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The US Is Now 50% More Unequal Than Ancient Rome (And That Includes Slaves)
As we previously noted, only the highest income earners have seen any gains in compensation since the crisis began around 2007 to the current 'recovery' tops. It is perhaps not entirely surprising then that, the total income controlled by the Top 1% is drastically above that of the slave-included times of Ancient Rome and as high as the peak in the roaring 20s.
Current inequality is almost 50% worse than in Ancient Rome and as large as the end of the roaring 20s...
Source: @ConradHackett
Which is hardly surprising given that since 2007, incomes have only risen for highest wage-earners...
We leave it to the following 139 words by Elliott's Paul Singer to conclude - which in two short paragraphs explains everything one needs to know about America's record class inequality, including precisely who is the man responsible:
Inequality in the U.S. today is near its historical highs, largely because the Federal Reserve’s policies have succeeded in achieving their aim: namely, higher asset prices (especially the prices of stocks, bonds and high-end real estate), which are generally owned by taxpayers in the upper-income brackets. The Fed is doing all the work, because the President’s policies are growth-suppressive. In the absence of the Fed’s moneyprinting and ZIRP, the economy would either be softer or actually in a new recession.
The greatest irony is that the President is railing against inequality as one of the most important problems of the day, despite the fact that his policies are squeezing the middle class and causing the Fed – with the President’s encouragement – to engage in the radical monetary policy, which is exacerbating inequality. This simple truth cannot be repeated often enough.
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rome fell, too...
bitchez!
due to overspending and pensions....
sound familiar???
USA! USA! USA! FUCK YEAH!
war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Amazing what you can do with a pure fiat currency.
For everything else, there's gold.
"50% more unequal"
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that. Is that the English or Metric unequal measurement system? And I for one find it very difficult to believe that there are ANY truely reliable information about the economics of ancient Rome.
0b1knob
You wrote: I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that
Wrong writing!
Right Writing: Is ever possible to unwrap propaganda
I heard the white house has an ooen door policy
Ohhps!!!!!
The 210 proposed reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire.
https://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html
Curiously some of the proposed reasons completely contradict each other.
Perception Matters
A common argument from neo-classical economists is that minimum wage legislation causes unemployment.
Any student who enrolled in an undergraduate degree at the Faculty of Economics at Sydney University in 1971 had to complete four year-long courses in economics, out of a total of ten such courses: Microeconomics and Quantitative Methods in the first year, Macroeconomics in the second, and International Economics in the third.
Forty years later in 2011, the Faculty of Economics and Business evicted the Economics Discipline into the Arts Faculty, and the Economics-free entity renamed itself as University of Sydney Business School.
There is now just one compulsory semester-long economics subject (Economics for Business Decision Making) in any Bachelor of Commerce degree at Sydney University, out of 24 such subjects—and that pattern is replicated across the globe. Economics has declined from 40% of any business-oriented degree to 4% in 40 years.
For a profession obsessed with linear regression, it has suffered a near-perfect linear regression of its own. — Steve Keen
http://www.debunkingeconomics.com/the-self-destruction-of-economics/
PITCH FORKS Bitchez!!! Coming for ya' Nick et al.!!!
Much later... Not any time soon.
Economics isn't a "science". It isn't even very good witchcraft.
Prop must rely on logical fallacies. So yes it is possible, for the independent thinker, and for the independent thinker who is not pussy whipped.
You left out currency debasement.
But yes, it sounds familiar
+1
starving citizens, bloated government. And my girlfriend's Bainsley Jenkins.
All we need now is plague and a couple of crop failures. Splat.
Seems to me that is already in progress.
well, they had mercenaries fight their wa....
oh, yeah....please disregard....
Ebola is your plague, and the California water crisis is indeed resulting in crop failures.
Ain't it grand to be a serf or peasant thanks to the incompetent corrupt arrogant narcissistic illegal indonesian kenyan alien sociopathic pathological liar in chief so it can live its overprivileged celebrity grand imperial golf lifestyle.
Studying Rome for my Master's Program currently and the similarities are endless.
i understand...
i am re-reading gibbon...
yeah, that monster book....
how currency became so worthless, people resorted to barter....
one can see the future, by looking into the past...
If you want to understand the decline and fall of Rome, you might better listen to a Gibbon than a gibbon.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=gibbon&id=DC9C81367D772EE6FE1DEDB67...
You're paying how much for that common sense knowledge? How's your reality tv course going?
you're right...I should just become a ward of the state.
Yeah but we have cable and four loko
And what's to be done? Have the government force more wealth redistrubution?
Guillotines
You can't even get the department of justice in this country to prosecute know criminals and racketeers, what do you expect when your country is owned by banks and controlled by a ponzi scheme. It's all for good show and everyone that plays gets paid at commoners expense.
Carry on, most likely a volcano, starvation or ebola will get us in the end... :)
how 'bout...
live within its means...
punish the elite who break the law more harshly then the commoner...for they should be the examples...
show mercy to the commoners...
enforce the law equally...
LIKE WE USED TO.....
Where do you propose we start? the morally corrupt judicial, legislative and executive branches of our government? The two ineffective political parties?
Free Jon Corzine! LOL
When the economy completely collapses and moves into barter mode, this problem will self-correct at the federal level. Corruption will be a lot more intimate.
all these will help to varying degrees:
-restore sound currency
-restore real accounting practices
-restore real price discovery
-end the war and beat the "swords to plowshares"
-reduce taxes as much as possible
-reduce government graft and corruption as much as possible
at some point, in the ongoing process of actually fixing this mess, there have to be measurable goals that result in physical conditions actually changing to the desired state. that there are goals that can be accomplished necessitates that someone or a group of someones is actually bold enough to put forth actionable ideas into the world.
the conversation will be by nature of its human participants, ongoing and but never entering into a state of perfection. having recognized this in advance, we would do best to encourage discussion and debate by at least not being openly cynical.
What's to be done?
Import barbarians, ramp up the bread and circuses, beat on weaker neighbors with an increasingly mercenary army, give supreme power to some dictator, castigate the Christian religion...man, there's a shit-ton we can do!
Im not seein why that comment got so many down votes.
Maybe people at ZH arent as smart as I gave them credit for.
I spose they dont get it.
:/
At least the Romans had to physically "clip" and debase their money. In our age the Rothschild banksters do it with a click of a mouse.
An American, not US subject.
Yes, that too. But they were surprisingly adept at changing the silver content of their coins by various metallurgical tricks at the Imperial mints.
Be talented, make talents, invest wisely.
Ride a wave of talents to Imperator. After that, the sky's the limit.
Seems like a pretty good state of things, from Romulus & Remus, all the way to Me!
Now if someone from the senate could just stab our Cesar!
Cesar? That real smart monkey from Planet of the Apes?
No, Cesar the guy who turns horse meat into premium dog food. That's the guy to watch. He knows his shit.
The US will fall much quicker than Rome did. It won't take centuries but rather a few short and quick years. Watch out!
I can complete a transaction with somebody on the other side of the planet as fast as it takes me to type in the information and hit 'send' or whatever button is on my screen. I can be almost anywhere on the planet within about 24 hours. Things move much, much faster than they did in antiquity.
But I would argue that we have been in a collapse since the 1970s when, for a variety of reasons, more people had to enter the workforce and rely on an ever increasing amount of credit to maintain their lifestyles. Lehman was a point where it started picking up steam.
Perfect summary. Instant transfer of wealth plus gradual transfer of knowledge. Beautifully illustrated.
Yeah about that... when the ball really gets rolling, neither the transactions or travel are going to happen in 24 hours or less. But absolutely a key element to the acceleration that leads up to the lockdown.
And yet it takes 14 days for my old brokerage to transfer my account to my new brokerage.
How fast does a deep freeze move? Watch out for that iceberg!
Karl Marx is absolutely right about history -first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Marx was right about a LOT of things. Most "Capitalists" just will never know it.
Would that be pre-Augustus Rome or post-Constantine Rome?!!!
Post "Romulus Augustulus" more like it!....
We need higher taxes on food and energy. It'll help equality or something.
ill +1
for sarc...
that was sarc....right?
Who would notice?
The kids are back in mind-controlling slave training school. The world series is coming up. NFL has kicked off the season. And all the Satanic holidays are just around the corner.
All is good in the land of aspartame laced gmo tainted milk and dead honey bees
Not long now before the first nationally induced geo-engineered snowstorm named Adam drops on the Garden of Eden
Someone mail me a snowball. Don't worry it won't melt.
^^dude took the red pill... :)
I'm not going to take it. I'm going to go to college and forget about it. I believe my chancelor Big Sis is about to become attorney general. Saw me coming and decided to split.
Steal a cup of soup...jail.
Steal Billions $$$$$$........nothing.
The rich have a larger share than ever yet all we hear from them or their puppets are sob stories crying for more? Perhaps if they were instead reduced to nothing they'd finally shut the hell up...
Roman slaveowners had to feed, clothe and house their slaves.
Today's ultrawealthy are freed from ANY obligations for other human beings.
Howling for more wars that other people will pay for and other people will die fighting...
Yes, but does that include the eunuchs?
Inquiring minds
9 of America's top 20 richest people, and about half of millionaires generally are Jews - 2.6% of the pop. They are also widely believed to constitute half or more of private donations to BOTH parties. They send BILLIONS, tax free to Israel each year, including illegal settlements.
But it is "anti-Semitic" to discuss these FACTS.
There is no ZOG...
the info from Rome only takes into consideration agricultural production
Get a job...
The Romans were pikers.
Degenerate Caesars having orgies in Roman bath houses? Meh, can't compare to Chicago bath houses...
Imperial accountants slipping lead into silver coins? Hah - today we conjure numbers from thin air and merely slip them into a stream of bits or a piece of paper which the brain dead zombies believe is just as good as gold!
Poison the populace with lead, hypnotize them with Circuses? We got GMO and Hollywood that does it on a grander scale.
Needing a cassus belli to take out uppity North African competitors from Carthage? Hah! We can match that and take out Libyans *and* Mesopotamians without breathing hard, and just because we can - we don't need no stinkin cassus belli.
So what if they had a horse as a Roman Senator. The US had the same and he went on to run for President and today is Secretary of State!
And the Romans had the entire horse, not just the back end.
Funny, I thought they already considered all of us slaves...
Zerohedge used to have incisive, cutting-edge articles. Now it seems posts are coming from memes seen on Facebook or Huffingtonpost.
Yeah, but they are much easier to color now.
To eliminate inequality, just give everyone a billion dollars, no strings attached.
Presto! Everyone is equal!
Apologies for repeating on another thread, but the content needs highlighting again with ref to this thread!
'They' don't give Sh!t about the 99.9%
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29402844
Labour said Mr Osborne was standing up "for the very wealthiest few".
And who is going to pay for the pitiful plight of the wealthiest few?
“The welfare freeze would include Jobseeker's Allowance, Income Support, Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit, Child Benefit and Employment Support Allowance, paid to those judged capable of work.
About 10 million households would be affected, roughly half of which are working, the Treasury said.”
Children in families in receipt of benefits/tax credits and income is 60% below national average. More than a quarter of Bristol's children live in poverty
USA is in the bad Caesar era, since 1963.
Better bread and circus than Rome however.
But the barbarians are at (inside?) the gates in shapes the Romans could not even imagine.
Take a good look at the mercenaries the US hires through Blackwater et. al.
Who wants to be equal.. I don't want everyone to get a medal
INCOME (an annual amount) means nothing compared to overall accumulated WEALTH
The 7 Walmart heirs are worth more than the total wealth of 40% of ALL Americans.
Good for them. I gladly continued to help them just a couple of weeks ago with a shopping trip to WalMart.
Fuck equality...I just want a chance.
Then go design something useful, start farming something that people want to purchase, or gain a skill that people will pay for. Not... that... complicated... (except for government regulation/strangulation).
Great Caesar's Ghost!
Don't worry . The only capital most people have left is their body .
Thus , the return of slavery .
Which child to sell to feed the rest ?
And the futures in baby livers and kidneys are way down .
If mercenaries have become military contractors , we can look forward to slavers becoming "Body Brokers" , quoted on the NYSE , with degree courses at Harvard an Yale in subjects like "Involuntary asset acquisition " (slave capturing) , "Informal asset re-allocation" (slave raid) , etc
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2011/04/inverse-anthropomorphism.html on how this happened
I am so confused by this website. One article blasts the inequality in this country while the link above it exaggerates the weakly progressive tax-rate in America. Which one are you ZH? Are you for the rich or for the middle class?
Good question. I've had enough of these vile pity parties for the rich. Every media outlet and website is turning into them. Abloobloobloo it's so hard to be lazier and dumber and richer than ever abloobloobloo!
gray and gay! gray and gay! this is the socialist mantra. every human needs to be inter breed until the skin color is gray. metro sexual and gay..... everyone.
people cultures societies are not inherently equal. Equality under the law is something very different and the fabians have confused this.
The socialists war cry is multiculturalism, but they destroy cultures and we are left with masses of consumers that live is culture-less societies. they destroy culture.
The socialists profess diversity. In reality they destroy diversity. and we are again left with masses of materialistic consumers that have no diversity and live in a culture-less society.
The socialistists demand tolerance. They destroy tolerance and institute blind allegiance and thought control....
i'd rather be a quarter than a nickle and two dimes