100%. The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force. Same in Vietnam.
The US populace is vastly larger and better armed and capable than Afghanistan.
The US military requires a massive economy to function. If it tries to attack itself, those little armed people could stop it, the economy would crash, and the US military would crumble without needed support and supplies.
A final issue is the US troops would lose a lot of soldiers if they were told to go attack fellow citizens. The soldiers would quit, would hesitate, would not want to kill people they view as their own people.
So armed citizenry absolutely have major power against the govt.
Finally, if you were in a country where the govt set out to kill its citizens, would you rather have arms or be completely unarmed?
>The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force.
We had no military objective in Afghanistan.
Our only goal there was to enrich contractors who had stockholders working at the highest levels in the Pentagon and White House. That goal was achieved spectacularly.
The US military would be the defending force, though, which would put The People at a disadvantage. Pushing through the defenses of a multi-trillion dollar military with AR-15s seems unlikely. I don't even think that China's armed forces could defeat the US military, let alone civilians armed with AR-15s
All being said, I am no military guru and I could be wrong
Japan has strict gun control and an extremely high rate of suicide. The US has more homicides per capita by simply beating someone to death by ones bare hands than many countries have total homicide rate (check data in FBI UCR). Restricting suicides and homicides to only those with guns is a dishonest comparison when the rates without the gun restriction are more useful and flip the outcomes of the discussion. I doubt a murder by non-gun is fundamentally different to a family or society than one by a gun, or any other method.
The Obama CDC study on gun control concluded that guns are used to stop far more crimes than they are used for in crimes. It concluded that a household with a gun saw far less bad outcomes than a household without during home invasions. It concluded a lot of things that didn't sit well with the left, so after all the fanfare to make it, it was downplayed by that admin. Read it, it's quite interesting.
He confuses two different places there is energy. Light is made (this is a little bit of a cheat) of photons. Each photon has a wavelength λ, and a per photon energy E where E = hc/λ, h is Plank's constant and c is the speed of light constant. So energy and wavelength per photon completely determines each other (and the color of the light of that single photon).
These energies are very small. You can add a lot of photons per second, increasing the brightness of that color, and this now has the energy per second of all those photons. So you can have a lot of red photons which sum to some energy, or a different number of blue photons that sums to (very, very close) the total red energy.
These are the two energies he confuses in those two places.
Paying more for less is never a positive change, it's an inefficiency that is costing someone and resulting in less goods for society. It's a net loss. That money paying for less is now not being spent where it was before, making that place lose out.
No, it's not corporate welfare. Min wage hikes mean those workers unable to add that much value don't have jobs anymore, are left out of a workforce and thus cannot gain skills, and now require actual welfare.
Requiring companies to pay more than value added by an employee simply fire those workers.
The purpose of govt is to provide assistance, and perhaps training, so those on min wage can gain experience and skills to move up.
You are correct that I was unable to summarize an incredibly complex tangled web of economics, sociology and politics in a few hundred words on a forum. I don't think any of us can do this. Of course it's an oversimplification. Is the comment I'm replying to also not doing this? Are you also not doing the same thing?
My only point is that this seems like an awful lot of confirmation bias. Something everyone suffers from.
Not all people suffer the same level of confirmation bias, especially across all topics. And, for most topics, broad consensus of experts is better and less biased than individuals.
US tax system is the most progressive in the OECD [1]
US top tiny amount of incomes pay vastly more, even per dollar earned, than in any other first world country, where middle and lower class pay a much larger share.
Around the bottom 50% of US taxpayers pay zero federal income tax, and after post tax transfers (aid, etc...) the lowest decent sized chunk get money back, i.e., negative federal income tax.
Then, after already covering the vast majority of US tax burden, the really wealthy end up paying another large chunk in estate taxes (and no, there isn't magic sauce where they all hide all assets in foreign lands - you can simply go over public IRS data, or CBO data and see).
> US tax system is the most progressive in the OECD [1]
Except that being paid in shares is not really calculated as a pay and top levels borrow money from banks with shares as a collateral so basically they pay zero taxes on their income. Even kids know that.
I guess kids don't know how to read or the Internet then.
Simply google "do ceos pay taxes on shares" and you'll see plenty of places making it clear they do. Part of my income at several places has been in shares, and they're always taxed.
Borrowing against assets isn't taxed for anyone, as it's not income, whether it's a common homeowner getting a mortgage, a person spending on a credit card, or any other loan.
Zero of this affects the facts I linked. And your claims are demonstrably wrong.
> The statistic in the article compares average CEO pay to the median income
No, it compares the top 500 CEO pay out of 250k+ CEOs to all workers, which is as ludicrous and misleading as comparing the top 500 worker pay to all 250k CEOs and thinking this is the useful metric to rage about.
There are 211,230 CEOs with mean annual wage $258,900 [1]. Being the mean surely gives that the median is much lower.
There are 120,053,000 age workers with median weekly income of $1,159 = $60,258 annual income [2] (and this includes part time, people in college, semi-retired, many people who have had high incomes in the past or will in the future).
A story about a 4.3x of CEO to worker pay, which is the actual stats of CEO to worker, doesn't generate enough outrage.
Comparing the top 500 (ish) of them to all workers is simply bad analysis designed to rile up people.
Surely people here would call out the dishonesty of comparing the top 500 wage worker salaries (many millions/year each) vs all the CEOs (258k) as dishonest. It's funny seeing how many people eat this equally dishonest comparison up as indicative of all CEOs and companies...
As to all the theories as to this or that law being some culprit, or some evil intentions, note the pay of the top performers in nearly every category, from musician, to athlete, to lawyer, to top 500 CEO, to even employee, have seen pretty much the same growth over the same time. It's nearly impossible all these are driven by something as specific as a labor law, a union change, a stock market or money format change. It's almost a certainty these are all driven by an excess of accrued capital in the US (and other markets) allowing those paying these incomes to pay for what they see as talent, whether is a huge rise in middle class disposable income, a larger share of US money available for retirement accounts, etc. Many years ago chasing down this exact set of ideas revealed a ton of econ papers reaching the same conclusions....
In short, high (someone else) pay rarely is money taken from the poor, and in more cases the poor and middle get higher wages as the top get higher wages simply by econ effects like the Baumol effect. This is the effect that as some jobs pay more, it attracts more people, so for society to get older jobs done, they must now also pay more, even if productivity in the latter jobs have not increased. It's why the lowest labor in the US pays many, many fold over what you'd get for the same output in most of the world.
Note that this is mean wage not compensation, specifically it does not include stock bonuses [1]. Considering that the high CEO compensation is almost exclusively based on equity (there are several famous cases of CEOs taking only $1 of wage), arguments based on wage are pretty meaningless.
Also, I highly suspect that even if we take the ratio of top 1% CEOs compared to top 1% of non-executive employees the picture would not change dramatically (unfortunately I can't find easily accessible information).
Taking the top 1% would certainly lower the gap, which shows had misleading or dishonest this invalid comparison is.
Also note mean wage is also not total compensation by a long shot. The actual benefits are tracked by BLS total compensation, or better yet, BLS cost to employ, which has grown a lot of the past few decades. The biggest tax breaks (or as people like to call them when it suits them, tax giveaways or tax loopholes) give more to the poor and middle class than all the tax breaks enjoyed by all companies combined: mortgage deduction, 401k style deferred taxes, and employer healthcare deduction, all give massive breaks the majority of which accrues to the poor and middle, yet this also gets ignored in this discussion.
No matter how you want to slice it comparing the top 500 out of 250K to all is simply bad stats, as bas as claiming the top 500 wage employees to all CEOs would show every day earners have a gap over CEOs. And it's simply designed to create outrage - that CEO taking less pay is not going to suddenly accrue to the workers.
So no matter how you want to slice it, it's completely bad stats.
Nobody is talking about the leader of some charity in the middle of Kansas when saying CEO pay (even though they are technically a CEO). You also ignore the main part of my comment that the majority (~70%) of CEO compensation is stock so not included in wage comparisons.
I'm also not sure in what world you live, but the effective tax rates for most of the wealthiest are effectively 0 [1] , compare that to the tax rate of an average wage earner.
The final point is that ratio of CEO pay to average salary pay has skyrocketed [2] . How do you explain that away?
The first article ludicrously confuses income (taxable) with wealth (not taxable) and unrealized gains (not taxable). It mixes cherry picking with proper data.
I already pointed out the answer to your "how do you explain..." question above.
If you want to argue about taxes take the time to understand them.
For example, https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...