On May 15, 2005, at 11:44 AM, Turbulo at aol.com wrote:
> The NYT aside, I have two questions concerning a real class
> analysis of
> American society:
>
> 1) To what extent has big corporate capital become depersonalized?
> I know
> there are still many privately held firms in this country and that
> stock
> ownership is concentrated in the upper-income brackets. But isn't
> it also true that no
> individual or family owns enough stock in the really big
> corporations to
> exert a controling interest?
>
A corporation is not a 'person', nor is it's capitalization. But 'big' is depersonalized.
> 2) What percentage of the population lives either exclusively or
> primarily on
> the proceeds of capital? The most recent stats I've seen on this
> are from an
> article by Dumenil and Levy in the New Left Review of 30 Nov. They
> state that,
> even among the top 0.005% income bracket (6,836 households with an
> income of
> over $10 million) wages still account for 50.1% of income excluding
> capital
> gains, and 25.3% including capital gains. Are their wages really
> wages in the
> sense that ordinary people would give the term?
>
I would presume that an individual with substantial capital holdings would use a corporation and pay their self a salary as well as other members of their family who had an interest. It would be a matter of tax advantage.
Martin
ps - how difficult would it be to send a text file with aol 7 for windows?