Say what you will about Goldman Sachs -- and you could say a lot -- but its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, recently boiled down one of America’s most complex problems into a perfectly simple and quotable line. Repeat after Lloyd, folks:
"This country does a great job of creating wealth, but not a great [job] of distributing it.”Bingo!
The Huffington Post
This 1 Quote Explains America's Biggest Problem Perfectly
Maxwell Strachan
Like Pope Francis said in Evangelii Gaudium.
12 comments:
Just shows that the author doesn't understand the difference between static assets and dynamic assets.
If static assets aren't distributed adequately, an entity can be starved of ability to develop & wield dynamic assets - WHICH ALWAYS DWARF STATIC ASSETS.
Commodities are static assets (e.g., ores to oils).
Evolved, behaving life forms express dynamic assets.
Example: "Wealth" is your ability to behave adaptively.
Not possible, no matter how much static assets you hoard, if they're all tied up in your fat ass ... instead of previously distributed to all cells & organs, AND ACTUALLY USED TO PERFECT SKILLS THROUGH PRIOR PRACTICE.
You can never recover forgone initiative. It's gone forever. As a permanent addition - or "adjustment" - to your historical Output Gap.
In that case, you aren't perceiving even a fraction of the exponentially expanding dynamic "wealth" you could be producing.
Capiche?
"This country does a shitty job of creating income and a shitty job of distributing it..." - Me.
Tom,
Lets say a person needs $1500 per month to minimally live in this country... and you cant eat property or shares of common stock or financial assets, ie one needs CURRENCY as a 'means of subsistence'...
OK, lets take an inventory of currency; we have like $3T issued.
Divide this by the 300M people in the country you get $10k, so go ahead and "redistribute" this $10k to everyone and they will only live for 6 months.... then you would have to redistribute it again... and again, etc...
Its got to be about FLOWS... the Vatican doesnt understand this much less how to do it...
rsp,
Yes, and the biggest flows are the flowing, dynamic assets.
Otherwise, agile entities wouldn't win .... every single time.
It's about stocks and flows. Wealth is a stock and income is a flow. If the playing field is tilted toward capital, then flows to workers flow to capital increasing it. This is called capital formation and it's supposedly what capitalism is about and why it make everyone richer.
Income flows to consumption. saving and investment. Saving accumulates as financial wealth and investment accumulates as real wealth. Owners' financial and real wealth dwarfs workers'.
Even if government supplements workers' incomes in aggregate with transfer payments, those tend to flow to consumption and the gains accrue to owners as saving and investment.
So no matter how much government puts in, the result is that it flows to the top and stays there unless taxed away, or a different distribution system is put in place to level the playing field, e.g., by allowing workers to increase their bargaining power instead of curtailing it as "inflationary."
And it is not just "profit-maximization" under a "free market" system that leads to this. As Michael Hudson says, what is not taxed goes to economic rent.
Nothing can stop us now, we have Blankfein and The Pope doing on the same page doing God's work. Economic Dream Team.
Ryan that's a tip-off imo! rsp,
Some I agree with Matt. I like his quote. Also the Vatican is running a surplus like Germany, right? It's all about the pipeline for Merkel and smokescreening Ukraine into the EU zone with gaudium...?
Right, income is just the net change in wealth during some time period of interest.
I'm not sure how good we are at producing wealth, even in the aggregate. A lot of the "wealth" we thought we had produced prior to 2008 turned out to be nominal clouds of financial fluff that evaporated from firm and household balance sheets overnight.
"So no matter how much government puts in, the result is that it flows to the top and stays there unless taxed away, or a different distribution system is put in place to level the playing field, e.g., by allowing workers to increase their bargaining power instead of curtailing it as "inflationary."
Exactly right Tom.
There is no solution to inequality that does not include workers sharing gains in productivity proportionately, otherwise the net flow is always in favor of more inequality.
TINA
So the only way out of TINA's trap is a Middle Class Liberation movement.
MC lib, MiddleClassinism
Where's Sam&Susan B. MiddleClass when we need 'em?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_B._Anthony
"So the only way out of TINA's trap is a Middle Class Liberation movement."
Unions are toast.
Can you say federally-mandated wage minimums and a mandated (fair) share of profits?
No, I don't think it could even be discussed in polite company.
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