Okay... Your point went moot again, or I'm just too blind to see a connection.
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If someone who is rich opens a business selling ONLY food, and does it at prices that are competitive while still allowing him to make between 5 and 10% overall profit, and the money HE makes is taxed at a 35% rate, and he does not try to gouge the customer and only changes his prices based on supply and demand (while still maintaining the above profit margin), and his income after taxes is still right around $10 million per year, what is your opinion of this person?
I read the situation given. The question you ask is irrelevant and makes no sense. I don't have an opinion of this person since I do not know them. And even if I did, this has nothing to do with the workings of the economy.
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Next if I may, I would like you to compare that person to someone who DOES try to gouge the customer and ignores supply and demand and has a profit margin of around 25%; he's basically the opposite of the person above. And let's say that he also takes in around $10 million after taxes. What is your opinion of this person? Does this in any way change your opinion of the first person?
Again, no opinion on somebody I do not know as in personality. How their company is ran is not substantial to shaping an opinion on their personalities.
Admittedly, the second case seems, as you wished for me to notice, leaning towards exploiting people. I don't see a point in saying "the CEO is an evil man", that's what the republicans do all the time. I will only say that if the company has poor service it will lose customers. Simple as that. Again, it has little to do with the place of rich people in the economy.
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Now consider the IN DEPTH implications of my examples. Their incomes are the same but their profit margins are different. Which means that one of them has a lot more customers than the other; one of them has a much larger workforce; one of them actually seems to care that the consumer can afford his merchandise. But according to the logic you presented above, both of them are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, which only makes sense if all rich business owners were like my latter example.
You brought down the argument to how kind or mean is the rich person running the company. I will not start claiming that rich people are evil, nor do I remember having done this here. Neither will I say that every rich person consciously tries to exploit the system. Have you read my post from
Wed May 04, 2011 9:24 am? It explains why too many too rich people are not healthy for a county's economy. It has nothing to do with how good they are or how much they care about their company.
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Just because there aren't a lot of people who are smart enough to do that is no reason to blame the rich.
Blame the man dying on desert for seeing a mirage of an oasis. I will not say those people who TOOK the mortgages are not to blame, but blaming anybody doesn't get us anywhere. When the cops are trying to make young people stop smoking pot they crack down on the dealers. Chasing the customers is a waste of time, the police knows that. You should too. I'm asking here not who to blame, but how to fix the situation so that the scenario doesn't repeat. And here it's obvious, regulate the mortgages given, if you give mortgage, you cannot package it up and sell it. Easy and simple.
But here you seem to have this skewed viewpoint that you cannot regulate the banks more because that will screw over the rich, and it's bad. As I said, the rich will still be rich, even if you force them to earn a bit less. Secondly, the economy doesn't live on the rich, it lives and works mainly on the middle class consumers, so no, regulating the rich would not bring down the system. And finally, the rich will be fine, these solutions are in place in other countries, and they work fine, the rich are still rich, they still donate to charity, etc.
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Now, if you have a legitimate reason to blame the rich for something--and I'm talking specifics, such as "this guy/gal/corporation fired a couple hundred employees but gave all their executives million dollar payoffs," then I can definitely see the problem you have with that.
Glad we agree there. Because every company (and bank) is made to make money (profit). We know that, in fact the few that aren't there to make profit have special names, like charities or non-profit organisations. If you leave the people running the company with a choice to make more profit at higher risk, they will ponder whether to do it or not. But if you remind them that they are too big to fail, and even if they fail they will get bailed out back on their feet by the country, there is no need for them to worry any more, and so they go off making extra profit by causing extra damage. CEOs being able to decide who will take what payoffs are where the danger lies. Giving a person the power to decide on their own wage is a completely irresponsible thing to do. And those are some of the things that need fixing.
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However, you also have to realize that this is NOT ALL OF THE RICH PEOPLE. A couple dozen millionaires making each other wealthy at the expense of a few thousand is not something you blame on everyone, because the rest of them are not necessarily like that.
Again, it's not about being "like that". The rich invest most, the poor spend most. It is how it works, and has NOTHING to do with their personalities and anything like it. Read my post again for reference. In reference to my older posts, yes, few rich people are as greedy as to steal from the country or use fake charities, but every loophole is still a loophole, even if nobody exploits it. I'm not calling for hating the rich, I'm calling for regulating the companies and fixing loopholes. There's a big difference there.
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In regards to consuming, we are Legion. We have the power. The People can sway just as well as a corporation. It just takes time and perseverance and cooperation. If a corporation wants to put a law into place, even ONE person can take this bill to court for its Constitutionality, because in the United States of America, regardless of what the Many want to do, it still has to be Constitutional and not infringe on the rights of the Few.
As true as it may be, I don't see how it relates to the point we're discussing. When I said "the rich can lobby and buy the politicians to get bills passed that favour their money gains" I never said any of those were or had to be unconstitutional.
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I know it seems like I'm just spouting this kind of Power To The People bullshit, but in reality there's nothing wrong with what I'm saying. It's just not sympathetic, especially to those who lost everything because of a defaulted loan. But in that sense, I have no sympathy. You do NOT enter into a loan agreement without understanding the rules and abiding by them. You do NOT take on debt if you have no way of paying it back. These are simple legal and economic guidelines. People who don't want to follow them have no business complaining when shit happens.
Yes, you do not. I agree completely that they shouldn't have. But note, as I mentioned, that:
1) Telling a hobo investing the $10 he just got is better than spending it on food right now seems stupid. However true it may be, the less people have the more they have to strive with today, and the less they care about tomorrow. So again, I won't take the blame off of those people for getting into trouble, but I want you to admit that it was PREDICTABLE that they would go for it, if given the chance.
2) I don't want to play the blame game. Imho both the giver and the consumer is to blame for causing trouble. It is the bank's job to make sure they don't give mortgages to people who cannot pay them off. Banks simply didn't do their job, or didn't have to. Wherever the blame may lie, I want you to say how you think the problem can be FIXED so that it doesn't happen again. And I think trying to educate the masses not to get loans would be quite a lot harder than ordering the banks to make sure they don't give too risky loans to begin with.