"Soon all the car companies will be owned by the Government."
She had a headache so she couldn't debate the facts with me, but that just annoyed me even more. So thanks to the internet and This website I have a handy chart:
So what the hell is Socialism?
Socialism refers to any one of various theories of economic organization advocating public or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and a society characterized by equal opportunities/means for all individuals with a more egalitarian method of compensation.
Haven't we been doing that sort of thing with Welfare and Social Security for decades now? What is the fear of the horrid 'socialist' movement that everyone is screaming about? Is Obama going to make us all become communists? Fuck no.
How does the top 20% owning over 80% of the wealth make sense? I found a lovely article with all the facts and the figures, but this paragraph made the most sense to me:
And now we have arrived at the point I want to make. If the top 1% of households have 30-35% of the wealth, that's 30 to 35 times what we would expect by chance, and so we infer they must be powerful. And then we set out to see if the same set of households scores high on other power indicators (it does). Next we study how that power operates, which is what most articles on this site are about. Furthermore, if the top 20% have 84% of the wealth (and recall that 10% have 85% to 90% of the stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity), that means that the United States is a power pyramid. It's tough for the bottom 80% -- maybe even the bottom 90% -- to get organized and exercise much power.
Just a lovely little reminder of how this country really works.
Wikipedia
Who Rules America: Wealth, Income and Power