SilverBoat
Posts: 257
Joined: 7/26/2006
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Well ...
First of all, you'll need a definition of "dependent" that has enough scope to address the context of this kind of discussion. The mere existence of every animal known to humankind 'depends' on the existence of many varieties of plantlife, certain ranges of temperatures, pressures, chemical concentrations (or absences), etc. The mere existence of those plants in sufficiency 'depends' on the existence of a variety of microbes, elements, etc, and certain ranges of sunlight, seasons, and so forth. And none of that would have exist (as we know it) without a big-bang, 2nd-generation stellar-systems collecting nova-dust, and a couple-billion years of relatively stable orbital parameters. (Frankly, there's a 100mi-thick layer in Jupiter's atmosphere that could meet all those requirements and is 1000-times the volume of Earth's ecosphere, but that's another topic entirely, perhaps.)
The point, however, is the definition of "dependent" within whatever sociopolitical context the several parties to this discussion might presume as bases for their arguments.
A human infant is 'dependent' on its parents or other older individuals or groups in its own (or nearby) species for its mere existence. Because of that period in a human's life, I disagree with Mm's 1:23 statement, since the "makes" dependent does not occur as an action that can be generalized as isolated from all other humans' influences. Although it's true that some people can 'make' themselves dependent on others, it's also true that some people attempt and succeed to 'make' others dependent.
Whether those latter had, or could have had, sufficient personal and/or collective resources to recognize and/or prevent the attempt to 'make-dependent' is of course germaine, but that leads to recursive infinities of what their resources depended on.
Even if the scope of discussion is limited to merely economic frames, it's quite obvious that income, goods, etc do not occur in isolation from socioeconomic cooperation, competition, etc.
For every person that siphons $100Mn in profits out of the US economy, that's $0.30 out of everybody elses' pockets. For every person that takes $1Mn that's $0.003 from everybody else. That might not seem like a big deal, until you multiply the former by 300 people, and the latter by 300,000 people. Do the math, etc That's the top 0.1% sucking about $1000 out of everybody elses's income. Still, maybe that's not a big deal if you're hauling in $100,000k/yr, but at the poverty levels of $10k/yr, that's a 10% gouge.
And the numbers for the next 0.9% (that's 3,000,000 people in the $250k/yr range) relative roughly double the 0.1%'s effect on the lower 99%.
Anyway, yeah, those are very rough sketches of the numbers, and really should be divvied up by households, persons per, etc, but they illustrate commonly held but grossly mistaken paradigm that the 'few' exhorbitant incomes don't affect the masses at the lower end of the scale. When it's all put together in detail, the sheer quantity of combined income going to the 1% lowers the income of the lower 99% by about $6k per tax-return.
Sure, there are some reasonable cases to be made for how money circulates through the economy, how the wealthy hire the poor, etc, but the $6k per year ain't peanuts at the low-income levels, and it's enough to cause 'dependence' ...
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