Income inequality

If I had even 5.00 extra per month I would be throwing it in the stock market.

I know, I know......some people don't even have $5.00 extra per month......you can call them on their I-phones and verify it.

So in "celebration" of the tax change, I went and bought a car real quick before year-end so I can still take the state sales tax deduction

But - to what LB said, I took a loan on part of it, even though I didn't need to.  Why?  Because with loan rates so low, I can make more money in the stock market.

Income inequality is such a hoax.  It's nothing more than a mechanism to make one group of citizens hate another group of citizens so powerful people can use that hate to stay in power by "protecting" one group from the evils of the other..  It's as simple as that.

OK, I'll bite.  What statistics would that be?

The key word you used is "believe".  Facts don't require belief, they're just facts.  Where people get in trouble is when they inject "belief" into science or economics and make it something that it is not.

There is income inequality and there always has been and there always will be.  A rocket scientists will always make more money than a grocery store cashier and rightfully they should.  The whole idea of "income inequality" is to make it so people "believe" that its a bad thing and at the expense of the poor.  All these rich people are rich at the expense of the poor.  That's the biggest load of garbage ever told.
The other big hoax is that the income inequality prognosticators like to pretend like there's just one pie out there so if I take a bigger chunk of it then it's at the expense of others.  The vast majority of wealth created the past 20 years was new wealth that was added to the pie, not redistributed throughout.  When a college kid puts pixels on a screen and turns it into a $100B company that's not at the expense of somebody else it's a whole new industry that never existed before.
When you even look at the percentages of the actual wealth distribution all groups have been going up.  The wealthy have gotten wealthier, the middle class have gotten wealthier, and the poor have gotten wealthier. 

The real dynamic of the income inequality hoax is that it's a belief system used to justify stealing money from rich people and giving it to the government.  We all know it's never going to the poor.  It's class warfare at it's core and a complete hoax!!!
Same thing can be said for global warming (sorry, climate change) because it's not about the climate changing at all.  The climate has always changed and always will change.  The powers that be use the hoax of climate change being a destructive force (just like income inequality is a destructive force) to take money from the rich and give it to the government.

Remember, politicians always have to have a boogie man to protect you from.  Virtually every politician runs on a platform of something they're going to save us from.  With income inequality they can justify class warfare against the rich.  Elect me and I'll protect you from the rich and even take their money and give it to you (not really, but I'll tell you that to get your vote).  It pains me that there are so many educated people in this country who can't see something so obvious.

Originally posted by Oysterboy Tony, Jeez, not everything is a gov'mint conspiracy to strip you of your money and give it to the poor. Climate change: Our planet enjoys a temperate climate because of the presence of several greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere that help trap and retain heat. Among these gasses is CO2 and CH4 (methane). CO2 levels have risen since the industrial age based on increasing rates of fossil fuel consumption (this can be measured in ice cores in antarctica and elsewhere). Put more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere you get more greenhouse effect, voila the planet warms. It is true that there have been fluctuations in climate over recorded history, but we now have (again, according to scientific data) the highest CO2 levels we have seen on this planet since the evolution of metazoans. Income inequality: Better put as the "wage gap". There has been a very slow rise in hourly wages in this country since the great recession. In contrast, investment incomes have risen substantially (all I have to do is look at my 403b to know that) over the same time. Throw in that wages are taxed at a higher rate than investment income and a number of tax loopholes and economic "rents" that cause market distortions, and it really just makes perfect sense that the gap between the haves and the havenots is growing. Again, this is measurable. The argument should NOT be with these measurable trends, but with potential policy remedies to these trends. One remedy is to do nothing, perfectly valid direction to go in. For climate change, the last admin decided to go with policy adopted by all the industrialized nations, while the current administration decided to back out of these agreements. My bet is the next admin will go in a different direction and in the meantime we have see states and some sectors of private enterprise react (I read that wind turbine technician was the fastest growing job sector). Nevertheless, yo-yo governmental policy like this is my biggest problem with rule by executive fiat - but this is what we have for government now - a feckless Congress (on both sides). No administration has done much about the wage gap since the 1970's as the political donor class is quite strong and benefits mightily from the current tax structure. One piece of history though is that periods of high income equality in the US (Gilded age, 1920's before depression) have always preceded times of great change within our society and this has driven changes in government policy (ie, T Roosevelt and Taft in trust busting in 1900-15, and the Great Compression and New Deal during the 30-40's). Personally, I think this is just societal reaction to the view that things are not "fair" within our society if the view develops that people are unable to improve their lives with a reasonable level of effort. If the economic deck is stacked against them and they perceive that the level of work (and luck) necessary to succeed is too great, society adjusts. See, no where in there did I suggest that the gov'mint revenuers should come take your stuff away As for the term belief, OK some things are just fact and should not be subject to "belief" per se. Like climate change and income inequality. I do not believe these things, these are measurable facts.

lol, well if the government isn't going to take my money then how do you propose they fix the wage gap?  Reading between the lines I'm assuming you feel it's the governments job to "fix" the wage gap so I'm curious how they would do that.

As for climate science we've hashed it over many many times here but the main issue I have isn't that CO2 isn't increasing, it isn't that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, it isn't that global temperatures aren't increasing.  It's that people use legitimate science and inject political alarmism into it and use it as a justification for confiscating wealth from citizens.  I know you talk about these programs with wind turbines and treaties but they all involve the government spending billions and billions of dollars and that money has to come from somewhere.
The legitimate science has shown that CO2's warming effect is not as much as predicted.  The earths climate is infinitely complex and when one thing goes up there's 100 other things that adjust to compensate and adjust.  Obviously the temperatures have been going up for 100's of thousands of years, but the level of increase of late isn't anywhere near as "alarming" as scientists once thought.

Nice!  Need any shirts?

Hey you guys.  We were trying to argue about income inequality and climate change and you had to throw in guns and ducks.  haha

We went to the lake the other day and I was quite surprised how many geese (I think that's what I'm supposed to call them) there were in the icy water.  Seemed like the big cold spurt got them in the mood to head south or something.

They already headed out before I took this picture, but these were the conditions:

We get a lot of these guys up in my area, but they're usually protected and hunting is allowed very infrequently.  They're pretty smart as far as birds go and tend to be a pest.  My old labrador had a great time chasing them around though

Tony - you will have ducks and geese as long as you have open water (providing the snow doesn't get deep enough to cover waste grain in the fields).  That lake of yours, which will take much longer to freeze because of it's depth, will always be a late season killing machine.

Ah, those climate scientists.  Kind of interesting that no matter what happens to the climate it's because of CO2. 
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/28/record-breaking-winter-cold-dont-worry-the-climate-explainers-have-it-covered/

Not to mention, the "record cold" being used as an argument is pretty much a U.S. / Canada aberration right now.  Worldwide, that's not the case at all.