I saw this Occupy Wall Street protest and I’m not really sure what these people are trying to accomplish. If you want to protest at a publicly traded company—try Starbucks. Those greedy bastards that give their employees’ health insurance have only earned me 19.24% on my money. Better yet protest by not using Google. I’ve lost 13% with that stock.
What is Wall Street? It’s a street in New York where stocks are traded. Stocks are shares of corporations. You too can own a share of stock in a company, or multiple shares in several companies. Why would you want to protest this market? If you don’t like big oil, (which I freely admit, I’m not part of that crowd) would it make sense to protest outside of Auto Zone because they sell Pennzoil?
I used to make a couple hundred bucks a month playing online poker, (usually) averaging about one losing month per year. I read a couple books on investing and decided to start putting some of that money into the market in 2009. It’s a good thing too, because if I would have left a lot of that money on FTP—it would have been gone. I did this because I started seeing people have their withdrawals confiscated by the government. Part of what I had left on the site was probably seized by the government, but most of it was either grossly mismanaged, or straight out stolen, . . .but looking back, the writing was on the wall. I probably won’t ever get that money back. Luckily I put most of my money on PokerStars and the stock market.
Even if the market goes down by 50% tomorrow I’m still ahead.
I like the stock market. I like looking for low P/E ratios on stocks that pay dividends. I’m not rich, granted, but I also enjoy putting money into 401K’s. I like that the government let’s me defer my tax liability to invest. I don’t like paying taxes. I think the government has mismanaged Social Security even worse than Full Tilt Poker has managed player deposits.
I like watching my 401K grow. I expect to have swings. I don’t mind the swings, in fact I kind of like them. Don’t get me wrong, it sucks to have your money go up or down 5% in any given week, but I like the fact that when it goes down, I get to put my money in when stocks are a discount. I made some mistakes investing in the stock market, but I’ve also learned from them. I’m down about 7% right now and I’m okay with that
I think the government has a duty to protect people against fraud, but here’s the thing about fraud you usually don’t see it until it’s too late. Let’s face it, Greenspan and Bernanke made a lot of mistakes in this area. A lot of Objectivists, like me even vilify Greenspan. He’s the ultimate example of what happens if you compromise on your principles. Regulation of a free market is no longer a free market. That being said, there seems to be something immoral about telling people the can afford a house when they can’t. It seems to me, that the problems of this economy were not the problems of Wall Street—a lot of people lost their shirts in the stock market. The problem seems to be with the deceptive evaluations of risk, predatory lending, and sub-prime mortgages. If someone has bad credit-they probably should not get a mortgage. If someone makes $30,000 a year, they can’t afford a $400,000 house. I wish I could tell you what the hell a derivative is, but I can’t.
I think one of the problems is that if you ask the average Joe on the street what is the Dow Jones Industrial Average? They don’t have a clue. S&P 500? It’s one of those things on the news that terrify them when it goes down. If you ask 10 people which president is on the dime, you might get one person to give you the correct answer, if you’re lucky (without checking their smart phone—made by some “diabolical corporation”) I can tell you Rosevelt’s on the dime, but I only have a vague idea of what derivatives are and have an even vaguer idea of why critics say it lead the economic collapse.
I’m not a fan of government spending, but I think I could live with it a little better if they start using some of that money to teach kids about money. Learn about the stock market. How is money made in this economy?
When I was in high school, I had one semester of economics. That’s not enough. I was lucky enough to have a teacher that actually started a bank with seven of his friends. They only needed a million dollars, but were able to lend out more than that( I want to say 3 million, but it was about 16 years ago so I’m not sure) He taught us about thinking at the margin by bringing in a couple dozen doughnuts and having a couple students eat as many as they could. I learned that the world has never had a 100% capitalist economy, nor a 100% socialist economy.
I learned that greed is good, contrary to popular belief.
Money is not backed by gold (at least not anymore) It’s only an idea, a representation of value.
I watched a video showing some of these Occupy Wall Street people. Here’s my question. What is the goal of these protestors? One man said there are no jobs for teenagers. Will protesting “Wall Street” create more jobs for teenagers than lowering (or eliminating) the minimum wage? I don’t smoke marijuana, but legalizing it would do way more to create jobs in in this country than protesting Wall Street. We might even get some of these hippie pot heads to work, since they wouldn’t have to pass piss tests anymore.
Another protester says if you paid more in taxes then General Electric, you should be here. WTF? Corporations don’t pay taxes—people do. If you decided to put $15 bucks in a GE rather than blow it on a pitcher of beer(B.T.W. I’m not against beer by any means)—you would have earned $1.30, not counting fees of course. How much of that should be taxes? Let’s say you also bought Rite Aid and lost .50 cents on that share. Should you not be able to deduct that to pay for GE’s taxes? What if you lose money one year and gain the next? You can’t subtract the previous year’s losses on the current year’s tax liability. Hey. . . what if you get taxed 30 cents on that GE share, but the company decided to raise it’s products prices to make your EPS $1.60?--Who’s paying the tax now?
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