Passionately Promoting A More Perfect World

ohemult:

fresh-outoffucks:

pastel-hutt:

Something my middlest brother pointed out yesterday:

The wealthiest people on Earth do literally nothing with their wealth. They do an awful lot with their power, but not the hoarded wealth itself. Any spending or reinvestment is minuscule in proportion to the sheer amount that exists just to sit there and accrue. The wealth grows far faster than it can be spent, so any argument that spending is itself an efficient form of redistribution falls apart. 

Under capitalism, capital races to become inert wealth. It is not a self-perpetuating dynamic system, it’s a system degrading toward a kind of heat death.

Of course. If they spent their money. They wouldn’t have money anymore. The rich suck money out of circulation in the economy and it stagnates indefinitely with them. Any amount they spend, no matter how ridiculous to us will never be a significant fraction because that’s what makes them rich and that’s how they stay rich.

The more rich people there are, and the richer they are, the weaker any economy becomes. There’s no way around it.

Their class warfare propaganda castes themselves as economic saints who “create jobs” as if they’re paying all their wealth out to their employees. If that were the case they’d be losing money the more they expand their business. But that’s not how business works so. Duh. That is a lie. They expand their business only to expand their profits and they always make far more than they pau back, so, literally the more jobs they create the more they suck out of the economy.

They also cast the poor as a burden, in order to pit those with a little to lose (middle/working class) against those with nearly nothing to lose (working poor), keep them squabbling with each other over the scraps of their salaries and tax funded benefits and nobody thinks about the tiny minority that has EVERYTHING and leaves everyone else squabbling over scraps.
But the truth is, the poor can’t afford to save money, sequestering it from the economy. They spend every penny they make and still go hungry. But all that cash flow strengthens the economy. Every penny of every benefit they collect doesn’t stay with them, it gets paid by the government to private interests, like grocery stores and land lords. Benefits for the poor don’t go to the poor they go through the poor right back to the rich anyway.
The poor are the opposite of a burden, no matter how much benefits they receive, everything they get they pay out immediately.

The rich are the ones taking more and more away and never pay back in as much as they take out. The rich are by definition the only real burden on the taxpayer and the economy. If they are allowed to keep getting richer without limit, eventually our economy, society, and political system will collapse under the weight of the money they amass.

The whole idea of market-based economies is that money is in circulation. People work, get paid, use this money to buy things, which pays other people so they can make/buy more things, that are bought/made, ad infinitum.

But when you take a bunch of the profit out of the calculation it just collapses.

So, there are several misconceptions here, but I just want to address the root one. There’s just one mistake here on which everything else in this thread seems to be premised:

Rich people are not dragons.

Rich people do not take all their money, convert it into solid gold, and then keep it in a chest that they defend from adventurers. That is what it would mean to remove money from circulation. Almost no one does that.

The OP says “reinvestment is minuscule in proportion to the sheer amount that exists just to sit there and accrue". This, quite frankly, makes no sense at all. The way wealth is accruing is as returns on investments. That’s basically what it means to be part of the capitalist class - you invest money and receive the returns from that. Usually these returns are reinvested because, if they weren’t, they would stop growing.

Honestly, I can’t even understand what alternative mechanism OP could be thinking of. If the money if being taken out of the economy, how is it still growing? Does gold multiply when you leave it in a locked box?

Basically, when you receive income (whether investment income or otherwise), there are three things you can do with it: spend it, invest it (loans (including lending to the bank) also count), or bury it (ie: take it out of circulation somehow). Only the second option leads to your money increasing. If you’re the type of person who buries your money in the back yard, you’re probably not gonna end up rich.

Investment means that the money rich people have actually tends to go into the pockets of businesses, consumers, and governments. The types of entities that are net-debtors, basically. They then use it to buy all the shit that they want, on the basis that they will later give money back to the investors, whether as interest or dividends or something else. Then those investors tend to invest the money all over again in something else.

(Alternatively, they might invest via speculation. However, speculation is literally “buying something now in the hopes that it’ll be worth more later” so, if your argument is “rich people don’t buy shit”, speculation is basically the last example you should give.)

This is why very rich people rarely own much cash, and why their net worths can only be estimated. They aren’t holding onto a lot of wealth. What they have is claims on wealth. They hold the promise that other people will give them wealth in the future, and how much those promises are worth can vary, depending on how likely the people making those promises are to pay up.

So, in conclusion, while there are a lot of complaints one could make about the wealthy (especially that they’re too powerful and have too much political influence), the claim that they suck money out of the economy is completely false. That’s not how it works. That’s not even related to how it works. The idea that rich people have uninvested money that somehow grows anyway is a kind of magical thinking that I can’t even wrap my head around.

(via zamboni-whisperer)