1687

Thanks, Strollen!! For the info, and the courtesy. :) Already checked out the links, somewhere i can connect.

Do you or anyone have thoughts on this news?

After pumping another $75 billion into financial markets Friday, the New York Federal Reserve announced it would continue special operations in an attempt to keep interest rates in their intended range. Short-term rates had shot up as high as 10% at the beginning of the week, threatening to disrupt the bond market and the overall lending system.

The central bank said it would offer a series of daily and 14-day term overnight repurchase agreements, or repos, in the coming weeks for an aggregate amount of at least $30 billion each. It also announced daily repos for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each until October 10.

So reading that, that’s infusing 75 billion a day for 2 weeks, whats going on there?! I’m not seeing any real info on why

1688

Any way you’d consider starting a new thread on what the Fed is doing? This discussion has very little to do with income inequality.

1689

This is a decent overview of recent Fed activity:

Also, I agree that this should probably get a new thread.

1690

Back on topic

One of the reasons I’ve always been so ambivalent about Income Inequality is the focus always seemed to be within a nation (and primarily the US). But global inequality is so much worse than inequality within a country and seems to get virtually no attention either by politicians or on the forum.

I watched the Netflix documentary on Bill Gates, which is primarily focused on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, my review is here.

This led me to wonder if some of the efforts we are making to decrease inequality in the US, won’t lead to more inequality at a global level.

Take globalism/outsourcing etc. certainly, the movement of manufacturing, call centers, and lately IT jobs overseas has kept wage down for American workers. However, the flip side is that globalism also has resulted in more than 1 billion people being lifted out of extreme poverty (making less than $2/day) since the 1990s. It sucks for the US worker, but the $120K US worked being replace by IT person in Mumbai is not only going to be able to support a large Indian family, but in many cases a number of household staff and their families, hired by the Indian IT worker.

If the far left, and nationalist right somehow managed to roll back globalism. What is the impact to the billion people who’ve been integrated into the global economy? Do they go back to these type of jobs?

I don’t have a major issue with paying an extra say $10K in taxes or higher prices in order to help a family making $20K move to $30K (aka a $15/hour job). This can be a combo of more cash or more benefits like free health care or free college for their kids.

But I think it is just as important to help a person making $2/day get to $3/day in another country than raise an American family income from $20K-$30K. But my $10k can help 27 people go from $2 to $3/day as opposed to a single American…

I also have the same concern about some of the proposal which would eliminate charitable deductions for estates. Depending on the timing, if we confiscated all of Bill Gates and Warren Buffets wealth and distributed to the 110+ million American families each family would get $1,500 -$2,000 (double if the money was distributed to only the bottom half) That’s a substantial amount to many families.

But the Gates foundation has already saved at least 10 million lives (Since 1990 an estimated 120 million children have lived thanks to vaccines.) And will likely save 100 million+ over the course of the foundation existence. Moreover, many of the things the foundation is working on like toilets which don’t need plumbing or electricity would likely never been created by organizations like the USAID, or the UN WHO.

To me the tradeoff of making the lives of American poor better, vs saving 100 million lives in developing countries is a no brainer.

1691

We could confiscate all of their money and use it to save people in other countries. Confiscating their money helps address some of the ills of inequality (the power of extreme wealth), so using their money to help foreigners still helps Americans.

The reason global inequality doesn’t get much traction is that it’s hard to imagine a local / domestic political solution for it. I can easily imagine Congress acting in some way to curb CEO pay or increase pay at the bottom or increase top marginal rates and transfer the gains to the poor with better services. But I can’t really imagine Congress acting in any way that helps e.g. the poor of Bangladesh in any substantial way. But maybe that’s just my poor imagination.

1692

Going global is usually just an excuse for the rich to tell the working poor in the developed countries to shut-up. It’s a trick and a callous attempt to allow those who have to make those without to keep doing their bidding under the disguise that they’ll save the starving in Africa instead of helping those nearby

The reality is, we can do both.

1693

As always, pitting the middle class against the lower class (or in this case, the American lower class against the global poverty class) is a false dichotomy and a transparent, morally repugnant one at that.

1694

There is no direct competition between the middle class/lower class in developed countries but the global poverty class, but it is absolutely true that the only real way for the poverty class to rise up is to participate in the global economy, which means leveraging their low labor costs to win business until they can develop other capabilities.

I don’t see how developed countries can control that to minimize negative impact on their population without taking some pretty extreme protectionist policies / taxation rates.

1695
1696

This means Trump is pivoting to run against Warren.

1697

Or Bernie, but yes, I definitely agree this is a pivot away from assuming Biden will be the nominee.

1698

Bernie has no chance at this point.

1699

I agree, but Trump is dumb, so…

1700

Good tweet thread from Krugman about the threat from alleged Wall Street Dems to support Trump if Warren is the nominee.

1701

I saw this in the WSJ, and found a non-paywall link.

Anybody have access to the research site?

Overall, the findings showed that those surveyed overestimate the economic prospect for children from rich and middle-income families while underestimating that for those from poor families.

In addition, the perceptions of some types of respondents offered some interesting findings. For example, the following categories of respondents were more pessimistic about the equality of mobility prospects across parental income ranks: those aged 18 to 29, white, living in a household with $30,000-$99,999 annual income, owning a house or paying some rent, leaning liberal, or with a bachelor’s degree.

1702

I didn’t see anyone specifically mentioning this article, but a few mentions to funding of IRS. Propublica has been going on it for a while and this is their most recent:

1703

That’s a pretty poor excuse; it’s harder so we don’t and won’t do it until you pay us more. Just imagine if all companies operated that way.

I am curious if the IRS is efficient with their tools, or even has any good ones. I’d think the bulk of the work would be not manual and the manual piece would be the flags or something of that nature.

1704

They have quotas to fill, and so, when you have only so many funds, you hit the low hanging fruit.

You want an IRS that will go after the rich, then you need to fund it. Something the American people are loathed to do, because of general short sightedness and ignorance.

As for the work that is involved with audits, I doubt that a lot of it can be automated. It requires man hour and leg work.

1705

About a third of auto loans for new vehicles taken in the first half of 2019 had terms of longer than six years, according to credit-reporting firm Experian PLC. A decade ago, that number was less than 10%.

A third of new-car buyers who trade in their cars roll debt from old vehicles into their new loans, according to car-shopping site Edmunds. That is up from about a quarter before the financial crisis.

1706

Roughly, this holds true for lower- and middle- class tax fraud, and does not for the rich. Not too many exotic things the former can do with W2/1099 income, and ‘under the table’ income is pretty obvious relative to income/assets at that level. Schemes lack professional advice and are generally more hilarious than effective.

The rich are doing their tax fraud with $500/hr accountants and attorneys exploiting the full breadth of the tax code and all its loopholes and exemptions, while taking in income and hiding assets in all sorts of places. Frankly, even with the old budget levels and a flexible pay scale by government standards, the IRS was still hoping to get lucky with talent willing to take less money to do public service (in a job that much of the public reflexively hates, no less).

I mean, we have pretty good evidence that the Trump family has been committing tax fraud for decades at this point, the IRS has allegedly audited them multiple times, the Trumps were not really working with the Best People… and nothing. Most of the other rich people committing fraud are better at it than the Trumps.