>>>>>>>>>>http://www.businessinsider.com/an-investment-managers-view-2013-11
>>>
>>>>>Do you expect them to simply give away their money until you both have more equal amounts?
>>>>>
>>>>>How is that not greed and jealousy?
>>>>
>>>>Mike - did you actually read the article? It says that the top 0.5% or 0.1% aren't just doing better than everyone else (which is tautological). It's says they're doing so by activities that are harmful to the economy as a whole. Opposing that is not class envy.
>>>
>>>It says that?
>>>
>>>Where?
>>
>>"I think it's important to emphasize one of the dangers of wealth concentration: irresponsibility about the wider economic consequences of their actions by those at the top.
>
>
>Thats also a tautology.

Hardly a tautology. The author says that wealth concentration leads to irresponsibility ...

>
>My question is how different would things be if you were on top?
>
>None at all I imagine.
>
>You think they are greedy and should give away most of their money but thats something you wouldnt do.

Since I'll never be in their place, it's hard to guess how it would be different. But I will say that when I fantasize about having a large chunk of money fall into my lap, my general thought process is that after setting up small trusts for my kids and nieces and nephews, the rest would go into a foundation to do some kind of good works in the world.

One of the basic philosophies with which I was raised is "leave it better than you found it." I see myself following that in all kinds of small and large ways in my life.


>
>The money you donate is probably beneficial to your tax statements.

Not usually. Some years, we get to deduct them, but certainly not all years. Even when we do, the time we put into organizations and causes we care about isn't compensated in any way other than seeing the impact we can have.

>
>You know for a fact that we all use our money to fund the exploitation of humans and the planet over in China. We sort of feel bad about it but we don't stop. No different than how he described the top 0.5%.
>
>You Miss 1% are no different from the 0.5%, the only difference is the size of your financial worth and you have the nerve to think yours should be closer to theirs.

No, you keep saying this is about my worth and it's not. We earn what we need plus enough to put away to guarantee that we'll be okay when we're too old to sick to work.

It's about the people who don't have enough, whether that's enough to eat or enough education or enough health.

>
>
>Heres the thing sister, just because youve done nothing about it, doesn't mean there's nothing you can do about it.

I have done things about it. As far back as I can remember, I've given time and money to things I care about.

>
>
>> Wall Street created the investment products that produced gross economic imbalances and the 2008 credit crisis. It wasn't the hard-working 99.5%. Average people could only destroy themselves financially, not the economic system. There's plenty of blame to go around, but the collapse was primarily due to the failure of complex mortgage derivatives, CDS credit swaps, cheap Fed money, lax regulation, compromised ratings agencies, government involvement in the mortgage market, the end of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, and insufficient bank capital. Only Wall Street could put the economy at risk and it had an excellent reason to do so: profit. It made huge profits in the build-up to the credit crisis and huge profits when it sold itself as "too big to fail" and received massive government and Federal Reserve bailouts. Most of the serious economic damage the U.S. is struggling with today was done by the top 0.1% and they benefited greatly from it."
>
>
>A more plausible theory is that the majority of the wealth that vanished was caused by a ridiculous amount of houses built fast and cheap being built and sold for high dollars.
>
>All the money went in to it, and the land developers cheapened the supply and weakened the demand making the money simply vanish all on a desire to make as much money as fast as possible.
>
>How many homes dis your husband build in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s?

>Did he think about what building more homes cheaper would do to the market where everyone was putting money?


I don't know how many the company built. What I do know is that some of those communities were built in transit-friendly locations; others were built on brownfields sites, that is, places where industry had polluted the land and it then got cleaned up. Most of what his company built were not McMansions, but smaller homes intended for people just getting started or people moving down after their families had been raised.

I also know that several times they looked seriously at building in communities that were starting to recover from poverty and each time, the bureaucratic overhead cost made it economically infeasible.


>
>Its not just people richer than that throw money around and cause problems.
>
>The solution to the worlds problems is not you getting closer to the 0.5%.
>
>Though that seems to be what you want to happen.

You make assumptions about what I want, what I do, and what I believe; all of them are wrong.

Tamar