Not in America anyway. The laws changed and you can no longer discharge debt less than 100k. It's not the clean slate it used to be.

That's really the biggest trouble in America today. Everyone believes there's this safety net, but it's gone. Clinton gutted it in the 90s during the .com boom while the economy was doing so well nobody noticed...

it has to do with how a dollar circulates. I'm in pretty bad shape financially. I had 3 close family members get hit with major illnesses all at once. I'm still recovering and I'm not sure I ever will. What I'm saying is I spend just about ever dollar I get my hands on paying debt and buying food/shelter/transportation. There's a little discretionary funds in there for my kid. I try to let her do thing things her friends (who's parents didn't get economically cock punched non stop for 10 years) do.

Now take a Donald Trump. No matter how greedy he is there's only just so much he can buy. At some point his money is just sitting around, doing nothing. He'll invest some of it, lose some of it, etc. But He's only got so much time in the day to do that. Eventually it becomes a war chest laying around doing nothing.

When we take it even further, to the level the Waltons have achieved what we have is pretty much the dark ages. You've got a small group of folks with _all_ the wealth. They're more or less Gods (Divine Right of Kings, anyone?). They stop investing because, heh, why should they? They already have the best civilization has to offer. As a result things can really only get worse for them.

If the above sounds complicated it's because it is. That's what makes cutting the marginal tax rate so seductive. It sound like an easy answer to the world's problems. Supply side economics, right? But there really is a reason we called them Voodoo Economics...

and he basically said it wouldn't stop him from making more money. We're talking 5% of _billions_ here after all.

you're still living very, very well. Also, these high level marginal tax rates are about the only thing that I've ever seen that solves the problems with income inequality. Specifically how a civilization leans towards oligarchy and stagnation as a smaller and smaller group of people claim all the money for themselves. Wealth builds on wealth, and at least here in America we don't see any end to that. The pie might get bigger, but if my slice gets tinnier ever year it hardly matters...

Put another way, I saw an interview with a multi millionaire complaining she didn't have any political voice anymore because the billionaires money crowded her out...

It's a 9% tax on entertainment. It's not the bloody Spanish Inquisition or the Gestapo. It's become damn near impossible to raise taxes enough to run a city anymore. The Right Wing have a name for it, Starve the Beast. Thing is a big dog is a beast, and that Beast was the only thing keeping the Robber Barons at bay. Doesn't anyone remember what laissez faire meant for 99% of the population in 1900s?

I suppose I could see them complaining if it was a flat 95%, but afaik the UK does Marginal taxes the same as the US, meaning they paid the same taxes as a lorry driver up to certain point.

See, we're offshoring as fast as we can and when we can't do that we bring in more H1-Bs. Hell, I'm starting to see them in non-technical fields like entry level business analysis.

The real solution is protectionism and an end to the H1-B visa program so you don't need a 4 year degree to do something that can be learned in an afternoon. As long as companies use that degree qualification as a quick and easy way to get H1-Bs for free you'll have kid's drowning themselves in debt out of desperation.

then somebody else can pocket it. Either for their own pet project or as tax cuts.

but saving up for a down payment on house is already impossible in my neck of the woods. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

There's a ton of basic science getting done for that $150 mil you're ignoring. I don't even get too made at the F-35s. At the end of the day it's all just socialism. Military Spending is about the only way we lower castes have ever managed to pry money away from the 1% (not counting a few minor victories with Unions that really only happened thanks to the Cold War).

Eisenhower talked about it in his memoirs. He and a bunch of progressives created the Military Industrial Complex as a way of redistributing wealth. It was the only way he could keep the US Economy going instead of grinding to a halt when the 1% took everything for themselves. As I recall he was guilty over it and thought the harm done was worse than the help, but the only folks I know doing OK right now have gov't jobs that either are or depend on the Military...

At least in America if you don't move into management you're dead meat by 40, 50 tops (unless you're some sort of genetic freak). Around that time it becomes impossible to put in the 50+ hour work weeks at a moments notice let alone compete with cheap H-1b labor. It's not even age discrimination. They don't care that you're old, they care that you either can't or won't put in tons of overtime they don't pay you for.

Or at least I hope you are, and you're not just a paid shill/astroturfer (you're a bit too crude for that), but you've also never had a mini-gun pointed at him by private "security" personal because you asked for better pay. You've never had terrorists come in the night and cut your families throats for the same thing (google "Coca-Cola South America" sometime). You have no bloody idea what the hell your talking about. If you did you probably wouldn't be trolling it and you'd go back to goatse and Natalie Portman Hot Grits.

And not just story time? When I used to gm I always had a hard time incorporation actual play mechanics into my sessions and caught myself just telling a story...

Google rarely, if ever, allows real malware to slip through. Yes, there is adware and exploitive free to play games, but you can uninstall them and they're gone. What makes malware malware is you need to ffr to get rid of it.

I serve some ads on my site glimmersoft.com (shameless plug) and I only serve Google ads for just that reason. There's plenty of folks with better rates but they just don't have the resources to keep up with the bad guys.

you're thinking about the upper middle class, not the rich. The 1%. They mostly horde their wealth. They don't have a lot of options. No human being could possibly spend the kinds of wealthy they've claimed. It's not even money any more, it's raw power. The ability to decide who lives and who dies. Guys like you and me can't even begin to understand what that's like. It's like trying to understand what a billion is. You can write the digits down on paper but you don't really understand what they mean the way you do for the number 10...