A bias against wealth?

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Understood, @Graeme Decarie . No denying that there can be expectations. Immigrants often have high expectations of children counter to the example you gave. I have heard and witnessed it from my co-op students.

My question is, though, is what biases do we have against those in what we refer to as middle class. What biases do we have against those in the next level, the higher wage uppers (i really hate the word "class" as in upper class, but, it defines the income). What biases do we have against those in the very wealthy.

I have read some here and I appreciate @Lastpointe 's points above.

How do we refrain from stereotyping the "other", whether the other be those who are removed by a few social income levels in either direction.
 
I agree with Graeme's observations. I too grew up in a 'poor' home and neighbourhood. At no point did anyone mention to me the possibility of a career. The basic idea was to get a job when you left school at 15 - "What do you want to do store, office or factory work?". It never crossed my mind that I could go to university - why would it when I didn't know of any local people who had done that?

I think we all have a tendency to put people into categories, with our minimal knowledge guiding our thoughts. Those who have always been rich or destitute really cannot accurately describe the others, any more than can those who have always been rich or destitute. I suspect the ideal income gives the ability to be clothed, housed, fed, and educated. Having vast amounts of money doesn't seem to translate into anything particularly useful.
 
The ideal income should be derived from a source that contributes to overall common good - producing something. It is this trading of numbers that have agreed upon value that I find distasteful. I don't understand how you can own stock in a company that you have nothing to do with other than trading numbers between computer systems. I might just as well defend my VLT addiction or smoking addiction or sugar addiction as a valuable contribution to society might I not.
 
monk said:
The ideal income should be derived from a source that contributes to overall common good - producing something. It is this trading of numbers that have agreed upon value that I find distasteful. I don't understand how you can own stock in a company that you have nothing to do with other than trading numbers between computer systems. I might just as well defend my VLT addiction or smoking addiction or sugar addiction as a valuable contribution to society might I not.
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Baudelaire said something like that ... intoxicate yourself with something ... but still it will not guarantee wisdom and justice ... for the other (hoo ever) will try and put you down in a rein of terrorism ... as it separates those contained in the demos ... that which the other oligarchs believe to be demons. It is much like the confusion over subject and object ... tis nothing if the verbal side is not medium and mean to the polity ... as carried by the powers ... whichever way but loose!

Whatever you choose it will still not change the sedate institution as it stands ... albeit casting a shadow ... that it can't see as it always looks to the brighter good side for those elite in their abstract fashion ... it does serve to allow the Shadow to go about undetected ... like a darker form of God ... kind 've like in a partisan tunnel boring through the darkness of power to vent pent up energies of the darker order ... more like a hole in the horizon where you can stand a' post'ole IHC ... what can you see as thus reciprocated ... like ostriches ... nothing.

It does allow rest from the burning passions above the ground of faith though ... and assist the outlanders plans for bringing down the wealthy powers with a quick blow from the Black Swan (one who operates outside the paradigm curve. Do you understand the paradigm as approximating the fall of the common John ... his head flat out on a plate? His head must be jammed right down to his toes with the weight imposed ... Taos Theosophy ... I.E. the God of Sophia as a buried talent ...

Chi's a dark and mire boid ... costa tu'pence to feed Ur ... ignites as Ignatius ... over alien things to the other powers ... contrary to where we're at as they can't Rae circulate well ...
 
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monk said:
The ideal income should be derived from a source that contributes to overall common good - producing something. It is this trading of numbers that have agreed upon value that I find distasteful. I don't understand how you can own stock in a company that you have nothing to do with other than trading numbers between computer systems. I might just as well defend my VLT addiction or smoking addiction or sugar addiction as a valuable contribution to society might I not.
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I have issues with the whole financial and investment game, too.

Not the basic stuff. Selling stock originated as a way for companies to raise capital without borrowing. It can contribute to developing new products or improving existing ones. Even trading stock (I sell my stock in Big Company, Inc. to you) doesn't really bother me.

I'm also cool with venture capital. New companies need money to develop their products and services and VC done right provides that investment. Yes, some VCs are exploiting young companies, but the good ones are genuinely helping advance technologies and services with their investments.

However, I find the whole market has gotten very complicated (options, futures, derivatives, hedge funds, and so on) and too much of that complication seems designed to keep brokers, dealers, and professional investors rich rather than contributing anything to real development or improvement of anything.

Had I the money to do serious investing, I'd lean to doing venture capital where I'm putting my money directly into smaller companies to help them develop rather than playing games on the markets.
 
How much wealth is buried in internet transactions ... and thus transmuting to quiet place ... out of reach of public concerns about Pragmatism lost?

Then if you didn't realize pragmatism as something good for everybody ... would you have lost grasp of the ide-R as "r" mimicking gamma or a darker shade ...

IDe being defined as the primal power ... a void in the first place forstoe in thoughts ...
 
We live in a society based upon moneyed-masters and debt-slaves.

A culture of greedy, power-hungry, warmongering, exploitative 'rulers' with a violent military industrial complex backing it up.

The very notion of wealth itself becomes equal parts illusion and yoke for the conditioned masses who, paraphrasing Noam Chomsky “don’t even know what’s happening, and don’t even know that they don’t know.”

Maintaining the illusion of prosperity is critical to our economy - its foundation is built on consumption, fraud credit and debt.

The banking system has been engineered from the top down to create unlimited wealth for some while taxing the eternity out of the rest of us.

He who owns the gold makes the rules?
 
Does it constitute a bias against wealth to observe that the richest two men in the country have a combined worth equal to the bottom 11 MILLION people in Canada? To suggest that this is obscene?

Would anyone object if we shifted things around and made all of the tax breaks and money-saving opportunities available ONLY to the bottom third? The top two thirds would simply pay a (proportional) tax rate on their income, NO MATTER WHAT ITS SOURCE.
 
Kimmio said:
Basically it comes down to, for me, that no child in Canada should go to school hungry - and no one should be forced to live on the street in a wealthy country like Canada. And the wealthy, and the middle class collectively, are the ones with the power and resources to change that.
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But if they actually did something about it there would be no middle class income for the research agenda:

"The next step for a research agenda on poverty in Canada is to start exploring the extent to which bad luck, unwise decisions, and government policies (including transfer and tax policies) contribute to at-risk groups being stuck in persistent poverty. It is only after the root causes of poverty are more fully understood that strategies for ways to help the poor can better address the problem."

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sit...duction-to-the-state-of-poverty-in-canada.pdf
 
In the U.S., prior to Kennedy, tax rates on the wealthy were 80-90% of their income. Kennedy dropped the rates to 70%, by Reagan's time, to 50, and now they are at 30. And I would say society was collectively better off with the higher taxation rate. If you try to raise taxation to 90% on an income over 400 thousand now (yes, that's wealthy in statistical terms) there would be mayhem. People would not be willing or able to wrap their heads around that.
 
monk said:
But if they actually did something about it there would be no middle class income for the research agenda:

"The next step for a research agenda on poverty in Canada is to start exploring the extent to which bad luck, unwise decisions, and government policies (including transfer and tax policies) contribute to at-risk groups being stuck in persistent poverty. It is only after the root causes of poverty are more fully understood that strategies for ways to help the poor can better address the problem."

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sit...duction-to-the-state-of-poverty-in-canada.pdf
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I don't heed research from Fraser Institute.
 
Kimmio said:
In the U.S., prior to Kennedy, tax rates on the wealthy were 80-90% of their income. Kennedy dropped the rates to 70%, by Reagan's time, to 50, and now they are at 30. And I would say society was collectively better off with the higher taxation rate. If you try to raise taxation to 90% on an income over 400 thousand now (yes, that's wealthy in statistical terms) there would be mayhem. People would not be willing or able to wrap their heads around that.
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There is no way that anyone should be paying 90% of their income to the government nor is there is any justification for doing so (and I wouldn't be in the target group, BTW). It's purely punitive and it is punishment for being rich. You're making Pinga's point for her with this post. The government gets enough money now to do what it needs to do. If programs are underfunded or needed programs aren't happening, it's a management problem, not a money problem.

The fact is that wealthy Canadians should be paying a marginal rate of 33% on income and that is plenty. If you want to get more money out of them, streamline the various tax shelters and deductions that they use to reduce what they owe. If you did that, a higher rate would be unnecessary.
 
Mendalla said:
There is no way that anyone should be paying 90% of their income to the government nor is there is any justification for doing so (and I wouldn't be in the target group, BTW). It's purely punitive and it is punishment for being rich. You're making Pinga's point for her with this post. The government gets enough money now to do what it needs to do. If programs are underfunded or needed programs aren't happening, it's a management problem, not a money problem.

The fact is that wealthy Canadians should be paying a marginal rate of 33% on income and that is plenty. If you want to get more money out of them, streamline the various tax shelters and deductions that they use to reduce what they owe. If you did that, a higher rate would be unnecessary.
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I was stating that many people are not aware that at one time the (to ultra) wealthy paid as high as 90% and if that were changed back today, heads would explode. You proved my point. ...But there was a time when that was socially accepted, even in the capitalist US of A. So what changed, that changed minds to be so staunchly against it?
 
Using US as an example...if taxes to the rich - highest incomes - have dropped that dramatically...but yet their incomes have gone up dramatically, in the past 50 years, there is no way in hell it comes down to simply a management problem.
 
BetteTheRed said:
Does it constitute a bias against wealth to observe that the richest two men in the country have a combined worth equal to the bottom 11 MILLION people in Canada? To suggest that this is obscene?

Would anyone object if we shifted things around and made all of the tax breaks and money-saving opportunities available ONLY to the bottom third? The top two thirds would simply pay a (proportional) tax rate on their income, NO MATTER WHAT ITS SOURCE.
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Do you tar & feather all of the people based on those two? Do you stereotype rich or moderately well off, based on your understanding of those two individuals?
If the answer is "yes", then yes, there is a bias.
 
Kimmio said:
In the U.S., prior to Kennedy, tax rates on the wealthy were 80-90% of their income. Kennedy dropped the rates to 70%, by Reagan's time, to 50, and now they are at 30. And I would say society was collectively better off with the higher taxation rate. If you try to raise taxation to 90% on an income over 400 thousand now (yes, that's wealthy in statistical terms) there would be mayhem. People would not be willing or able to wrap their heads around that.
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Kimmio, you may wish to look a bit deeper into those numbers. Prior to FDR, rates were closer to what they are today. FDR proposed a 100% tax and it is where you got some of the 90%.
Taxation is not a simple question of the tax-rate, as you also have to consider items such as incentives, write-offs, deductions.

Then, again, we are still not talking about bias. You are just showing your feelings regarding how people are taxed.
 
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