If I had a quarter of a billion dollars like Mitt Romney, I’d probably still go to WaWa. But the thing is that I wouldn’t have a quarter of a billion dollars for very long. I would give almost all of it away. I cannot in my mind justify one person having that much money while many people are in need. I’m not saying I would support a law against having that much wealth. I wouldn’t. But, on a personal level, I would never feel comfortable having that much money in my possession. It is so far in excess of what I would need to have my dream house and every toy that I could ever want and to provide for my family and my descendants that I would find ways for that money to circulate back into the economy where it would be helpful to people. And I’d hand out C-Notes like candy to every valet, waitress, bartender, or maid I encountered. And I wouldn’t go around talking about how much I like to fire people.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Well said, Booman. I’ve often felt the same way. People piss away so much money on stuff that would be impossible to justify if one maintained any level of consciousness that one third of the world lives on $2 a day or less.
I don’t have anything against people having a nice home and a couple of nice cars. I see nothing wrong with taking some nice trips or blowing some money on a night out on the town. But when people are flying around in private jets and own more homes than they have time for, something is seriously wrong.
been reading you awhile, BooMan, and here’s the hint between the difference of you and Willard:
you are NOT a sociopath.
since you are not, you can’t comprehend how a sociopath like Willard thinks.
I would buy my very good friend Donald Trump some better hair.
I wouldn’t tell anyone I had lotsa money.
I would take care of myself and then donate to where the money would do the most good.
I wouldn’t ever hand out cash,it would unsafe to do that, a robber might just pay a visit to the house or clobber me over the head on the street.
I certainly would. A cap on individual wealth of oh say $100 million sounds about right. I would also cap individual income…to $10 million per annum: every dollar made over that to be taxed at 100%.
Obviously I haven’t thought this all the way through, but does it sound oppressive? Really?? One thing it might do (or more precisely, what I’m hoping it will do) is force the uberwealthy to donate more to charities and/or invest more in local businesses.
Because really,
thisthis is what we’re talking about.We have a “reasonableness” standard when it comes to other measurements, like how much poor families really need to get by. Such a standard is anathema, even to Boo, apparently, when it comes to the filthy rich. Every developed country except the US limits the divide between the top and bottom income levels, either through progressive taxes or straight-out regulation. It is a peculiarly American perversion to believe that a slug like Romney or Dimon is worth thousands of times more than the person cleaning their offices.
I think $100 million is too high for any asset other than a working business, but that’s a matter of compromise. I’d also use tax rates to make it very difficult to take in more than a couple million/year. Seems to me the standard of “too much” is a level where the person doesn’t have to make personal spending decisions anymore: buying a 4th house or 12th car should require some choosing whether that purchase is worth putting off the boat buy, or the overpriced schooling for the spoiled brats.
Unless, of course, somebody can show that the bloated pay actually reflects the recipient’s value to society — which has never been accomplished yet and never will be.
In a recent discussion of money, my wife feels like Booman. I on the other hand would be perfectly comfortable having that money.
But regardless of how much money I ever have or not have, I totally support a hard cap on individual wealth (probably index it to inflation or something).
And I’d hand out C-Notes like candy to every valet, waitress, bartender, or maid I encountered.
Like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas(early on anyway)? 😉
What’s a little bizarre to contemplate is that a quarter of a billion dollars net worth is chump change next to the Koch brothers, the Walton’s, etc. Really. Next to them, Rmoney is poor.
if I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t bother wasting on politics. I’d buy myself a fuckin’ island of my own for use when I wasn’t traveling the globe and having adventures.
I mean, seriously. Politics is a pastime and a game for a rich fuck like Romney.
If I had a quarter of a billion dollars…
The United Mine Workers would be a political powerhouse.
There would be old mill buildings being renovated from Maine to Buffalo.
Half the commercial fishermen in Massachusetts would be conducting cleanup and restocking operations.
I’d throw out all my old tube socks – I wouldn’t even go through them and pick out the ones with holes, I’d just toss the whole lot – and buy, like, two whole packs of new tube socks.
So, you wouldn’t hire a lobbyist when you decide to triple the size of the cabin?
Is a dressage horse out of the question?
I love it that these nasty people are the republican idea of a good replacement for the Obamas. and like Bearpaw says they’re not all that rich, just filthy.
In the uber-wealthy circles, Mitt is probaby considered a working-class hero.
When I consider what my wish list would be, it would make Mitt laugh out loud, it’s so simple. I would like to have health insurance so my husband could have his collarbone reset and I could get my teeth fixed. I’d like to help each of my sons out with some extra money so they could afford some nice things. I’d like to be able to get some things around the house repaired, too.
And I would love to quit my soul-sucking part-time job and have enough money to have enough material on hand to do my artwork and teach it, too. I make hooked rugs and the wool off the bolt keeps getting more expensive. It’s $250 for fifteen yards, and I go through it like mad. In my dreams, I have a whole room filled with bolt after bolt, and I never have to wait until I can save enough to get more.
That would hardly make a dent in Mitt’s sofa change.
What, you wouldn’t want to make other uber-rich people even richer, while cutting the legs off thousands of working class men and by liquidating the companies they work for and pocketing the cash and all the other assets????
Why donnah, if I didn’t know better, I would swear you’re a goddamned socialist, or something!!!
I know. Color me crazy! lol
Ah…a fine collection of Keynesian thinking. Only Progressive Keynesians imagine somehow that “circulating in the economy” creates wealth…and that, somehow, stored value, in the form of accumulated wealth, does no good for the economy…
The Great Recession was caused by too much spending (on housing and consumer credit), not too much savings…if Americans had saved more, and accumulated more wealth before buying their houses and running up their credit cards, there wouldn’t have been any bubbles bursting…stored value provides the capital to produce further wealth…if we consumed everything we produced, we’d still live in caves with fig leaves. The stored value in Mitt Romney’s portfolio creates far more wealth and value than, say, a quarter of a billion dollars in distributed food stamps.
I’m all for donating money and giving huge gratuities, but the idea that wealthly people should spend all of their money just to not feel guilty that folks in the third world live on $2 a day reveal a fundamental misunderstanding the causes of wealth creation and superior standards of living.
Only Progressive Keynesians imagine somehow that “circulating in the economy” creates wealth
When money circulates through the economy – that is, passes from one person to another through market transactions – value is added along the way. When I give GM $18,000 for a car, that action doesn’t just move $18,000 from my bank account to theirs. It also pays GM to engage in operations which change a collection of raw materials into a car that is worth more than those raw materials. Far from being the exclusive knowledge of Keynesians, this is in fact universally understood among people who know how a market economic functions.
…and that, somehow, stored value, in the form of accumulated wealth, does no good for the economy…
Stored value does wonderful things for the economy. A nice, heavy winter coat does wonderful things for a person’s comfort, too. The tricky part is, you need your clothing to do certain wonderful things during winter, and a different set of wonderful things during summer. When the economy is suffering because of a shortage of demand, we need money to do one particular wonderful thing (stimulate demand) more than we need it to do the different set of wonderful things that money saved can do.
The Great Recession was caused by too much spending (on housing and consumer credit), not too much savings…
This is true. It is also true that a staph infection is not caused by the patient taking too few antibiotics. Nonetheless, antibiotics are the cure for a staph infection. Similarly, the entirely correct observation that Americans were spending too much prior to the meltdown does not mean that we don’t need more spending now. As circumstances change, so must policy.
The stored value in Mitt Romney’s portfolio creates far more wealth and value than, say, a quarter of a billion dollars in distributed food stamps.
Corporate America is sitting on – hoarding might be a better word – record amounts of cash right now, and has been for the past 3 or so years. If your theory was correct, then this record amount of stored value should have resulted in a booming economy. Suffice it to say, it has not.
Which action occurs first…GM producing the car, or you buying it?
Stored value gives producers the capital to produce goods and services to the market…there cannot be demand before supply.
The most fundamental problem with this economy is that evil corporate America would rather “hoard” cash than invest it, because of the anti-business rhetoric and actions of this administration…
We need to “put money in the economy” by getting producers to hire people, not by paying government employees to transfer wealth from some to others.
Sorry…supply (production) comes before demand (consumption).
That’s kind of a chicken or the egg question. What I do know is that GM won’t make another car until I (or someone like me) doesn’t buy that first one. Consumption drives overall production. Obviously, the company makes the first one but if they only sell one they’ll be out of business real fast.
Stored value gives producers the capital to produce goods and services to the market…there cannot be demand before supply.
Nonsense.
There is frequently demand before supply. One fishmonger sells out his cart one day and turns people away, so three fishmongers show up the next day, because they know there is an unmet demand. You’re basically defining out of existence the concept of “unmet demand.”
The most fundamental problem with this economy is that evil corporate America would rather “hoard” cash than invest it, because of the anti-business rhetoric and actions of this administration…
The “anti-business rhetoric and actions of this administration” have resulted in record corporate profits. So what you are saying is that corporate America is behaving irrationally and failing to pursue its own economic self-interest, because their feelings are hurt. Boo Hoo.
Sorry…supply (production) comes before demand (consumption).
You don’t even have the relationship between supply and production, and demand and consumption, right.
First of all, it’s not about guilt. I would have no use for that much money. Yes, it could help finance the government’s debt. It could help finance many corporations’ operations. It doesn’t have to sit in a mattress. I’m not saying that the money wouldn’t be doing anything useful. But any number of other people could be using that money to live off since I’d have everything I could possibly want at a small fraction of that wealth.
I didn’t say that I would give it all out to indigents who would immediately consume all the value. I just said that I would give it away, and why.
Nice bit of ideological thinking there. Not willing to grapple with what Keynes actually says. That aside, it’s probably too complicated for you. But if you are interested, you can wade through Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Come back and make accusations against Keynesians after you have read it.
The first thing we have to agree on is what you mean by “wealth”. Are you talking about stores of goods, claims on goods and services, what accountants call “assets”, money, or what?
But theoretical argument aside, you make assertions about the Great Recession that are–er, interesting. Especially in your repetition of the phrase “stored value”. It sounds almost Marxian. As if there is a common unit of value.
The Great Recession was triggered by overweening concern about inflation in the prices of housing and wages and salaries. So you began to have technical analysts and business reporters saying how “this can’t go on any more”. Well, if folks hadn’t gotten so damned cost-conscious and started laying people off, it could have gone on a bit farther and maybe if it were only that folks were overextended that would have resolved itself. In 2007, total household debt was $13.8 trillion, a good part of it in 15- or 30-year mortgages. Total consumer revolving debt in 2007 was $904 billion. That’s not a whole lot of debt to unwind. Really, it’s not. As long as there is an expansion of jobs and stability of wages and salaries. Which would have happened if (1) there wasn’t an asset value bubble and (2) that bubble had not been leveraged globally in a way that escaped regulation.
How big a bubble? The Market Oracle for October 12, 2008 showed that globally there were $680 trillion in Bank of International Settlements-monitored derivatives and $596 trillion of them had been traded in the OTC market. That was ten times the value of the global domestic product of goods and services at the time. There’s where your bubble is. Investment bankers and their customers. Now not all of those derivatives were unanchored from underlying assets. So when things started to fall apart, the holders of these bubble derivative assets started to scramble and nearly took down the financial system completely. And they started calling in underlying assets and when those were not available, invoking their credit default swaps, a lot of which were backed by AIG.
Because the derivative collapse affected banks balance sheets, they froze lending. Which caused highly-leveraged business to have to further cut cost through layoffs, which caused former employees to fail on their housing payments, and around the cycle again.
But in addition to the derivatives bubble, something else was going on in the financial industry. Loan originators were writing fraudulent mortgages, even without the purchaser’s collusion. Loan originators were telling purchasers that they did not qualify for prime loans when in fact the purchaser did; the purchasers were stuck with subprime loans. Purchasers were sold on buying more expensive houses and taking out adjustable rate mortgages. For people whose primary criteria is the house payment, they got trapped into mortgages that had sudden increases in rates or had payoff balloons. When could not afford the increased payments, the mortgage holders foreclosed.
When those foreclosures happened, the servicing agency that was doing the accounting and not the actual holder of the mortgage automatically put together the foreclosure paperwork. But because the ownership had been transferred as packages of derivatives, the current owner was often not known. And those transactions shifting ownership occurred outside of county recorders of deeds offices. Which meant that under the law the transfers were essentially fraudulent. So who held the mortgage? The volume and complexity became so large that foreclosure mills were hired to process the foreclosures and retrieve any mortgage insurance for the holders. Some foreclosure mills discovered that they could make money foreclosing on folks who were current with their payments; others were so sloppy in the paperwork that they foreclosed on houses that had been paid up for some time or on the house next door to the one on the mortgage. And judges rubber-stamped the foreclosure documents as they came in, turning them into judgments that were summarily acted upon by the county sheriff.
But that was not all. Homebuilders dramatically overbuilt in the 2000s. There are now more vacant houses in the US than there are homeless. With jobs insecure, folks stopped buying, construction stopped, construction workers were laid off, they joined the ranks of the unemployed and too often the foreclosed upon and homeless.
The guys making the trades. The US government stabilized the markets with $1.6 trillion in loans to financial institutions and a bailout fund of $700 billion, of which it only used $350 billion. And the US government acquired AIG and begin slowly liquidated what assets had value. There was enough confidence restored to wind back the $100 trillion exposure in credit default swaps that existed in October 2008.
The reason that I accused you of ideological thinking is that in spite of your talking points in defense of the rich, I have the distinct impression that you are not yourself rich at all. That you do not have any “stored value”.
Otherwise you would have known very well how the Great Recession happened and how the guys that designed it and ran the financial system into the ground got their six-figure bonuses without skipping a beat. And claim it was pay for performance.
Excellent. The overbuilding was caused by unsustainable finance and speculation. All those houses could be filled with happy working families if only the workers had jobs with salaries that allowed them to buy them instead of accumulated wealth being stored by Jamie Dimon and the London Whale.
His analysis reminds me of the explanation of the Great Depression being caused by “overproduction”, which is just another way of looking at “underconsumption”. Pollution and declining resources are the only reason to limit consumption and if the produced goods are in the form of bits on the internet, movies, games, blogs, books then all the more reason to consume.
Not exactly you idea of heaven, BooMan? What are you? Anti-Amurkan?
Another day. Another drive troll.
drive -> drive-by
I have pretty much everything I need and want as long as neither of us gets seriously ill or has an accident. Then I’m afraid we would be financial toast.
But come to think of it… a car elevator would really one-up the neighbors.
veilingen faillissement