[chongli]

Lots of people love to throw around the word "shareholders" like it's a pejorative. The word seems to carry connotations of greedy old Uncle Scrooge, Uncle Pennybags, or some spoiled Saudi Prince. That's a highly distorted view.

Lots of "shareholders" are people's retirement funds, pensions, and the like. When those funds finally pay out, they get taxed as income just like for everybody else.

[celtain]

Even including stocks owned through retirement and pension funds, 84% of stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and roughly half of all households have exactly $0 invested in the market.

Saying that Uncle Scrooge and his buddies own all the stocks is not much worse than implying that normal people own a significant share of the market through their retirement accounts.

[objektif]

Most stocks hold by Americans are owned by the top 10%. Unfortunately this libertarian trickle down fantasy of trickle down economics is not correct.

[Spivak]

This is a stupid argument. Say we have 100 people in our economy, 90 of them $50k, 9 of them make $200k, and 1 person makes 1 million. Everyone invests 10% of their income in 'stoks' which cost $5/each.

Each of the 90 people invest $5k and have 1000 stoks.

Each of the 9 people invest $20k and have 4000 stoks.

The millionaire invests $100k and has 20,000 stoks.

The top 10% have 99.96% of the stoks.

It would be weird if the richest people didn't own most of the stocks. It doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem.

[FireBeyond]

Except it's not 10%, or 1%. It's stats like "3 hedge fund makers make more than 140,000 teachers". The problem isn't disparity, it's the absolute mind boggling nature of it.

[objektif]

Yeah his example is comical in the sense that it kind of shows the nature of the problem.

[objektif]

So you don’t see the problem in your little example?