Who are the protesters behind Occupy Wall Street–and what do they want?
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irishpatrick
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There has always been a significant difference between the wealthy and the middle class and poor…always. The problem is not with the wealthy, they have earned what they have. The problem is with a system that is under assault by an administration that simply will not do anything to help businesses flourish. The USA has the highest corporate tax rate in the world (some say second highest, but that is just splitting hairs). At such rates, businesses often have no choice but to stop employing, or to lay off people, or to ship jobs out of the country (all three are happening). Today, there are constant threats to take more, and more, and more from companies and the wealthy–it is not surprise they do not want to invest, they have no trust in their own futures.
What the protesters are really angry about (most of them are young) has nothing to do with idealism or anything like that, it has to do with the fact that jobs are scarce right–they are afraid they won’t be able to earn a living (a very sound concern btw). So, what they should be doing is protesting the hostile environment our nation takes toward businesses and banks (banks ARE businesses btw).
They should not be attacking profit makers, they should be telling our government to get out of the way of businesses so we can have many more profit makers, thus we’d have many more well paying jobs.
Profit is good, not evil, and yes sometimes people take very large sums in profits, that is just part of the system. Without profits, there’d be no jobs. We need to create an atmosphere that will bring more brilliant business people to the top. And, those protesters need to understand that jobs come from our capitalistic system, which means we need to encourage business growth, not stifle growth.
Get the government off the back of business and see jobs flourish, and when jobs flourish those protesters will disappear!
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Vonier
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Ah…Scott Walker in league with the Koch brothers. Scott Walker did what he had to do to begin to solve his state’s fiscal problems. Sort of what he was elected to do. What Democrats were protesting in Wisconsin was the results of a legal election that didn’t go their way. So they ginned up a massive conspiracy against “the people” to justify trying to negate that election. Did not work.
So now the liberals protest some other nebulous villain, Wall Street(see Koch brothers). It was that wicked Wall Street that hurt us. We must stand up to Wall Street. It’s all their fault. That’s not my name on the bottom of those mortgage papers. Not my name on the car loan. Not my hand swiping that credit card, over and over. Hey, there goes Wall Street. Get 'em.
You really think revolutionizing something is the same thing as a revolution? That’s a typical word game and I’m not playing.
Government on all levels spends too much and not enough people take care of themselves, or even think that they should. Too many people riding in the wagon, not enough people pulling. How long did you think cities and states and Washington DC could pay endless pensions and healthcare and welfare and social security and medicare and disability until there just wasn’t enough to go round?
This is the most simple economics in the world…there’s no such thing as 110% of the pie.
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St_Francis
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Many individuals and companies on Wall Street have suffered from this. Where are Lehman Bros and Bear Sterns? Where are all their employees? Where are the 7,000 laid off from BoA?
As to thise who own stock, there is a lot of stock owned by pension plans. When the value of the stock or fund goes down, the knes who suffer are retired people who paid into the plan, sometimes a union plan, sometimes a company plan, sometimes an individually-held plan, while they were working so as to have money for retirement. But these are regular people, people who worked manufacturing jobs–they are not all fatcats making a killing off Wall Street.
And I notice that the demands of these protesters go far, far afield from Wall Street and college loans.
Democrats didn’t create the populist uprising we are now witnessing - remember what happened in Wisconsin? I believe Scott Walker, backed by the Koch Brothers, can be credited for creating that one.
People choose to commit certain actions. What the OWS folks are doing, what the Wisc teachers did, that was the choice they made. It was not Walker who “created” the “populist uprising.”
There is a huge difference between starting a revolution and revolutionizing the way government works.
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SamH
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With the proper gymnastics you can prove the first part of your claim, what about the second part?
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sedonaman
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Why is it always greed and never envy? The people are their own worst enemy; they do it to themselves by their willingness to “stick it” to “the rich” even though they hurt themselves in the process.
I would like to know how you short real estate.
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Scott_Lafrance
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Well, I guess we agree on most of this then. When politicians game the market, everyone looses, particularly the taxpayer.
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JimG
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I don’t know that much about it, only what I read. Freddie and Fannie lost money for the government by insuring an excess of bad loans, but as far as I know they were never involved in CDO’s or Credit Default Swaps. Loans went bad, Fannie and Freddie made lenders whole, or they were made whole by PMI companies or FHA insurance.
But I think that the big money was lost on uninsured loans. I don’t know all the characteristics of the loans living in those subprime pools being generated by the big investment banks. But they were so bad I doubt that they were insurable. Securitization was supposed to somehow protect mortgage bond buyers against loss by pooling together a mix of loans. But it didn’t, because the loans were just too similar in one particular way–they were bad loans destined for default!
Investment banks were accustomed to bundling corporate loans; and they didn’t look closely enough at what default rates would do to their pools. They didn’t even look closely enough at what was in their pools.
When a few hedge fund managers tried to bet against the housing boom, they had to beg the investment banks to sell them credit default swaps. It was like the buyers of CDS were buying insurance against loss in the CDO pool. Finally the investment bankers sold it to them. The bankers thought it was a guaranteed profit for them.
CDS buyers had to in effect pay an insurance premium monthly for the right to claim a loss when the CDO’s went bad. But the "premium was only 25 or 30 basis points against the possibility of collecting billions when the CDO’s fell. Still, the bankers thought they had the better part of the deal, since S&P rated their CDO’s triple-A.
When the market did start to turn against the CDO’s in favor of the CDS’s there was one thing the hedge fund managers couldn’t figure out: who was on the other side of these crazy deals? Some clueless foreign banks? Some clueless very rich CDO buyers? No. It turned out the investment bankers who had been selling them the credit default swaps were not middlemen; they were keeping the long side of the trade for themselves! And they lost big.
The hedge fund managers recounted in Michael Lewis’s book, “The Big Short” did blame the investment bankers. Some of them thought their traders and CEO’s should go to jail. But after reading the book, I can only say, for what? Incompetence? Because that’s about the best case he makes. And it was the bankers’ incompetence that made the hedge fund managers rich.
The only conclusion I reached after reading his book was that you don’t have to be real smart to work on Wall Street.
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SamH
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Thanks for the info - I’ll see if I can find “The Big Short”.
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new_User1357246
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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States
The wealth distribution has skewed very significantly towards the rich in the last 30 or so years (see graphs in link above)
And how do things like the estate tax hurt business, at all? That is an example of a policy that made no fiscal sense to eliminate. Thankfully that has been re-instituted.
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sedonaman
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A small business is worth $2 million. The owner dies. His heirs don’t have the money to pay the death tax, so they have to sell it and give a big chunk to the government. No justification for it at all aside from an envious electorate.
BTW, can you give some numbers [not adjectives] on what constitutes in your mind a fair “distribution” of wealth, assuming that wealth is “distributed” as opposed to created?
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new_User1357246
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Except that the cutoff is nowhere near $2 million. the first $5 million are tax free and after that the rate tops off at 35%z
Can you give some quantitative numbers as to an unfair wealth distribution? Or does that not exist, in your opinion?
I have no idea what a fair wealth distribution would look like. They have done studies, however, on the optimal distribution of wealth (for economic growth). At the very least I think we would want to try to be close to the optimal range for that. People can totally disagree on how that should be achieved, but at some level, that should be the goal.
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Luigi_Daniele
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Which is theft. Look, the tycoon that died already paid taxes on his income, why should his heirs have to pay again?
but a lot of his income was from dividends or other passive income some say.
To which I respond: so what? He made all his investments with after tax dollars.
Are all the rich perfect? Heck no. Stealing from them won’t make them any more perfect. And I am certain that they will create more jobs investing their own money, than having the government “invest” it for them.
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SalesianSDB
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Apparently they don’t know that we don’t have a truly capitalistic system. This came about through corporatism, not capitalism. The mess came about through GOVERNMENT involvement and GOVERNMENT being in bed with these corporations.Of course it’s possible. I’m sure there aren’t any communist sympathies within the Occupy Wall Street group…
http://weaselzippers.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Anti-Capitalism.jpg
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Luigi_Daniele
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Agree completely.
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sedonaman
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I don’t see that it changes anything to move the numbers.
Yes. Everyone’s net worth is the same: $100,000. Actually, we can pick any number because if wealth is equalized, it will be equalized at a low level, and in this example, $100,000 will be essentially worth very little. There are plenty of examples to support this. Communism is an attempt to equalize wealth. Would you want to live in a communist society? Or would you rather live in a country where there was only one chance in a million of your becoming rich rather than zero chances?
If you have no idea what a fair wealth distribution would look like, how can you make statements like, “That is an example of a policy that made no fiscal sense to eliminate” and “Thankfully that [death tax] has been re-instituted”? Its very purpose is to “redistribute” wealth. You might also explain how wealth is “distributed” as opposed to “created.”
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new_User1357246
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It’s not theft, by definition. People are double or triple taxed for various things all the time. It is the government’s right to levy taxes. In this case the government is levying a tax that can be tremendously beneficial to society and the biggest argument against it is that it is unfair. Cry me a river…
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Luigi_Daniele
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- Says who?
- So you voluntairily give a higher percentage of your income than required as taxes?
- Government has legitimate functions. This is not one of them. You’re just happy with it because it is not your ox being gored.
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sedonaman
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Unfortunately, taxes considered excessive by the rich have a way of working their way down to the middle and lower classes. A good example is the AMT that was crafted to “get” 22 [or some small number] of rich people who paid nothing in the late '60s. It is now hitting the middle class.High taxes are also an encouragement to lobby, another thing these protesters probably want to see ended.
A good, but lengthy, article is spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the . It’s not liberal or conservative; it just tells it like it is.
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new_User1357246
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Says plenty of economists and politicians. The estate tax is nothing new (predates federal income tax) and has been studied extensively. There are, of course, arguments against it as well, I just don’t find them as compelling.
- Says who?
- So you voluntairily give a higher percentage of your income than required as taxes?
- Government has legitimate functions. This is not one of them. You’re just happy with it because it is not your ox being gored.
As to your second point, that’s not how taxes work. There’s a reason we are not just eliminating taxes altogether and letting people donate to the government. The reason is that that system wouldnt work.
Your third point is all opinion.
In the end, this is all going to come down to opinion and different world views so I don’t know if this discussion is worth continuing…
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