From: bright@nazgul.UUCP (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: pnw.general
Subject: Re: government still at large (was Re: FDA still at large)
Date: 30 Jul 92 07:44:43 GMT
Reply-To: bright@nazgul.UUCP (Walter Bright)
Organization: Zortech, Seattle

In article <1992Jul28.175234.3653@eskimo.celestial.com> alpinist@eskimo.celestial.com (David Butler) writes:
/In article <857@nazgul.UUCP> bright@nazgul.UUCP (Walter Bright) writes:
/>What do you think rich people do with their money? The ones who spend it all
/>on toys usually don't stay rich very long.
/ Well, it sure as heck doesn't 'trickle down' to the populace.  Over the past
/Decade the richest 10% of the nation went from owning a little less than 1/4
/of the nations wealth to over 1/3.  That means the majority got poorer.

	You are assuming that the net amount of wealth remained fixed.
	This is untrue, as one thing that business does is *create* wealth.
	You are also assuming that Reaganomics reversed the trend towards
	socialism. It did not. Taxes and social spending increased every
	year. That can easilly explain the increasing wealth gap. Socialist
	countries tend to have extremes of rich and poor much more than
	free societies do.

/When somebody owns enough money to represent consumption of more than they
/could produce in 100 lifetimes (anybody worth >1 mil) then that means 
/thousands of people must produce more than they can consume (the working
/poor) in order to support that person.

	I'll quibble a bit with your statistics. Assuming an income of
	30K/yr, and working for 45 years, that is 1.35 million, minus
	30% in taxes, yields about a million dollars. So 1 million is about
	one lifetime, not 100. And even if it were 100, where does the 1000
	come from?

	I'll repeat my previous statement. The excess that rich people have
	that they do not consume they *invest*. Investment creates jobs.
	Investment creates wealth. Investment is what economic growth is
	all about. I know that 'trickle down' is a derogatory word, but
	investment does find its way into the pockets of the little people.

	Remember the sweat shops of the early industrial revolution? What
	were those people making? They weren't making toys for the rich,
	they were making pots, pans, cloth, Model Ts, and vast quantities
	of *affordable consumer goods* that enrich our lives.

/Letting the rich get richer only
/sends this country barrelling down the road to 3rd worldism and creates a
/class society of the haves and have nots.

	Do you know of any real example of a society *without* haves and
	have nots? I can't think of a one. It is also a general trend
	that the freeer a society is, the evener the distribution of wealth.
	The increasing wealth gap in the 80's I claim is more probably
	the result of our steadilly declining freedom due to ever higher
	taxes and regulation.

/Hey lets let people be well off.  Lets reward them for individual incentive,
/but how about putting some limits on the upper end (where they've got way
/more than they need anyway) and raise and maintain a decent standard of
/living for everyone.

	Because people will stop being productive citizens when they reach
	that barrier. And then, they lose and you do too. You and I lose
	because we lose that product or service that that individual was
	producing. And that person was making all that money because he
	was providing us with what we wanted.