The rich are getting richer much, much faster.

[Jon Miller]

Prove that statement.

JM

[Kuciwalker]

Capital gains vs. investment income is the trivial one.

Another one is pensions. Pension accruals are not counted as income, but if a company gives me money and I buy deferred annuities with it, that is.

[Jon Miller]

Capital gains vs. investment income is the trivial one.

That is the one I was thinking of.

I don't think that they are economically equivalent.

I couldn't make a model that worked, and ignore one.

Just because they are degenerate in one equation does not mean they are equivalent.

JM

[MRT144]

So food stamps should count as income? Bizarre.

Good! More rich people means more jobs.

You're a ****ing idiot.

[Jon Miller]

Another one is pensions. Pension accruals are not counted as income, but if a company gives me money and I buy deferred annuities with it, that is.

Uh, why isn't pension accruals something that a person is taking in?

We are talking about having a consistent definition.

JM

[Kuciwalker]

.

[Kuciwalker]

Uh, why isn't pension accruals something that a person is taking in?

? What are you asking ?

[Jon Miller]

The question was:

"how is defining income as 'what a person takes in' incoherent?"

BTW, I can see how due to accounting/etc, that it is probably best to tax on consumption and wealth and leave income alone.

JM

[MrFun]

The rich are above reproach.

That's generally the consensus among many on Apolyton. A lot of members here are tools for the one percent.

[Jon Miller]

I am playing with a hypothesis in my head:

Richness is gained either by taking advantage of poor governance (generally of your own country, but sometimes others), or by a new technology, or some other new resource to exploit.

The technology of the 80s/etc was computers, the technology of now is financial and informational (note that just because a new technology is available does not mean that it improves the rest of society, I am not convinced that that the new financial technologies have improved capital allocation for those who are not financiers).

If nations want to become wealthy, they need to make sure they have the necessary capital investments to take advantage of the new technology (it is probably too late to lead in finance or information). For people I think you can probably jump on, but you might need to move.

Exploiting your own nations lack of governance is of course a problem, taking advantage of another nations lack of governance is not necessarily a problem.

For new natural resources you have to get lucky (and there are less of those that are *new*).

One conclusion of this is that becoming wealthy does not come about by delayed consumption.

JM

[Kuciwalker]

The question was:

"how is defining income as 'what a person takes in' incoherent?"

Because there are lots of things that I implicitly "take in" that aren't included!

[Jon Miller]

Because there are lots of things that I implicitly "take in" that aren't included!

They should be, if you define income as 'what a person takes in'.

I actually think it is the most defensible definition.

JM

[Kuciwalker]

In that case no one should care about income, unless by "what a person takes in" you're including all of the things I've described. In that case your definition is fine but it's not what's being measured by your statistic.

[Jon Miller]

It wasn't my statistic.

I do think that it should include everything that is taken in, including transfers.

JM

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Yeah, of course almost all of the income gains from the recovery went to the top 1%. Their income is highly volatile and they took a large part of the income losses from the recession. The wealthy can tolerate a lot more risk than the not-so-wealthy. That doesn't have much to do with the fact that most of the American population is not earning much more now than it did in the 1970's.

This.