Thats pretty sad and goes to show such a tiny tiny minority hold all the money and the power.

Its pretty sad that such a large majority of a nation are buying gold grills, designer jeans, iphones, jewelry and maxing out their credit cards with useless crap... then bitching about those who don't.

:2 cents:

Rich people invest.

Poor people spend.

That concludes this lesson on Basic Personal Finance As It Applies to Macroeconomics 101.

I don't consider politicians my betters.

For all you who don't "understand" what they are protesting about, or who is who, and blah blah blah.

Here is a REALLY good article sort of explaining a lot of it - http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...ating-20111025

^ Seriously, if you plan on making any more posts in a OWS thread in your life, please for the love of god read that article. So tired of people (in general) just blabbing away on topics they don't understand. So fucking annoying.

It is sad. It's also sad that most of the 89% sit around and do nothing but collect tax money to support themselves and even sadder that they demand the top 11% aught to give up their money too for no other reason than it's greedy not to.

what you kids fail to understand is that anyone can become rich as proven by all the people born middle class who now populate the Forbes Richest list.

there's not some secret society of rich people holding you back, its simply your lack of intelligence and ability.
many of the world's richest people started out in life with less than you.
they had the ability, you don't.

What you don't understand... is that if you have to keep explaining it, then no amount of explaining will matter. Hence the futility of their efforts.

Bullshit. Rich people spend tons. How many jobs you think a rich person creates and supports when he buys a mansion, (company full of employees to build it, housekeepers, gardeners, nannies to maintain), boat (company full of employees to build it, deckhands, captain storage & maintenance mechanics to keep it running). I know plenty of people in the 1% and they tend to spend a shitload of money and balance it out with saving some as well.

I know 2 people in the 1% that never made more than 50k in a single year.

Personally I have been in and out of the 1% myself almost 4 times in my career, and when I wasn't in it, I didn't ask anyone to give me money, I just worked harder.

Speaking in generalities like that is just ignorant, the 1% don't tend to stay in the 1% and enter in and out of it many times in a lifetime. That is what has been always so great about the USA, that this opportunity to move up and down exists and is close to impossible in other countries.

You idiots who think no one is entitled to keep the majority of the fruits of his labor are nothing short than jealous GREEDY assholes. Sure a tiny portion of the 1% inherited the money and never worked a day in their lives, they can fuck off, but that's under 0.1% of the population. Both sides of this argument are serving Kool-Aide, but the marxist message seems to have a bit more sugar in it. Drink up losers.

odd then that we see so many OWS signs being carried by actual OWS protesters that DON'T talk about big banks and the government. And the whole "warren buffet doesn't pay enough" argument is for the stupid.

All of the stuff you listed didn't really happen with the previous generation yet they were still poor or at best, middle class. They didn't have credit card, they saved money but in the end they didn't really have much more of anything to show for it.

How do you justify the average CEO salary being 335 times that of an average employee? Just in 1998 it was about half that. If things continue to go this way, we'll eventually see the average CEO making 1000 times what the average worker does.

As for the 'anyone can get rich' idea.. sure in theory but just about all of those hugely successful people have some kind ot catalytic event that propels them towards success and without, most likely would never of achieved such success. It could come from a connection that person just happens to have vs another person with the exact same idea who didn't have that connection. Guess who will be successful? Or like the guy who was lucky enough to get a relative to lend him 100k of capital vs the guy who has no one to lend him capital, etc etc etc.

the unable, unintelligent have plenty of excuses.

Rich people aren't continually spending MORE than they have to create the appearance of wealth. Poor people continually spend more than they have.

Obviously everyone spends money. Certainly an astute observation on your part. Great Job!


Yet you speak in generalities....

success is part intelligence, part imagination and part timing/luck.

The Soviets and Chinese tried to create your workers paradise where everything was fair. Guess what? Nothing was fair and it all failed regardless... and here we are. The worlds largest economy. I am sure you would have been happy with a shitty little apartment and factory job, no car and cheap vodka to dim the pain of the harsh winters as you walked to work.

from Mc Hammer to Nicholas cage to Donald Trump they all get behind and in debt then file bankruptcy. Trumpt took out loans to pay loans LOL

humans spend, it matters not if you are poor or rich. In fact, the rich tend to spend much more as can be seen by COUNTLESS examples of celebs and washed up investors.

the poor buy chargers and put rims on em to bling in the hood, the rich buy yachts and default on the loan.

I am in no way in favor of a communist type system. Although its funny, what you describe is life for a good majority of americans. Regardless my main issue is with a few select at the top who don't want more wealthy people, they want less. As there is only so much wealth to go around, the more that make it to the 'top', the less wealth there is for those who already are there have to gain.

We are talking about general rules, not exceptions to the rule. As a general rule, rich people invest money. As a general rule, poor people blow it as fast as possible.

An economy is NOT a zero sum system. That line of reasoning is a favorite logic of the poor. "If someone has more, then it means we have less". Thats not how an economy works. Mark Zuckerburg didn't cause people to be poorer by creating facebook.

no, actually success is part intelligence and part hard work.
the unsuccessful thinks luck plays a part.

what have you accomplished in this world?
why are you not working harder to accomplish more?
sitting around posting on a chat board waiting for your timing/luck to show up is opportunity wasted.

It's a private corporation, the CEO and many times the owner of the company is entitled to whatever he wants, his biz, his decision. If I had enough money in my biz to pay myself 1000X my employees, it's my money, and if the employees don't like it, they can quit (proving it was a bad decision on my part), but as my company I can do whatever the fuck I want and I don't need a govt' to stick their noses in my business and tell how much I'm allowed to earn off my own business.

If it's a publicly traded company I think it's a bit different since the company and CEO are answerable to the shareholders. Nothing is worse than seeing CEO's being paid millions a year in salary and given 100million in stock options, then the CEO runs the company in the ground and is rewarded for it at the expense of the stock holders. SEC should have some rules setup that they can't do that in a way that screws the shareholders, and as a shareholder you would have the right to demand they change this practice.

If you don't have ownership interests of the company, or are an employee of the company, you should stop using the companies service or buying the companies products if you don't like their biz practice. Otherwise, stop whining and get to work on your own deal.


That's stupid. Most successful people I know did it themselves with little help and nothing more than hard work. The idea of "luck" is being there and knowing where to look and how to execute an opportunity. Opportunities are everywhere but you will never find them if you are busy doing nothing but bitching about your misfortunes.


Rich people spend more than they have to create wealth all the time, far more than a poor person. People get rich all the time borrowing huge sums of money many times more than they are worth, to go into a project they work to death on and pays off in spades in the end.




HA! you obviously have no clue.

Simple.

If you sit back, do eight hours a day, go home and forget about work, and never even try to get into college, you get the basic minimum. If you apply yourself, put yourself through college, work 12 hours a day PLUS take work home with you for twenty years and rarely take a vacation.... You get rewarded for your efforts.

I see it in this industry too. I see people who shut down on Friday afternoon and you can't reach them until Monday. They don't even so much as check their email - even if they work from home. You send me an email during the weekend, and I'm responding to you in a reasonable amount of time.

I worked for the phone company and I was stunned what I saw. I saw people who had worked there for fifteen years who never moved past an entry level position. Why bother? They get raises every year, and more vacation time each year. It made me sick to my stomach. After my first year I got my first promotion, and four years later I was in management making four times as much as people who were twice as old as me.

In the book Good to Great, the author devotes a chapter of their studiees to the personalities of the successful CEO's who helped transition companies from flops to companies that had seen tremendous success over a period of 15 years or more. All of them apportion a great deal of "luck" to their success. That's typically a product of humility rather than a reflection of reality. Google isn't "lucky". Apple isn't "lucky". Microsoft isn't "lucky" etc.

Circumstance often plays a large role. But if one was truly "lucky" - he could just sit in Vegas betting $100,000.00 a time at roulette.

As they say... "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Right... "to create wealth". Debt has a role in business. Debt has a role in the economy beyond impressing friends with new gold teeth and 24" spinners on a shitty ex-police car.

Poor people don't spend to create wealth. Poor people don't go into debt to create wealth.

Poor people go into debt to live beyond their means. This is a key difference in the "rich get richer" complaint.


Well said. Who could argue with the guy who calls "speaking in generalities" ignorant as he speaks in generalities about the wealthy or "1%" in his arguments?

Erm... i guess you win?

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

It was only a matter of time before these idiots showed up.

This movement has no leadership, and anyone can enter, no matter what their objectives or intentions are.

I don't think the people who over ran and took over that building last night were anarchists. They were moving in and out of the building, singing and playing music.

That hardly seems worth it. Have zero life to be successful 20 years later? No thanks. I work 7 days a week but everyone needs to have a life outside of work, otherwise you might as well just kill yourself because you aren't living. Work smarter, not harder.

People always say, stop whining and get to work on your own deal but its a mathematical impossiblity for everyone to be successful. Society wouldn't function properly if everyone was. So what do you say to the % who will simply never be successful no matter how hard they try?

I also don't know what you consider as rich. I don't consider someone making 335k a year rich. A recent artcle said that rich is defined as having 26 million dollars. I don't know if i'd go that far but i'd say you have to make at least 1 million a year to be barely 'rich'. Opportunities might be everywhere but you need the right idea at the right time. Launch facebook in 1998..it would of most likely failed but in 2004-5, it was just what people wanted at the time and it blew up huge. Zuckerberg happened to be the right age to understand the demographic and the programming behind it. Had he been 10 years older, he wouldn't of. Or look at 'domain king Rick Schwartz. Had be been born 15 years later or earlier he never would of been able to register all of the great .com's that made him millions. Would he of been successful elsewhere? Very possibly but not there.

It's not an explanation, I just use basic, common, every day logic.....

Lots of stuff, yesterday it was attention, which they got.

How was I speaking in generalities? I was pointing out that the 1% don't fit the rich banker mold like the media/gov wants you to think they do, I was pointing out that the 1% are incredible diverse and income mobile.


Saying that poor people only spend and rich people invest is the biggest generality I've heard. And completely wrong but exactly what they are teaching now in college and it's a page straight out of Karl Marx's propaganda book. He taught that, and the next page is that the rich get their money from poor people and lock it up, and it's the government's job to take away the money from the rich & give it to the poor people.

thanks I didnt feel like saying it LOL

one need only watch Cribs once or twice to see the wealthy overspend just to show wealth. Shak, aquariums in cars? ummm yeah :1orglaugh the rich spend just to show off more than poor. I saw a woman riding a Rolls the other day. looked used or definitely not the nicest one... yeah she needs that to drive around new orleans. lol

It's perfectly worth it. Work hard, play hard.

I'm not saying I work seven days a week. If I have put in an hour on a Saturday and two hours on Sunday, I'm okay with it.

Put in the bare minimum, you get the bare minimum in return. Push harder and the rewards are much higher.

Could you please use Google for once in your pathetic life.

Let's see... Nam war, peace in general, ending the draft, civil rights from the black movement which was huge, to women liberation, to students and prison reform, and let's not forget the war on poverty which is a mixture of subjects too... and it goes on and on.

Sorry, you are wrong, they did have mixed messages that slowly grew together to form a strong core... but that doesn't mean they dropped all other messages.

Correct, if everyone did the same biz plan at the same time they would all fail. Not all people will have a good idea nor will all people even try, in fact the huge majority of people WILL NEVER EVEN TRY. The reason everyone isn't successful is because the world is a kaotic place where things happen, people get sick, die, lose interest, become lazy, become unmotivated. Some people don't have the intelligence to be a millionaire. But everyone has the ability to try to do so and when you placate people with easy entitlements the motivation to even try is gone.

I can go lookup the stats (not gonna) on how many businesses a successful entrepreneur has had that failed before one succeeded (lots of failures). It takes failure to get the wisdom to succeed in many cases. The ones who learn from their mistakes have a better chance of succeeding, and then there's people who never learn from their mistakes and try to do the same thing over and over expecting to succeed with the same shitty idea.

The idea that you can create your own wealth from your own work is the OPPORTUNITY we should all be guaranteed, and not be penalized for when we achieve it legally. The idea that everyone is entitled to something for nothing is a disaster for any society and it's the path our country is now on.


Our current govt' considers anyone making over 250k a year rich enough to pay extra taxes. To be in the top 1% you need to be making $340k according to the IRS. To be in the top 0.01% you have to make more than $1,432,890 as of 2009 according to the IRS.

I consider "rich" meaning you never have to work another day in your life to maintain your desired lifestyle for you and your family. Everyone number will be different.


As far as your examples with Zuck and the king, that's just silly. Zuch was intelligent enough to succeed at any time IMO, if not with facebook, than something else. Knowing what people want, and how to create it and sell it to them is the mark of a good businessman. The king had the fore site to invest in something and he did and it paid off in spades. Could he done the same thing in another industry? why not, plenty of industries to successfully invest in.

As I said, if you think you're part of the 1%, you have an ego problem... I'm not say you are, I'm simply making a statement.

The tea party didn't start off with a core message, it formed one afterward, at that, not everyone protesting was repeating that message, MOST people protested many various factors, as can easily be seen by a Google search. Unless that core message was Obama being a marxist, communist, liberal, tree huger, anti-christ was part of the tea parties message.

The same goes with the 1960's protests.... it wasn't defined at first, then it became that way... yet still had mixed messages all the way to the end - and without question changed a shit ton of stuff.... those damn hippies!

As a general rule, wealthy people are not earning 500.00 a week and spending 600.00. As a general rule, poor people do.


I have all of Lenins books btw. Russian and English btw.

We are all doomed man. This empire is in its dying days. The last stage is entitlement and a false sense of arrogance. We are a nation of spenders, not a nation of producers. Spending became the new economy and grew into a ponzi scheme that eventually started to crack and fall apart. It is not just a US problem, its happening across Europe as well.

At the end of the day, all you can do is sit back, smile and find happiness where you can. If you make 10,000,000,000.00 tomorrow by creating anti-groupon.com, i'm all for it. If you can do it using Indian child labor, i have no objections. One of the greatest jokes of our existence on this planet is our own arrogance in thinking that any change we fight for is meaningful or will be permanent. It's all just one big theater of the absurd and at the end of the day, you are alone to find/create your own security for yourself and your family.

Completely and utterly wrong, and false. Wealth is continually created, both by the creation of new products and services, improvements on existing products and services, and labor.

As for percentage of wealth, it doesn't make me poorer if my neighbor becomes a billionaire. Wealth is not a zero sum resource where one person having more means someone else has less. It is constantly created and expanded every time a new product or service is created which is determined to have value to other people. In fact if my neighbor becomes a billionaire it actually expands my opportunities to gather more wealth by providing that neighbor with goods or services that he wants and can afford.

The only way that this equation can be changed is by the government, which produces no wealth and can take mine from me by force, rather than the free exchange of wealth for the value of services, products, or labor. If the total wealth created in a society increase, then the PERCENTAGE of the total is inevitably in the hands of fewer, because the larger the amount overall, the greater the potential range is between those with the most and those with the least. Either way, people levels of wealth is never stagnant, which is why taking a "snapshot" of percentages is not an accurate way to perceive the reality.

If wealth is not created, then the total amount of all wealth existed 1,000 years ago. This is plainly not the case. An empty piece of land has a certain amount of value. Plowing and planting that land increases it's value. The rocks on the land have very little value, but if you create processes that extract minerals from that rock that can be used for other things that creates more value. If you extract iron it has more value, and if you then create a shoe for a horse so that it can walk longer you have again increased it's value. If there is a tree on the land it has a certain value. If you create a house with it that people can live in you have created much more value. If you transport those goods to a place where people need them to be that increases their value, etc, etc, etc......

Value and wealth are the same thing. Go ahead and look up VAT. Value added tax recognizes this basic economic fact.

Take a look at this little video. These guys have some decent, although simplistic, videos on basic economics....




.

So wealth is an infinite thing? I somehow doubt it would be possibly for ever person on the planet to possess 10 million dollars each. At some point, it doesn't work. Your neighbor having a billion dollars doesn't make you poor but the success of facebook for example, made myspace poor. Consumer spending can change directions, can't it? People will sell stocks from one company and invest in another. Wealth is not being created there, just re-directed, isn't it?

please go find a job so the adults can talk without being interrupted by your idiocy.

you lie and say there were 1000s of messages then list "Nam war, peace in general, ending the draft," as if they were 3 unique messages.
so out of your 1000s you've actually got 5 if I'm being generous.

please take your idiot "look at me" posts and start your own threads. Because you lack self awareness, you've missed that no one is interested in your thoughts.

darwinism.

thats what I say. You know, that force that has been in place for billions of years and only in the most recent slice of history have we allowed the best of us to be weakened by propping up the least able of us.

Yes but what about the guy who tries and tries and fails and fails until he can't afford to try anymore? Is he not motivated? Does that mean he is not smart? Or does it mean that its very difficult to break into an already developed market? Its quite hard for an a newbie to compete against those already established. There are loads of variables but at the end of the day there are many very competent people who will just never succeed despite their brains, money, etc.

The world relies on people being so poor in third world countries that they will work for pennies. The world relies on people being mcdonalds workers, garbage pickers, etc. Society wouldn't work if everyone was a millionaire.



my point with zukerberg and rick was that timing played a big part in what they were successful in. Of course i think they could of been successful at other things. although perhaps not quite as successful. Its hard to say but regarding what they are successful for, if not for timing, would be completely different. I just wanted to point out that timing and luck does play some part in success.