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OwlFancier posted:And the reason you can do this is because you already had control of enough money to buy the houses in the first place. Money = power = the power to acquire more power. Thus capitalism is inherently accumulatory and unstable. You don't have to buy a house. Anybody can invest in real estate mutual funds with a significantly smaller barrier of entry and get about the same percent return as what that homeowner got.
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Mar 23, 2019 00:09
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 12:39 |
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OwlFancier posted:"anybody" Pretty much every 401k provider will have a real estate fund, and if that's not available, one can easily get access by opening up an IRA or brokerage account for free.
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Mar 23, 2019 01:29
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OwlFancier posted:Private pensions and whatever the poo poo a brokerage account is, definitely things we all have. In the US, 80% of the workforce has a 401k option available. If you meaningfully contribute to the countries production, it's open to you. And with the employer contribution, you get extra money on top of your paycheck that you can put towards those same sorts of investments. And no, that's not how compound interest works. Those percentages over decades end up surpassing the principal amount you invested several times over. There's a huge opportunity there for everybody, not just for billionaires, at least in the US. It's not unfair for somebody to get a return on an investment when you have that exact same investment available to you if you want it. And at the same time, if that dude made the wrong call and that neighborhood goes to poo poo and the property values plummet, it's a loss that according the your definition of how the system works, is not available for the lower classes to have to deal with. roomforthetuna posted:Sure they can, they can get a 5% return on zero, and it's even less effort than getting a 5% return on a lot of money! Obviously it's absolutely fair that a person with zero money can get a 5% return, exactly the same percent as a person who inherited a billion dollars would get. I don't know how anyone could think there's any sort of imbalance there. More than half of all lottery tickets are purchased by the poorest 1/3 of households. Sure a lot of people have a lot of hurdles in their life, but a lot of people are really stupid with their money too. That's an educational issue, not an inherent flaw in the system. 80% of millionaires are first generation, so there's obviously the potential there.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:19
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It's not magic and you need to take a breath.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:29
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going into character and raving like a madman doesn't actually further your point op
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Mar 23, 2019 02:35
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OwlFancier posted:I'm carefully tailoring my argument to exactly the amount of credence your position merits. With about as much effort as you're tailoring your families future from the sound of things.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:38
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WampaLord posted:Ah yes, it's those drat lottery tickets holding all the poors back, well that and all the avocado toast, natch. Surely it's not stagnating wages combined with rapidly increasing costs of living, all that inequality is just a behavioral problem, the system works! I wouldn't dispute that all of those things are issues. This isn't a black and white thing where there's only one dynamic at play. There's a bunch, and financial illiteracy is one of them.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:43
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OwlFancier posted:tell me how much did mammy and daddy give you to start your portfolio I work in a factory off the back of a community college certificate. My single mother of three will be mostly dependent on me when she retires as she's always lived paycheck to paycheck, and I haven't spoken to my dad in my adult life. If it's accessible to me, it's accessible to the vast majority of people. I mean if you want to be broke to own the neocons and their magical investments, feel free, but it's totally doable. If you invest $20 a week for 30 years, you'll have invested a total of $31,200, but your balance from investing in something as basic as the S&P 500 index would conservatively get you in the neighborhood of $100,000 as your final balance. A $70k profit. And over the next 5 years, if you continued, it would go up another $50k. If $20 a week sounds like something you would have to squeeze your budget to make happen, then that is probably twice or more of your annual salary that you would get as a return if you managed to do it. That's not chump change by any means. There's opportunity in the system, it's just a matter of making sure it's more accessible and that people know how to do it.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:03
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OwlFancier posted:Right so obviously the reason your mum is dependent on you is because she's a feckless poor who knows nothing, rather than say, the fact that she lives paycheck to paycheck and thus, has never had any money to invest in fabulous property portfolios owing to spending it all bringing your worthless arse up. She's got two vested 401ks from different nursing homes, plus she'll have social security, so she might be totally fine depending on how much she budgeted all those years, and she's still got time to make a lot more. I suppose I'm just preparing for the worst because I haven't seen her financials. But it's true, I did get better financial footing since I didn't have kids as young as she did, I didn't get hosed in a divorce with an idiot, and I'm interested in finance. That's a pretty big bowl of poo poo for someone to eat though, and at that point, we're discussing welfare and where the social floor should be rather than what the potential is of the opportunities available to everybody. OwlFancier posted:Also loving lol that the triumph of capitalism is that if you save up your entire loving life and nothing goes wrong and you never need to actually use any of your savings you could have.... two years salary at the end of it!!! I mean I'm on pace to make way more than that, I just used the $20 a week figure because it's so low that only extreme outliers wouldn't be able to make that work. This is the example where you save your entire loving life but you save so little that you barely even loving noticed it and still walked away with enough money to drastically change your financial situation. The more you put in, the more you get back, obviously. And you'll be happy you did when those emergencies pop around because the money you saved gives you flexibility to deal with them. Again, I am aware not every single person can do this, but the vast majority can, and the vast majority of those people choose not to. It isn't some inherent fault of capitalism if those people don't maximize their earning potential. It's just a missed opportunity that can be fixed with education and a better social safety net. And the less people there are that fall through the cracks, the easier it is to provide for them.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:49
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Think of how many trabants you could buy with $60k tho, comrade. A whole fleet!
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Mar 23, 2019 03:59
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Traditionally in hard socialist regimes, you're lucky if your car is worth $10 a month. Forget about netflix.
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Apr 3, 2019 03:36
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 12:39 |
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OwlFancier posted:Why is it utopian idealism to suggest that money and resources would and could be better organized towards making more people better off rather than making very few people obscenely rich? Again, you are assuming capitalism is some sort of immutable state of nature rather than a relatively recent invention. How exactly does the Stalin slush fund guarantee a society in which everyone gets better off and not just a few? It's going to be subject to the same forces at play in the current capitalist system. Greed will exist with or without capitalism, and power will corrupt with or without capitalism. The only way to bypass these things if you have a belief in a sort of benevolent governance that could manage a fund like that in a way that ensures that 100% of the proceeds go towards the benefit of society. And if your end goal is a government with that as its central principle, then such a government could accomplish the same exact benefits through tax reform, enhanced welfare, social security, funding for secondary education, etc etc, regardless of what label they use for their economic system. I'm an Occam's razor man myself. Volkerball fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 03:54
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