Saturday, January 21, 2017

How being 1% works with trickle down policy

Saw a meme that went like this:

Daughter to Mother:
"how does trickle down policy work?"
"First, the 1% get all of the money"
"and then what?"
"That's it"


lol This is clearly wrong. First, the 1% -starts- with 99% of the money, then they continue making money and paying low wages and issuing 'favors' instead of exchanging money and then through capitalism they weasel out another 0.9999 %
Then, the government steps in and says, let's give consumers free money to spend wherever they choose! And those consumers spend the money at big businesses where the 1% get another .000099999% of the cumulative monies.

Long story short, it's not that trickle down is bad, it's that big businesses are allowed to pay disproportionate wages (128:1 manager to employee wage ratio? give me a break) and when they spend money to grow, they award the contracts to their cronies who skim the top 80% off in profit and the bottom 20% they write off as "expenses" on their taxes and therefore don't have to pay taxes on it, and those companies they hired 'trickle down' and say, well 30% of our profits from this are expenses, and they had to hire another company that claims 40% is expenses, then 50% then 60% then 70% then 80%, then when you get to the bottom trickle down level(s) that claims they actually took a loss on the job, you find out that the big company from the beginning actually owns a majority, controlling share of the little company and the biggest company comes around at tax time and says : We have 80 different little companies that actually took a loss this year for a total of -$900M Which we would like to apply to this years taxes. We made $1B net profit, so all in all our company only made $100M this year. But then you look at their Net Worth, and you realize: They started at $6.4B at the start of the year and now they're worth $7.3B. And so they pay a corporate tax of 35% of 100M which is $35M and the price of their shares go up 15% which if they started at $125 is now $143 ($18.75 per share) and the 1% who own those shares own 99% of all 10M share so the owners of the company--that same 1%-- gained $185M in their investment accounts. So their personal net total is something like $6.25B at this point

And oh, the best part about it is that they didn't have to do anything to make that money. Nothing. From day 1 to today. All they did was sink some money into the business to buy 70% of the company back when the shares were only $30/share ($210M--which is just about 1 years profit today). And the way they were able to acquire those shares wasn't with their own money initially--they set up a mutual fund which legally accepted hard working american's 401K contributions and invested them into a select group of stocks for which they were trying to acquire. Being the broker of these stocks, they took a $5 fee each time anyone bought or sold stocks--which was 25x or more per year per person because the contributions were made off of every paycheck of these people ($125/person/year). And after doing this for 5 years for 500K people, they accumulated the necessary $210M and they "reinvested" the money into their own company (a mutual fund) by 'buying' (actually the correct term is 'selling,' because the mutual fund is selling these shares off to a private party [those 1%] on the market) out the specific shares of said original company and reserving them for themselves specifically so that they could perform a company takeover.

They basically used everyone else's money in a long-game plan to gather these shares under the umbrella of different mutual funds, and then when the time was right they bought out the shares for themselves using the fees they accumulated from brokering the mutual fund.
After a short period of time, those shares grew from $30 to $125 and then onward to $143 and everyone praises them for being these genius investors and the government doesn't really tax them yet--they can't tax them until the profits are 'realized' (i.e. cashed out) because they keep claiming them as reinvested capital gains each year when they buy stocks and other investments until they need to cash them out to live off of. But conveniently the company offers them a dividend so they never really need to cash out because they own enough shares that they can live off of the dividends, buy nice things, and other people do all the work for them and get paid less.
They pay brokers and investors to run the mutual funds and collect the fees. They pay CEOs to run the company and make them money. And then all of those people pay to put their money back into the stock market for their long-term investment (retirement) plans and that's where their money goes. Meanwhile, these 1% collect money from the investment plans (AGAIN) and when they aren't making enough money they blame the CEOs who have to cut jobs of hard working americans. Those hard working americans have to cash out or borrow against their 401K and have to pay the fees to the mutual funds to do so and thereby the 1% get money yet again!
Then, they avoid paying taxes by buying up the debts of homes that are going to foreclose, they let them foreclose rather than accepting short sell offers, and then the government pays them 60% of the value of the home through FHA insurance--plus they get to keep the home, which still has intrinsic value. They write 100% of the value of the home off on their taxes--which is how they have 80 different lending companies that listed a net Loss on their taxes--and then they wait for the next year to roll the insurance profits over or they "reinvest" again and buy up more homes that are about to default (C grade or lower loans that the normal bank doesn't want to hold onto). Then, they wait a few months and they start to sell the homes 1 by one that they already foreclosed on and collected the mortgage insurance on, and they sell them at auction for 50-80% below market and they claim the extra 20-50% on their taxes as losses under a fun field that says if you are forced to sell something below it's market value you can list it as a form of depreciation and write it off on your taxes. --If you've done your math right, YES these people are making 130% to 190% of the price they paid for the home. so a $200K home brings them up to $380K in profits. ($180K is net profit).
And they don't have to do a thing for that money because they have paid other people 1/128th of their profits to do it for them (which in the home example is $1400 to collect the money and put it up for auction--a very simple task)

The unfortunate side of all of this is that it is the byproduct of whatever form of capitalism exists in america. Capitalism is the private ownership of property capable of being exchanged. Stocks held at the mutual funds are property. Real estate is property. Debts are a form of property. Money is property. Because it benefits people to reinvest their money by not having to pay taxes on their property, they reinvest. The government sees this as a good thing, because by reinvesting they create more jobs(some attorney gets paid $1400 for every home he puts up for public auction), so they are willing to postpone collecting taxes if it means more jobs are created.
Capitalists have learned though, that they can double dip on profits with tricks like collecting fees on the exchange of property (Buy or sell something, pay a fee--buy a stock, pay a fee. Sell that stock, pay a fee. Buy a home, pay a fee, sell a home, pay a fee[they're even looking for ways that they can create their own currency so that when you use their currency, you pay a fee, when you buy into their currency, you pay a fee, but thankfully all of those methods get blocked by the government eventually--at least after all of the choice profits are already made]). They can also capitalize on your misfortune, such as seizing your home out from under you when you fail to pay your mortgage--no, you don't get reimbersed for the money you already put into it, they don't buy out the equity of your home--you aren't paid anything for this, they just take it based on the terms you agreed to when you took out a loan.

Worse, even still, is that it isn't going away. Ever. Whether you apply a trickle down policy or not is irrelevant--but they don't want you to know that. The 1% already won at this game. They already have all of the property that they need and even if the rules changed tomorrow and they suddenly couldn't 'reinvest' to avoid taxes, or if laws were created that stopped them from capitalizing on certain things--well, then they'll stop...and they'll take their property and say FU to politicians and people, and they'll live off of it for ages and ages and the other 99% would be lucky to receive table scraps from them. It's too late.--Even in the worst case scenario where there is a total government takeover, the only thing that MIGHT change is WHO the 1% are. The money is already accumulated folks. You can't change that. If someone took control of the government, they would seize control of the 1%'s wealth and then the story would continue, only be worse.

SO...I've educated you on the whole matter and now you have to make a decision:
Would you rather the 1% continue what they are doing and allow other people to try to do what the 1% do but on a much smaller scale? or would you rather they took their money and left and we got the table scraps and the economy--all life as we know it--shut down? Or, and I shudder to even list this as an option: would you rather someone else came in and took over and changed all life as we know it and seized the 1%'s wealth?

No comments:

Post a Comment