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[Max™]

I wasn't saying you were wrong really, just that your chart was old and that you mentioned wealth but it showed income.

I mean, strictly speaking you were a bit off on the idea that the wealthiest folks weren't doing as well after the crisis, but it could be argued that some of them did indeed lose out and drop from the top iters, but overall whatever losses the wealthiest portions of the population had during the crisis have been a speedbump which they've been accelerating away from again.

As for prison, we have for profit prisons, which is completely fucked.

We have a shrinking proportion of the population made up of white folk who have known the demographic changes were approaching for decades, and accordingly they've been striving to reduce or eliminate any risk of them losing control over the country.

Probably because so many of them have done little but fuck over and demonize anyone slightly darker than they are, so they expect some sort of probably violent reckoning if anyone else got into power, because it's what they would do. Stop them from immigrating if you can, criminalize their freedom so you can lock them up if you can't, and act shocked but do nothing if they get killed by cops.

Do unto others before they get a chance to do it to you. American Colonists: Ruining the lives of Brown People Since the 15th Century!

[McTraveller]

The $182 billion quoted is incidentally astonishingly close to the US median income of $63k a year times the "almost 3 million people" the department of business labor statistics say are employed in the criminal justice industry.

And regarding "people don't want to pay for others to eat" - that's false. Most people are willing to pay others so they can eat in exchange for something of value. That's basic commerce after all.  What the US culture doesn't like is paying for other people to eat in exchange for nothing.

This is a tough philosophy to overcome.  Yes it would be nice to live in a world where people just grew food and stocked it in stores and whatnot just because they enjoyed farming, or because they enjoyed making robots to farm, or whatever.  But we don't live in that world (yet? ever?)

[sluissa]

That eating argument is very suspect, given that so many large corporations pull shit like keeping employees just below the number of hours for full time employment, so benefits don't have to be paid out, and you end up with significant numbers of people working nearly full time hours on government benefits like SNAP. Or education for certain industries being so expensive that the debt they're in once they start working, even at full time benefits and wages, still puts them on government benefits to make ends meet.

People often don't really want to pay others for anything at all. It's simply legal requirement and the occasionally successful market forces that force people to pay employees a wage to keep them from simply leaving.

That's not a universal truth. But it's truth so far as a successful company in a competitive market will likely have someone near the top engaging in some form of cost cutting at the expense of employees.

[McTraveller]

I was talking about people, not corporations.  Anytime you aggregate people into an organization like a company or a government, things start to skew. It's demonstrable that the anonymity of the aggregate allows people to start doing things like you described, where companies / governments start trying to shift the cost/benefit equation around.

Most of this is actually the result of some group thinking they know best how to help everyone. This is crazy dangerous.  So some law gets written (poorly), and then companies take advantage of it.  I mean the employment laws are a great one - why is there a concept of full time vs part time is dumb; any form of benefit should just scale linearly with hours worked, not with some kind of all-or-nothing cutoff.  I mean sure you can define "40 hours/week" as 100%, but then if you work 20 hours a week you get 50% benefits, not zero.  But that would probably mean real health insurance reform too.  Part of the trouble I think our legislators have is that they try to tackle only one issue at a time, without realizing they are all intertwined and you have to address about a dozen things at once.  Or maybe they do realize it and they are using it to their advantage - it's probably some kind of sliding scale.

[Kagus]

There are lots of regulations in Norway designed to kinda help people from themselves, including an enforced retirement savings plan. Basically, the company you work for is responsible for taking a chunk off of your paycheck and putting it into a retirement account for you, something like 12-13% of your wages while working there.

However, if you work at that company for less than 12 months, you're not entitled to retirement benefits associated with that company (since you obviously didn't work there until retirement!)... Including the money they've set aside for your pension.

You're not getting it back either. It's just gone. Eaten by the system, and explained away as "reimbursement to the company to cover the costs associated with frequent change of employment".

[LordBaal]

Woa what a crappy thing. You really should strive to spend more than one year in ever work, which is logical I guess anyway but sure it's unfair not getting back that 12~13% of the salary. Well I guess is better than the Venezuelan system where you get 6% of your salary discounted for several not working in any shape or form public systems and social benefits. Burning the money would at least produce some recidual heat and ashes that could be used as fertilizer, and that would be like 1000000% far more productive than what they supposedly spend it, if we had cash that's it. In reality it simply gets stolen by the government.

[Kagus]

There's also funny stuff like withholding a certain amount of pay until right around summer, where you get a big payout of "vacation money" that sends a hefty percentage of the population out of the country in a mass exodus to Spain. Then there's a period in November-December where you pay half income tax, since it's the holidays and you probably need the cash.

The term "Nanny state" really does apply in some areas, heh.

[Reelya]

I'm confused how you get some of those numbers for the 1% though, it doesn't look like the chart is showing relative proportions like yours did (as in only the 1% colored section is theirs) it looks like straight numbers, so the 1% went from over ~62 Trillion in wealth down to over ~55 Trillion in wealth and back up to something over ~105 Trillion in wealth.

Umm, the $105 trillion is the total of all cohorts added together. Have another look at the data. You can turn off the other cohorts if you want to see just one cohort graphed.

I got the numbers by merely clicking on the tab labeled "Table" to view the raw data from your link.

Over the same period it looks like the bottom 50% went from maybe 2 Trillion, down to less than 1 Trillion, and back up a bit over 2 Trillion?

The figures tell and interesting story, if you look back at the "bottom 50%" wealth, you'll notice there was almost zero growth for the 10 years before the crash. 1997 Q2 wealth (bottom 50%) is 1.30 trillion (and that's not even the peak, but I'm using Q2's to be fair: if you pick a later date in 1997 or 1998 can actually show *negative* growth between 97/98 and 2007), while the very peak at 2007 Q2 was only 1.39 trillion (I missed this data point before, it's higher than 2007 Q3 for this cohort, so it's a fairer peak).

So in the 10 years between 1997 Q2 - 2007 Q2, the bottom 50% averaged 0.67% growth per year (one fifth of one percent). In the 12 years between 2007 Q2 (the peak before the crash) and 2019 Q2, they've averaged 3.1% per annum growth, a growth rate 4 times faster than the previous decade. 

And this is measuring from the peak, not the bottom, so it accounts for both the crash and recovery. Growth since then is actually averaging much higher than 3.1%. Right now, the last 12 months growth for the bottom 50%'s wealth was apparently 12.8% per annum, and if you average growth rates since the absolute bottom for the poor (2011 Q2 - 2019 Q2), you get 36% per annum growth.

[Iduno]

Also, I think that the wealth distribution is really a red herring in terms of wealth. What really matters is if the lower wealth / income brackets are high enough to have an enjoyable and sustainable standard of living.  Yes I know there are psychological effects if your neighbor has 10 times what you have, and I agree it feels ridiculous that there are people who have multiple-lifetimes' worth of resources at their disposal.  But if your poorest have sustainable food, housing, and health security then the "wealth gap" is really just a tool to manipulate the masses.

Of course, we don't have a minimum where the poorest have food, housing, and health security; those are too tightly tied to employment.  The conservative side of me says they should be tied to some extent to employment, but you should not lose health insurance or your house if you are out a job for a week.  And no, I don't count COBRA as generally it's expensive and terrible.

The normal quality of healthcare here is shit anyway. But at least it's expensive enough to bankrupt you if you get sick (and if you're rich enough not to go bankrupt from being sick, you can probably get actual good healthcare instead of what the proles get).

Of course, we don't have a minimum where the poorest have food, housing, and health security; those are too tightly tied to employment.  The conservative side of me says they should be tied to some extent to employment, but you should not lose health insurance or your house if you are out a job for a week.

Eh... I understand the sentiment, but ultimately I don't think -- especially in the richest country on the bloody planet -- anyone should be going homeless, starving, or dying of preventable or curable health concerns, even if they don't work. The price for that should be at most a lack of luxuries, not fucking dying, or starving, or living on the streets, y'know?

How are they going to maintain an unsustainable level of wealth growth without juicing the poor, though? [/s]

And a big point of where the money is going to come from ... why do you think USA has such a big prison population compared to just about anywhere else?

Prisons are good for slave labor, and you can convict people of anything. Then set tougher sentencing to make sure they stick around.

There's also funny stuff like withholding a certain amount of pay until right around summer, where you get a big payout of "vacation money" that sends a hefty percentage of the population out of the country in a mass exodus to Spain. Then there's a period in November-December where you pay half income tax, since it's the holidays and you probably need the cash.

The term "Nanny state" really does apply in some areas, heh.

What's a vacation?

[Frumple]

I think a vacation is the day or two off you get for holidays, sometimes? If you're lucky enough to have a job that gets them. Maybe. Think most jobs seem to accrue some time off stuff, but that's inevitably less "vacation" and more "please don't fire me while I deal with a family/medical emergency".

[Kagus]

What's a vacation?

Those days you get to take off from work while still getting paid! You know, the legal minimum of 25 working days a year, plus whatever extra you earn by doing overtime (you can choose to earn vacation time or extra pay).

[Iduno]

What's a vacation?

Those days you get to take off from work while still getting paid! You know, the legal minimum of 25 working days a year, plus whatever extra you earn by doing overtime (you can choose to earn vacation time or extra pay).

Damn, where do you work. That sounds great.

[Kagus]

What's a vacation?

Those days you get to take off from work while still getting paid! You know, the legal minimum of 25 working days a year, plus whatever extra you earn by doing overtime (you can choose to earn vacation time or extra pay).

Damn, where do you work. That sounds great.

Norway. We've actually got laws for protecting the employees an' stuff!

...also lots of bizarre laws and regulations that are in place "for your own good", like stores not being allowed to sell alcohol after 8 PM (6 PM on Saturdays) and obscene taxes and fees on cars because you "really shouldn't use them that much". There are also laws on the books that say you're not allowed to work two weekends in a row, but stuff like bars and cafés have exceptions to that.

And a consequence of all the employee protection laws is that employers will generally be really careful about hiring anyone new, because once you're hired they're pretty much stuck with you unless you commit fraud or try and burn the building down. They need to provide adequate grounds for terminating any employment contract. Which, being a nice thing, some people of course abuse the shit out of it and laze about while doing the barest minimum required to not get fired. And businesses love part-timers, because if you're not working 100% then a good half of the protection clauses just don't apply to you.

But hey, I mean... Free healthcare.

[Reelya]

What's a vacation?

Those days you get to take off from work while still getting paid! You know, the legal minimum of 25 working days a year, plus whatever extra you earn by doing overtime (you can choose to earn vacation time or extra pay).

Damn, where do you work. That sounds great.

Same here, Australia, and standard agreement is 4 weeks paid leave / 10 paid sick days per year. And our site isn't even unionized and the people from the union sites say we're getting a raw deal. Also minimum wage here is almost $20 and there's none of that tipping-wage bullshit.

EDIT: also they have some decent overtime where I'm working. Saturdays are time-and-a-half for the first 3 hours, and double-time after that. Public holidays are paid days off at full wage, but you can optionally work the public holiday as well, then you get your normal pay plus the hours you actually did, but at time-and-a-half, for effectively 2.5 times normal pay. Also, I have to point out that this is considered to be a fairly shitty job that I have.

[Telgin]

Whereas I live in the US and work for a tech company with "unlimited vacation" where you start to get weird looks and potentially a private talking to if you go much over 2 weeks.  I used to get 5 weeks a year before we were bought out by this company, but that was only because I'd been here almost 10 years at that point and new people only got 2 weeks.