Trickle Down theory officially dead - UN Report

[Karlin]

Well ok, so the UN didn't say the theory is dead, but the statistics in their report say that by themselves. Trickle Down didn't even drip a little into the hands of the poorest in the past two decades, but there was surely a major "Flood Up" as the numbers show.

Everything in our economy is structured to funnel money to the Elite Wealthy people, or to their banks, their stock holdings, and other financial interests.

Included in that are the conspiracies that make fossil fuels as "our only source of energy", pharmaceuticals as "the only drugs we take", and that the constant warmongering "is for your security".

Market Forces are NOT in play wherever prices would normally go down, or where wages would rise, but just when there can be a bigger profit.

This concentration of wealth means democratic ideals are just a big farce [don't you get that either?]



Link:

http://www.nupge.ca/news_2006/n07de06a.htm

quotes:

The numbers are breathtaking.

A report by the World Institute for Development Economics Research, a UN agency based in Finland, finds that more than 40% of all household wealth on the planet is now owned by 1% of world adults, most of them in Europe and the United States. The top 2% own more than 50%, and the top 10% have corralled 85% of the planet's wealth.

By contrast, the bottom 50% of all adults on the planet lay claim to just 1% of the wealth.

The statistics are based on data collected in 2000. If the same trend has continued since then, and there are few doubts it has, the situation is even worse today.

Translation: countless millions are starving while the wealthy pile up ever more exorbitant mountains of wealth. One measure of just how large the gap has become is that an individual with just $2,200 in assets now ranks in the top half of the world's distribution of wealth.

 

[jimmoyer]

For that UN report to become more credible it needs to not ignore the following points:

1. The transfer of wealth has increased hugely since so-called Free Trade without tariffs has
been pushed. In fact more nations have benefited from this than from any charity or free handout
or foreign aid program. Generally the Left does not view it that way.

2. Irony of irony is that when a capital market opens up to more free trade, there is an overall
increase of wealth to all levels of society. The irony is that with a free market, statistics are more
readily available to the press and so you will see in all western democracies the rich getting richer
and the poor get richer, but seem to fall behind the rich in a RELATIVE WAY TO THEM, but the poor
are not falling behind in comparison to decades gone by.

 

[jimmoyer]

Gap Between Rich And Poor

The strength of the economy is not the central factor that drives the gap between rich and poor. I could find several countries that are much poorer than Canada and still have a smaller gap. There are both richer and poorer countries with smaller gap between rich/poor. This is not a correlative factor. The USA has the number one economy and has one of the largest gaps among western democracies between its rich and poor and consequently one of the highest crime rates as well.
--------------------------freethinker posted this awhile ago in another thread---------------------

You know, freethinker, I've seen this point made often.
And to give you your due, your point has longevity because
large gaps between the rich and poor cause much distrust
to the point of mutiny, to the point of crime, to the point
of civil war and unfortunately is embraced without question
by the thinking intellectual LEFT.

But ultimately your point about the gap between rich and poor
needs much more examination.

Often in most people's lives in the Western modern first world,
a lot of people switch from poor to being richer often.
And so the poor is no monolith, but a changing demographic.

While the gap grows bigger in China, a million people a
month rise to a level never before dreamt.

It wouldn't have happened from patronizing foreign aid.

And what of this POOR MONOLITH ?

It appears to be a static thing. It appears that all the poor stay
poor their whole lives. But this is not true.

Nor is it true that the parents who are poor always beget poor children.

What makes some poor make it in the next generation?

Many first generation immigrant poor have a hope that defies
your sensibility, because they do what it takes as poor people
to get their children to a higher level. It is why the immigrants
often invigorate many nations even while pissing off the natives
who buy into your ideas of monolithic poorness.

You have often heard the grandparents of the Great Depression
never thought of themselves as poor.

Why?

Because of perception that everyone was in the same boat.

So now you got everybody poor. More poor people than you
could shake a stick at !!

So when everybody is POOR, you got no GAP !!


And yet these children played.

Perception my friend !!

It can defeat you or make you ALIVE !!

There is no doubt your mantra repeated like it was the 11th
Command of thou shalt have no LARGE GAP is a matter
of great philosophical contention that is quite real. Quite real.

We say our cities are failures because of it.

But in those cities are the very immigrants that have a hope
that defies other cultures of mindthink --- in particular they
defy your mantra, your zeitgeist, YOUR MINDTHINK, freethinker.

In India, the middle class is something that would look poor
in America or in Montreal Canada.

Middle class in India is rowhouses that have HOPES and DREAMS
and instead of laying down to die, they strive with vigor !!

The Polish Plumber pisses off the French !!

The Eastern German prostitute really pissed off the West German
prostitutes.

Poverty, my friend exists, because it is quite complex.
So complex that it has defeated your best ideas.
And it has defeated my best ideas.

So I propose that the old divisions of socialism and capitalism
are an inadequate answer to the complex problem of poverty.

What we need to do is target cultures of failure, cultures steeped
in a mindthink that does get passed on from generation to generation.

In the last riots befalling East Los Angeles, the ghetto natives destroyed the alchohol beverages and mom and pop stores and gun shops and appliance stores ---- mostly run by immigrant Koreans.

Only in passing did the white media notice some of these
Korean complaints of being targeted.

And just in a lightning blitzkrieg segue (totally relevant),
how many White kids send money home to their parents?

The Mexicans do.

This money sent home from Mexicans in America is the 3rd
largest percent of the Mexican total GNP, Gross National Product.

And these Mexicans are poor.

They see your gap, but they don't see the gap in the same
intellectual vein you do.

 

[Karlin]

thats it? Thats all you got? We might have to start calling YOU Rambrose.

When markets open up in 3rd world countries and workers all benefit, I might believe you. As it is things just get worse but you believe the stats put out by the perpetrators - they will tell us how the wages have risen for workers there. The fact is that very few of the workers get those jobs with Nike or whatever wetsern corporation using the cheap labour there, and OVERALL THE WORKFORCE GETS MUCH LESS, most of them unemployed, with just those few workers used as an example.

Easter bunny, Santa, tooth fairies and now globalisation benefits the poor - you believe anything.,

 

[BitWhys]

Irrespective of the fact the report details the results of weath accumulation not the mechanisms involved in achieving them, I find it amazing that out of the plethora of reforms that have occurred, for better or for worse, over the last few decades anyone would be able to single out any particular one as having either a positive or negative correlation to the distribution of weath across borders, let across the social strata within those borders.

...particularly a policy that even if ever properly implemented goes a long way to maintain the relative advantage of industry in the North over resources in the South.