Oh, yeah, they sure do. What happens when everyone eventually figures out politics is pro wrestling, and the same donor class runs the whole show? The fake left/right divide goes away, and the rich find themselves outnumbered, and their money won't buy them a way out.
It definitely will. The only civil war could be working-class cops and PMCs against people who are paid by the hour, who have to show up with an hour's notice, who have their urine tested, who have their complaints about discrimination and dangerous conditions ignored, and who are fired at will - and that war is always going on.
Wealthy people will (do) rely on people with guns to protect their physical vicinity, and the technology, organization, and propaganda provided by the people posting on this thread to multiply the effort of the people with guns.
edit: I bet you could have a civil war in the US that wouldn't affect the financial industry or the wealthy at all, even while the war was going on. Personal security would just become one of those things that people looking for jobs at FAANGs would expect as part of the package.
Cheer louder? People love that stuff.
I'm more worried about the people who think the pro wrestling is real and end up storming government buildings on that basis.
Biden couldn't deliver one of his most important implicit promises - that will deescalate the culture war and return to normal. So far things has intensified.
We are in for a bumpy ride.
The transfer from the young to the old in the form of federal support of stock and real estate prices, and various subsidies to health care, is probably larger than the 2% interest and 1% CPI the old have lost.
As far as the second part of your comment, you should get your head out of the clouds and look around at working-class America. Perhaps 20% of retirees own a significant amount of stock, or own a house worth enough to cash out of. The US median home price didn't even cross $250k until 2018. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
Those "retirees" also do not have enough money to retire. To retire and live off the interest of a theoretical 5% interest savings account for 30 years requires you to already be wealthy. If you're a working-class baby boomer, you may have gotten that from your house when you sold it and moved into a bad neighborhood or an apartment. But that's just about the only way other than Social Security and old pensions that you're going to keep eating.
source? using the data from FRED https://i.imgur.com/O6EdHco.png, the periods where that was true (ie. interest rates being 4-6 percentage points above inflation is few and far between.
From a few years Mutual funds have been quite famous, but inflation is so high, nothing really works.
Here in India only safe source of income is rent income.
The transfer was from people relying on interest/bonds to people relying on stock returns. Far more old people rely on stock returns than savings account interest. The transfer of wealth was actually from future taxpayers to stockholders.
The US is the arms dealer of the world. It is American weapons going into Mexico and other Latin American countries that are causing problems there.
The lawful/licensed gun owners in Canada have to put up with potential bans because of the too ready availability of guns in the US that are smuggled over the border and make headlines.
That being said I think GP's prediction of a civil war triggered by inflation is hysteria.
[0]https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/sites/default/files/resource...
Now here is a problem. We live in a physical world. Monopolies, extortion and violence exist and if you use them properly you can force yields to be roughly constant. You can achieve higher yields by screwing over other people. The most common examples are housing and medical bills. If national yields are 0% and your house gets 3% yields because it's location is a monopoly then you got those 3% at the expense of another person who is losing those 3%. Since the level of production and amount of money did not change, inequality must grow.
In that sense interest rates aren't the problem. The real problem is that there are investments whose yield does not follow the interest rate plus a risk premium according to the asset class. If housing yielded 0% then only those who actually want to live in it or rent it out (for a fair price) would buy it.
There are enough weapons in USA, no need for anyone to do that.
Inflation is the traditional way that wealth gets transferred to the working class (besides higher marginal tax rates - but that seems to have gone out of fashion). While inflation hurts everyone it hurts especially savers and especially old savers who have most of their wealth in assets with a fixed interest rate. Workers can renegotiate higher salaries so in the long run they are less affected than somebody with lots of savings during times of high inflation. Very low inflation for the past decade are a big part of the reason why the wealth gap has increased so much.
I know the official inflation numbers for the past decade were small, but this highly depends on what you put in your basket. The rise of stocks, real estate, education and health over the past decade shows that inflation was there all the time. Therefore I do not see why low inflation would increase the wealth gap.
The wealth gap always increases without external disruptions (world wars, strong government) because the return on capital is higher than the growth of the economy as a whole.
Well, it goes to show that the economy and financial system shouldn't be based on interest does it not? Something we've known for thousands of years now with the prohibition of interest/usury in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.
I think, at least for small businesses, if the owners don’t feel like they are overwhelmingly wealthy, they’ll just tank the business and move on, maybe go back to working for someone. And big businesses have cash reserves like mountains. They’ll play chicken until people beg them for jobs.
Many of that same generation counted on Social Security, and CPI adjustments to help save them from poverty. The CPI numbers were pushed down to keep the costs of benefits those retirees were entitled to receive artificially low. Another transfer of wealth / theft.
Now the rest of the population has seen their crappy but steady wages evaporate on a whim, and will no longer settle for less than an actual living wage. A rebalancing is going to have to take place, and somehow the wealth needs to be transferred back to the working class, or things will get very violent, very quickly. Once that kicks off, our near peers will funnel weapons into the US, and a civil war will make us the latest 3rd world country.