with it.

😉

I see that the moral cannibals at Oxfam propose more of the same socialist poison that created the poverty and lack of economic mobility that they allege to be whining about. In fact that will do nothing but perpetuate poverty, and of course that’s the real goal. Wealthy, independent men can’t be ruled, and Oxfam, like the rest of the progressive left, expects to rule. They no more care about the poor than NOW cares about women or Al Sharpton cares about blacks or the rainbow coalition cares about gays. The victims are just a pretext for the accumulation of political power by existential impotents who can’t make their way honestly in the world.

Media Delenda Est

What Paula said. Spot on.

[…] Original: Two things that are dangerous This entry was posted in Mobility and tagged poverty, wealth on January 19, 2015 by […]

I spent some time at Fark today watching the discussion of this subject. There is a lot of simple envy and hate out there combined with a very weak grasp of both economics and reality.

I asked these questions:

How would raising taxes on the rich improve your life? Would you receive better wages? Would you get a better job? A better house? Would your taxes be lower, noting that (in the U.S.) the top 1 percent of tax payers already pay more taxes than the bottom 90 percent, and that the government already spends more than it receives in taxes. What would change for the better?

Crickets for answers to these questions but a lot of there are lots and lots of people who believe that having more money than they have is evil somehow.

Well said, Madame Weasel; iamfelix; Paula, and Some Vegetable.

When I first heard that report this morning, I thought of a couple of things –
– hey, it’s The Guardian,
– I smell journalistic malpractice, and
– What the hell was so remarkable about this. Hasn’t wealth been concentrated throughout history into an elite set of “haves” (e.g. royalty), as opposed to the rest of the “have-nots” (mostly peasants, farmers, etc). What’s remarkable is that any of that wealth has started to trickle down to create any kind of a middle class.

Now there’s something that a journalist could research and write about. If we could ever find one.

Oh, and I guess that was three things.

Interesting: Guido has a post today about the plummeting public trust in NGOs like Oxfam, at http://order-order.com/2015/01/20/plummeting-public-trust-in-lefty-ngos/

Trust peaked last year at 67% of the public; down to 52% now. Things are looking up!

Being a bit (heh) anal retentive, and being a LOT suspicious of anything I read, I note:

“50% of all property is owned…” does not explicitly address that land area owned by no one in particular (i.e. government land, public land, wasteland (desert?, swamp?) in a particular country, etc).

What percentage of earths surface is considered “owned” by individuals? And of that land owned by “the public or citizens in general” I wonder if it was it apportioned out to “everyone” in the calculation of this number?

…and Teh Won will be placing his imprimatur on this iniquitous inequity in the strongest terms visible on His teleprompter tonight in the SOTU address.
Thanks to His extensive background in economics, due to His associations with Krugman, Gruber, et al., He will announce an easy fix.

Well, they keep throwing out this 1% crap, but in a world with 7.1 billion people, that’s 70 million people with “ALL TEH MONIES”

So it’s not like a Country Club’s worth of people here, you know?

Oxass Dickheads…

Seventy million people. That’s more than the whole population of the UK. That’s awesome. They should totally form their own country: Billionarese.

Yeah, I wondered about that, McGoo. They have to be looking at some limited kind of asset that is already being measured, like stock holding, or it’s a wild-ass guess. Or probably both.

Hate to break it to you, but if your gross income is more than about £35000 a year or you have £500K in assets (which is the NPV of a mid-level occupational pension + a modest house with the mortgage paid off), you’re in the 1%. The problem is that a very large number have either zero or negative wealth (AKA debts). So the “1% own everything” statistic has to be hedged around with so many caveats as to make it useless. Wealth is a bullshit metric for most people anyway. What is more important is consumption (money sitting in the bank doesn’t buy you cool/tasty/shiny things). And by that standard there has been a massive increase amongst the poorest of the world – unprecedented in human history.

One important question. How much of the world’s wealth is not owned by any people?

That is, how much is owned by governments and non-profit entities? (E.g. Harvard University, which has an endowment of $36B.)

It’s wofrdenul to have you on our side, haha!