It's practically free. Run the program, wait a bit and your done. A child or a well trained monkey could do it. You OTOH, cost dollars per hour. Seriously, is anyone else scared shirtless that something so abstract and complex as this can be automated? Is any job safe (outside of being a member of the ruling class)?

sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not just sitting around doing nothing. The ultra wealthy are hording wealth in order to create artificial scarcity so they can use their control of society's wealth to bend it to their whims. There's more too it than that in order for them to stay in power, but the basic element is conservationism. e.g. making sure _nothing_ changes. Controlling all of society's wealth is a very effective way to achieve that. The constant desperation brought on by artificially induced poverty makes everyone else very conservative and very opposed to change out of fear that things will get worse; that you'll lose what little you have. The 1% use this to keep folks from questioning why they have so little when the top guys have so much. It's also very important that no one ever notices that if the 1% didn't exist we could all live pretty well. This isn't me pulling $h!t out of my proverbial back side. We're already producing enough food to feed the world's population. And giving poor folks access to birth control & education has shown to control population perfectly (maybe even a bit too much). We can do it, but not when we've got 1% of the world consuming 60% of the resources.

Sorry, again it's complicated. I don't know how to boil it down to sound bites that work. I've got a few (e.g. "I don't want insurance, I want health care") but if I was as good as Karl Rove I'd probably use those skills for the other side. With everything in the world so horrible it takes a saint to use that kind of power for good... :(

but I'm not clever enough to explain why. Please read this. Also follow the link in the article to "This Time is Different" and read that too. We've been doing this little song and dance where banks screw up and blame the public for centuries...

Greece is getting thrown under the bus, "austerity". Aka lower living standards for the working class. It's already " live within your means " with you people. The Greeks weren't living the high life. A bunch of Rick asshats were passing bad debt around during the housing boom and Greece got caught holding the bag. If a big country like Germany had done it no harm no foul. It was too much for Greece though. And the powers that be are gonna use this to steal a bunch of old v folks pensions.

_after_ gov't subsidies. It's also a tiny little car that does poorly in crashes. Why in hells name would I spend that kind of money? I could buy a Versa or an egg (excuse me, the Yaris) for $10k less and get the same features. There's no way in hell that car is going to save me $10k over the course of it's life. It doesn't help that it's a Chevy...

it's that wages aren't coming close to matching real inflation. By "real" I mean inflation of necessities (food, shelter and in this case transportation). It's a fact that wages have been declining for 40 years. Also when I was a kid I could get a pretty nice beater for a grand. Work part time over a summer and you had a car you could putz around in. That same kind of beater is $3-$5k now...

Seriously. I've got to see this.

Sure, it's dog slow, but it's hit the asphalt at least twice now and it's still kickin'. Hell, if they'd stop putting a heavy piece of glass on them to make them feel less like the cheap toys they are my kid's iPhone would stop breaking when she drops it.

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.