Difference between revisions of "Why do you rob the middle class? It is where the money is."

Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber, was supposedly asked "Why do you rob banks?"  His answer: "because that's where the money is."  And that's precisely what the 1% (actually .01%) has been doing to the middle class, because the middle class is where the money is.

Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber, was supposedly asked "Why do you rob banks?"  His answer: "because that's where the money is."  And that's precisely what the 1% (actually .01%) has been doing to the middle class, because the middle class is where the money is.

In the late 70's, I recognized the assault on Social Security as an attempt to steal from the largest pot of money in the world: the retirement money for baby boomers.  Protecting Social Security from theft has been one of the few successes of the past 80 years, perhaps because it is so obvious.  There is still a huge campaign to delegitimize Social Security and reduce support by convincing younger people that they will never collect it, but that doesn't seem to be succeeding yet.  There was a huge, successful campaign to convince people that average returns from the stock market were much greater than returns from Social Security, which resulted in a variety of government-sponsored programs to encourage investment of savings in the stock market, such as 401K plans.  But it turns out that ordinary people are very unlikely to do as well as the market unless they invest in index funds, and the very rich are likely to do much better than the market with their investments: a major transfer from the middle class to the rich, who essentially own market institutions.  It's as if the ordinary people are the players, and the rich are the house at a casino.  And speaking of that, the casino industry has expanded enormously as yet another way of extracting wealth from the middle class.

In the late 70's, I recognized the assault on Social Security as an attempt to steal from the largest pot of money in the world: the retirement money for baby boomers.  Protecting Social Security from theft has been one of the few successes of the past 80 years, perhaps because it is so obvious.  There is still a huge campaign to delegitimize Social Security and reduce support by convincing younger people that they will never collect it, but that doesn't seem to be succeeding yet.  There was a huge, successful campaign to convince people that average returns from the stock market were much greater than returns from Social Security, which resulted in a variety of government-sponsored programs to encourage investment of savings in the stock market, such as 401K plans.  But it turns out that ordinary people are very unlikely to do as well as the market unless they invest in index funds, and the very rich are likely to do much better than the market with their investments: a major transfer from the middle class to the rich, who essentially own market institutions.  It's as if the ordinary people are the players, and the rich are the house at a casino.  And speaking of that, the casino industry has expanded enormously as yet another way of extracting wealth from the middle class.

The largest, most successful theft in the history of the world was by the 1% through the housing bubble that burst in 2007/8.  The brunt of the losses was largely borne by the middle class, while the banking and stock industries skimmed off vast amounts of money from the selling and reselling of homes and mortgages, primarily to the middle class.  Another layer of profit-taking was bundling of mortgages into vastly overpriced and risky financial instruments which burned the investment portfolios of the middle class.  The banks were rescued by government, but not the middle class.  Nobody has gone to jail over this enormous ripoff, though innumerable families lost their investments in their houses.  Housing policy in the US was designed to enable the middle class to build assets over long periods (the 30 year mortgage, for example.)  Through "financial innovation", it was turned into a huge scam.

The largest, most successful theft in the history of the world was by the 1% through the housing bubble that burst in 2007/8.  The brunt of the losses was largely borne by the middle class, while the banking and stock industries skimmed off vast amounts of money from the selling and reselling of homes and mortgages, primarily to the middle class.  Another layer of profit-taking was bundling of mortgages into vastly overpriced and risky financial instruments which burned the investment portfolios of the middle class.  The banks were rescued by government, but not the middle class.  Nobody has gone to jail over this enormous ripoff, though innumerable families lost their investments in their houses.  Housing policy in the US was designed to enable the middle class to build assets over long periods (the 30 year mortgage, for example.)  Through "financial innovation", it was turned into a huge scam.