(April 18, 2015 at 11:37 pm)Brian37 Wrote: You don't need to be an expert in any economy, it should work like this, when it crashes, like 08s or the great depression, put the CEOs who cause it in prison...
Leona Helmsley once told a judge, "only little people go to prison." Not quite true, she got 4 months for tax evasion. But we can't throw them all in jail. Not all of them are criminals. Superpredatory minorities aside, I imagine a lot of this involves making bad moves at the wrong time with no adult supervision around. Why punish, when the Nanny State can put on her apron and regulate instead?
(April 19, 2015 at 6:17 am)Heywood Wrote:I Wrote:The current role model for CEO and investment mogul behavior lies closer...
Hatshepsut, you are changing the subject. Nothing you wrote has anything to do with the disparity between the rich and poor.
Begging pardon. Those $100 utility wipes you were talking about. Doesn't that lead to the geometric progression in the first place?
Suppose $100/day is considered a “basic” income.
Then, to feel noticeably elevated, you need 10% more, or $110. But once at $110 you still need 10% more to feel elevated again, or $121. Then the next step is $133.10. Our society has 100 steps of this kind of elevation at 10% per step. And the 100th step up gets you to $1,387,000/day.
That’s why we have such a huge gap between rich and poor. "Utility" is a synonym for "feed the ego" on the way up and a matter of not wanting to spend the time to monitor $1 if you have millions of them. On the way down, however, that $1 acquires utility as if by magic. We get real tightfisted whenever Josh Brown's investment blog gets nervous about the economy. In the Depression, no bombs or massive earthquakes damaged any American workplaces. The managers just locked the doors and walked away. But it's still utility. Even a billionaire values every dollar if it starts looking like those dollars are circling the drain.
