Quote (AspenSniper @ 13 Jul 2020 22:06)
I pride myself on my individual, moderate, pragmatic views. I guess if I'm in a bucket, it'd be libertarian like a lot of white guys around 30 years old. Pro gay, pro abortion, pro liberty, don't f with my money but i'm not an idiot that doesnt understand that collectivism money can produce a positive social good.
The BLM movement caused me to think a bit. I've been quick to think, I really didnt come from anything with a firefighter dad and a retail store clerk minimum wage earning mom, so if I can do it so can everyone. I do still think that and I do still think increasing money on social welfare is a stupid idea because it's usually just a bailout for people who dont make good decisions. I don't believe in inequity in the workplace as most managers would kill to be able to hire more women/POC, etc., but often times there just isnt a huge talent pool and the best candidates just are white guys, especially in areas like tech. Even at the corporate executive level, companies often strive to add female and minority board members/executive leaders. However, I've come to really understand white privilege and there's a piece we don't really think about.
Inheritance and family money is seldom talked about and white people don't give it much thought. More of a class issue than a race issue, but they often go hand-in-hand. For most, if they lose their job they have a family member even if not a direct parent that could support them financially or let them live in a room in their house, etc. That isn't nearly as common in minority families. Also, why i feel class/race go hand-in-hand dates back to housing laws for many past decades. Levittown is an easy example. Those houses were sold for about $10k per, sometimes less, which would be maybe $100k or so in today's money. Those houses are about half a mil now, meaning they made 5x in investment equity value after adjusting for inflation. Those houses, as was the case for many other communities, weren't available to blacks. Outside of just the law, many areas refused to sell homes to blacks, pushing them to historic black areas. Surely most of us know the historic "black neighborhoods" that still exist today even in more wealthy cities. Those home values didnt rise at anywhere near the same rate.
This isn't broad brush and I get that, but the amount of inheritance money about to flow to millenials i believe is somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 trillion. Not a lot of that is going to minorities because of what happened in the past. So when my white friends say "hey i didnt do anything to you, don't blame me" I kinda get the anger/annoyance/attitude from minorities as we're going to benefit off of the racist actions of our grandparents' and great grandparents' era and minorities won't.
Anyways, I haven't posted here in a while and wanted to share this.
I think the bolded part really gets at the core of the economic and social problem facing America today, but not in the straightforward way:
The real issue, in my opinion, is that people's economic situation (and subsequently their fate in life) is increasingly determined by their assets/wealth rather than their income from work. Returns on capital investment (including real estate property!) have outpaced wage growth for decades, and to add insult to injury, the effective tax rate on capital gains is lower than the actual tax burden on working- and middle-class families (when we include inevitable sales taxes and such). Capitalism has always favored capital over labor to some degree, but in recent decades, our system has degenerated to the point where this advantage has become nearly insurmountable.
Only for this reason does accumulated family net worth play such a big role, only for this reason does it seem as if minority families will never be able to make up the headstart white families inherited due to discrimination and exploitation from several generations ago. If society eliminated systemic discrimination in the present, like redlining or police violence, then these different economic starting points for whites and minorities should quickly fade over time and be made up for after 2 generations max, no reparations needed. Imho, the fact that this vision seems unrealistic today does not point to even more hidden and nefarious forms of racial discrimination - it is the result of the systemic
classism I described above.
Simply put, a lot of the aspects discussed today under the umbrella of the 'race question' actually belong to the 'social question'.*
Solving the social question/the woes caused by economic inequality would do more for minorities than any quotas, symbolism or virtue signalling could ever achieve.
Side note: this is also the reason why "Labor Bernie" from 2016 was so intriguing, and why "Woke Bernie" from 2020 was a dud by comparison.
* This is no coincidence. The billionaire overlords are very deliberately stoking racial tensions from both sides of the political aisle in order to distract from the economic dimension of all of this. By polarizing the political sphere around (seemingly) non-economic issues, they redirect political energy away from the fields where action would really hurt their bottom line, and they additionally manage to lock the executive and legislative down in a perpetual state of partisan gridlock where nothing truly meaningful ever gets passed.
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Quote (AspenSniper @ 13 Jul 2020 22:31)
A bigger fear of mine is a tax on the “kinda wealthy” like increasing taxes on people making $200-300k a year. 200k a year in DC, San Fran, NYC, etc., is NOT rich. That’ll maybe get a kid or two through college and yourself in a 3 bed 2 bath old house often times. The left not knowing where to draw that line is dangerous to me. Tax the overpaid and family money rich, not the hard working who just kick ass with their MBA/law degree/MD/working 60+ hours a week in a challenging space and get compensated well for doing so.
100% agreed, well said indeed!
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 13 2020 06:21pm