1. I am no fan of corporate welfare or cronyism in politics. But this is a problem of politics, not wealth. As long as there are favors to sell, there will be people willing to buy them, no matter how big the wealth gap is. Take power AWAY from politicians and government, and they’ll not longer have anything to sell.

2. To Melinda9′s point, the rich don’t owe anyone a job, and any definition of “enough jobs” would be purely arbitrary. The number of jobs that exist is a product of the demand for the services provided by the businesses that require workers. The solution to the rich not providing enough jobs for your taste is NOT attempting to remove from their possession the only tool they have with which to create more jobs.

3. To atimoshenko’s point, I’m afraid you are wrong. 80% of millionaire’s are 1st generation.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley-millionaire.html
Also, equality of opportunity is certainly a worthy goal. But it’s a fantasy. If I start at the same place as my brother (same family, same school, etc.), but decide to work harder and earn more in my life, do I not deserve to give my children strategic advantage over his by sending them to better schools, and teaching them how to be successful?

4. To kromelizard: what possible reason, other than profit, do business owners have in owning business? Have we really descended into the territory where we have started believing that businesses exist to create jobs and provide health insurance? Believe me, if I could run a business and not lose revenue by having no employees, I would. So would you. But employees are necessary, in most cases. The wage they earn is proportional to the value they provide.

Now, if you think about the consequences of what we see in this photo, it is indeed gruesome. But the photo itself is not. I don’t think that a graphic photo of this man after the fire was put out would have been posted without warning.

That doesn’t speak to whether or not there’s a difference in reaction to such photos of animals, which there is, but you can’t really compare these two cases directly

That they are in the position of ownership doesn’t mean they DESERVE the amounts of money they are accruing. It means they just have the power to. Unfortunately for the rest of us they have, as a class, elected to use this power to systematically dismantle the economic system that allowed for their success and replace it with third-world crony capitalism that promises them even greater control over the wealth of this nation while impoverishing the rest of us.

Make no mistake. They are stealing from us. The mortgage crisis was the greatest act of coordinated theft and fraud in our lifetime.

Money is a recent invention.

About as recent as civilization. Even “banks” issuing paper currency (banknotes) to represent deposits are, what, 1,400 years old?

Now maybe you’re trying to say that civilization is overrated, in which case: good point. If there’s no civilization we don’t need money.

Signed,
Citizen of a smaller net contributor who is happy to pay taxes so that Romania will one day be as wealthy as we are now.

(Without the EU Greece would just go bankrupt, a scenario that would make the Great Depression seem harmless. Your anger should be hurled at the Papandreou clan, not the folks trying to get Greece back on its feet.)

Money is a recent invention.

Uh. Would you care to elaborate? Because money is as recent an invention as civilization. The idea of debt happened well before the invention of the wheel.

If you really want a deficit spending option because you worship at the alter of Keynes, then fucking listen to what the man actually said, which was that in the good times you are supposed to save money to spend later, not deficit spend during the good times, and then  deficit  spend even more in the bad.

Do it for no other reason than that if you are not blowing half your nations GDP on interest payments,  you will actually have more money to spend then you do while deficit spending.

I have literally no hope that the US isn’t going to merrily followed Greece’s example.  The Democrats can’t restrain from spending and fail to raise taxes to pay for it, and the Republicans, overcome with a fit of insanity, insist on cutting taxes before they pay for what they currently have, much less the crap they want to buy.

I think we are all screwed.  We have found democracies Achilles Heel.  Politicians get elected by giving away stuff.  They get kicked out of office if they try and pay for it with taxes.  The politicians that win are the ones that combine the two halves of the equation by giving away crap and refusing to pay for it.  The people love it until the economy implodes.

Bah.

Perhaps protestors should start bringing their pets with them.  Pictures/videos of animals getting maced would probably spur more outrage than the people getting it.

Something tells me he should be setting fire to the fucking 1%ers.

They don’t necessarily live in the country that they’re draining.

but at least we will have tried.  feckthestatusquo

The idea is not to foolishly pursue some arbitrary equality of outcome – the idea to pursue equality of opportunity (destroying any inequality of outcome that is a product of the inequality of opportunity as a result). Wealth makes it easier to generate more wealth, and it is because of the unprecedented concentration of wealth that privilege (today) is much easier to maintain than it is to acquire. It is this inequality of opportunity that the “1%” criticism attacks.

As they stand right now, democratic systems have little to do with identifying and (respectively) empowering the absolute best citizen for tackling a given challenge. 

We need more small business leaders, less CEOs sucking up 300 times their producers income.

Xeni ended up taking the image down because of the overblown reactions of a few.

But nobody seems to have a problem with children and kittens seeing a guy self-immolating on the same front page?  I’m not saying that you should take this guy down.. but Chase-no-Face should not have been censored!

(end of rant completely unrelated to the subject… just had to vent that out)

And let’s not forget Chase-no-Face!
http://chasenoface.blogspot.fr/

There really isn’t a free lunch.

What’s the practical result?

The 1% own the businesses that provide the jobs and paychecks of the 99%

The 1% provide the capital necessary to buy houses, cars, and start businesses.

The 1% are typically highly productive individuals who have the leadership skills to make businesses profitable. Profitable businesses lead to higher stock values, which the 99% depend on for retirement.

I suppose we should all be a litte bit poorer, so long as the rich are less rich, right?

Poverty starts above that cutoff.