When a family of today has 2 paychecks it has more money than the family of yesterday with only 1 paycheck. More money AND more money overall.
Not when the paycheck itself is worth less than it used to be. And that is exactly the case, since (sing along if you know the words!)
WAGES ARE DOWN.
They are putting more restrictions on credit cards too! But if someone defaults on a loan, that is the credit companies problem; if they have a problem with repayment, they will make adjustments on who they allow to have credit.
Yes, but it still means less money if the money lent isn't paid back. Also, even for those who are paying back their credit card debt, it means money spent toward that goal isn't being spent on daily necessities, meaning the family suffers as does the economy.
Unpaid debt doesn't help anyone.
But if the million people who pay bills have that profit go directly to the CEO, that is less movement than a single person who invests a billion and it goes to research and development, expanding the business and hiring more people. So again I ask; why does the number of people investing money make a difference if the amount of money is the same?
It all depends on where the money goes. More people means the money goes more places. It's spread around more, and that means more movement. Remember, more movement is better for the economy.
We are comming out of a recession. When this happens corporate profits always grow faster than wages. Just like when the recession happened, and while corporations were losing money, most wages remained the same.
Nope.
In fact, the new jobs that replace the ones lost during the recession
pay less than the ones lost.
Oh, and corporate profits
rebounded pretty quickly from the recession.
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal of corporate financial reports finds that cumulative sales, profits and employment last year among members of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index exceeded the totals of 2007, before the recession and financial crisis.
That article is from 2012, meaning "last year" was 2011, so corporate profits rebounded within a couple of years.
Oh, and you may have seen where the article states that "employment" also rebounded along with sales and profits. Before you start to think that invalidates what I've been saying, check this out, also from that article:
The performance hasn't translated into significant gains in U.S. employment. Many of the 1.1 million jobs the big companies added since 2007 were outside the U.S. So, too, was much of the $1.2 trillion added to corporate treasuries. Two-thirds of Apple Inc.'s $82 billion in cash and marketable securities as of Sept. 30 was held by foreign subsidiaries, for example.
Laying off workers during the recession allowed some of the larger corporations to outsource even more than they had been doing before!
So, overall, corporate profits are way, way, WAY up, jobs and wages are down.
As I've been saying.
Actually you said something totally different;
No, I didn't.
It does, or you wouldn't have said it. If you wish to quote these two totally different statements, I'l be happy to explain what you might have misunderstood.
what do you mean when you say money stays at the top?
When corporate profits are up and wages are down, what that means is the profits mostly go to highly paid executives and shareholders, very little of it filters down to the employees of that corporation. So long as wages go down or stagnate, that will remain so.
Who are the rich that get this cut you are talking about; the shareholders? And you do realize the CEO and the guy working on the line are both employees and get paid from the same pool of money; right?
Yup, but one gets a much bigger share of it than the others, by a huge degree.
And that's kind of the problem, economy-wise.
Giving more money to this problem will not fix it either
So let's not just give money to it, let's address the problem and fix it!
My car is a poor analogy because I have the option of getting rid of my car if I don't like the way it preforms; I don't have that option with the Government
You posited getting rid of the government:
"we should quit throwing money at the government". That's the getting rid of the car part of the analogy.
I am not talking about illegal money hidden in swiss bank accounts;
What's illegal about it?
I'm talking about people with legal wealth. Again I ask; do you really think Bill Gates has $80 billion in US currency stashed somewhere?
There is nothing illegal about having holdings in foreign countries, the illegality comes from not declaring it on your taxes. The money I mentioned is known, so it likely was declared. Who knows how much hasn't been!
But that's just one area where the rich keep their money. I've mentioned others, like real estate and expensive things like art, there are also holdings like mutual funds and such, also investments in corporations. The rich have no end of things they can do with their money!
The middle and working classes, on the other hand, by and large only have two options: spend it or save it. And with wages being down as they've been over the past decade or so, little to no saving is going on.
Rockefeller had a pocket full of shiney PENNIES that he would hand out to kids no the streets. He didn't keep his millions in the bank, he was worth (Billions in todays economy) because he had a bunch of paper with numbers on them (as you call it) that says he is worth that much, and that is how it is done today.
You've misunderstood what I said. When I talked about money only on paper, I was talking about appraisals, and only that. Let me illustrate the point I tried to make: if something is appraised at, say $3 million, you don't actually have $3 million dollars, you have a piece of paper that says something is worth that much. If you try to sell that thing and no one wants to pay you $3 million for it, but you only get $2 million, can you get that extra million from the appraiser?
Try it, and see!
Your bank account isn't just a piece of paper, but the appraisal of your Chagal painting is. You can get the cash in your bank account simply by asking for it, you can only get the appraisal's worth of your Chagal if someone wants to pay that much.
Do you really believe someone wrote the CEO a check for 10 million dollars? No! The $10 million is in company shares and unless he sells all his shares, he has nothing but (as you call it) a bunch of paper with numbers on it.
I wasn't talking about shares.
So again I ask you, where did the additional wealth of $4 million come from?
If the $4 million is someone's appraisal of how much the company is worth, then it's the appraiser's opinion (though it may very well be an informed opinion). If the $4 million is additional revenue, that it comes from more goods or services sold.
The question is not about counting your money, it is about accumulating wealth.
Yup. But wealth is measured in money, so they're very much related. The value of a company comes from it's revenues, the money it takes in from thsoe who buy the product or service offered.
When you improve your property, and it becomes more valuable, wealth is created and there is a place in San Francisco California who prints extra money to account for the increased value you made to your property. That is what I meant when I said "creating wealth".
Nope. If you improve your property, the value may go up, but that only means an appraiser believes you can ask more for the house when you decide to sell it. It only translates to more cash if you can get that much when you sell it. Not before. Until you sell the property, that additional value is just a number on a piece of paper, it may or may not exist when you sell, but it does not exist beforehand.
Oh, you can borrow against it if you like, but the bank is lending you based on how realistic that appraisal is. In other words, they are banking on how informed your appraiser's opinion is. Which is why good appraisers try to make their opinion an exceptionally informed one, and being considered a "good" appraiser means you have.
-- A2SG, that bit about "on paper" only applied to appraisals....
