In any smaller theft the thieves usually have to make >100% restitution (balance of stolen + fines). I wish I could get away with stealing and only having to pay back a small percentage of my takings. We need to stop passing out sweatheart deals to corporations it only leads to more theft.
Agreed but then who would manage the state clerks IT department? Deloitte? It’s a case of “You’re in the wrong but we secretly need you because we are even more incompetent”
I mean BAH or whoever can continue doing that after they pay back the stolen funds if the state clerk will allow it.
I'm just griping with, time after time, a company stealing 100m dollars or whatever and then reaching a settlement that lets them get off scott free after paying back 50m.
I wouldn't get a $377 settlement for defrauding the government $500, but apparently you can obtain a $377M penalty for defrauding the government $500M. In fact, I would not be able to "settle" at all...
There's a lot of times where deals are made because the government looks at how much it's going to cost to get the full value vs the settlement price. If the cost to gain the full value is larger than the settlement, then getting the full value is actually a loss compared to the settlement. Also, the government makes deals willing to take a haircut to get some vs none. A settlement is both parties giving something, not just the accused.
Honestly, I make a low six figure income (starts with a 1), with a couple of kids, and a stay at home partner, and work from home in a moderate city for housing and costs on the west coast.
We make ends meet, can afford the things we want to do, but never seem to actually build any savings. (grocery costs are eating us alive this past year or two)
Median household (not individual) income in the US is barely $70k, not sure I'd consider 50% above the median at the low end "middle." But most people here, myself included, probably make $150-200k/yr before any stock or RSUs so I'm looking forward to the mental gymnastics calling that middle class.
Basing class structure on difference from the societal median is a bad idea. It means making the entire country except a few poorer grows the "middle" class.
There are three classes: Struggling, comfortable, and rich. If paying for necessities like transport, housing, and food requires significant efforts to manage cash flow or is even impossible, you are struggling. If you don't know when your employer pays you because you haven't had a cash flow problem in a decade, you are comfortable. If you don't have an employer because your wealth comes from things, you are rich.
I mean you can simplify it even more into "haves" and "have nots" but there's a reason nobody serious does that anymore, because it doesn't give you any useful information, nor does those three categories.
That doesn't change the fact that almost everybody wants to think of themselves as middle class, but especially here on HN most people are definitely not. If you make $200k cash plus RSUs on top of that you may not be rich but you're certainly on your way there and you're certainly not middle class in the way that carpenter making $75k with his stay at home wife in Houston is.
Property. Historically, this meant land. Today, it means assets. Savings of any kind. The poor live pay check to pay check; the middle class could survive a bad harvest.
The safety buffer it provides lets you take more risk, personally, civically and societally. That lets you access rewards someone fighting for sustenance can’t countenance. Consider the years we, as a society, spend educating our youth when they could be working a field to produce food.
It also means leverage. If a harvest failed, the poor in the army got fed. The others didn’t. The middle class, on the other hand, wasn’t forced into that choice simply to survive. (We use the term “survive” nowadays to mean maintain some arbitrary quality of life, but I’m speaking literally.)
From an economic standpoint, the Wikipedia definition is correct. From a sociopolitical angle, especially a cultural one, it’s quite different.
Broadly, what constitutes a middle class depends on the society we are observing. Every society has its elites. Some had slaves, some have destitutes. In between is gradation defined, variously, by income, assets, education and lineage. (See the history section; modern/British middle class was originally defined by education.)
In America, discretionary income is a good definition because most people have a reasonable expectation of lifelong economic stability. (We gripe when it isn’t improving.) In Europe (and most of the world), the asset test is far more sturdy. And even within America, you see this vary.
I fully disagree because if that was the case, it would be highlighted in the wikipedia article. Go ahead and add it, let it go through the rounds of thousands of people trying to be on the same page about it - then I will believe you. I'd rather trust that source that backhanded comments here.
> it would be highlighted in the wikipedia article
Did you read the history and evolution of the term section?
“Friedrich Engels saw the category as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry in late-feudalist society. While the nobility owned much of the countryside, and the peasantry worked it, a new bourgeoisie (literally "town-dwellers") arose around mercantile functions in the city.” In the French Revolution, “the new ruling class or bourgeoisie in the new capitalist-dominated societies.” Capital, it’s there in the term. The Stevenson definition, which follows in the next paragraph, cites the “chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class [as] control of significant human capital.” This British education-and-skill-derived definition is the basis of the top-of-the-article summary definition, since that human capital produces excess income.
Would note that the article appears poorly cited (as many notes on it claim), despite a cursory review of the bibliography shows they’ve covered the basics.
> there are plenty of middle class living pay check to pay check and do not own things
And there are plenty of the very rich who go bankrupt and die penniless.
Someone relying solely on income from labour to sustain their standard of living may live as the middle class do, just as a poor person accumulating debt may sustain a middle-class lifestyle, but that doesn’t change their fundamental economic situation.
Also: When middle class folk talk about living paycheck to paycheck, they’re usually ignoring retirement assets. But I don’t deny that plenty of people consume their economic security because they, and many times rightly, don’t believe they need it.
The 4.6% figure only makes sense if you think all their business involves wrongdoing and this is the only instance that got caught. If you take the penalty and divide by how much they allegedly made ($500M), you get a much worse figure of 75.4%.
But if the penalty for malfeasance is 75% of the profits gained thereby, malfeasance is still profitable. Even if the fine were 100% of the profits, it'd still remain a profitable strategy unless the odds of being caught were 100%.
In short, penalties aren't theoretically capped at 100%. That said, it's still theoretically possible to construct situations where the expected cost of lawsuits is less than what can be gained by the illegal act. However to make that claim you'd need to correctly calculate what the chances are of getting caught is, which is far more complex than pointing to a court case where someone settled.
Maybe not, but it still has to meet with the cold harsh reality that government budgets are limited, and society isn't willing to spend arbitrarily high amounts on the justice system. Also, is the implied suggestion of giving prosecutors unlimited budgets really the right course of action here? Prosecutors are in an unique position where they can wage legal battles and get the public to pay for it. Every other participant has to pay their legal expenses out of pocket. Having a limited budget is one of the few things that keeps them in check.
4.6%, maybe not a rounding error, but definitely cost of doing business area