[badname]

Interesting point of view. Just some notes on the rich spending: (I don't have time to find refs but that should be pretty easy) numbers show that rich spend a tiny proportion of their money compared to other classes. So they are effectively hoarding. Also they invest mostly at the only place that can give them returns over 3%(?) nowadays which is stock markets, etc (1). Real investments in industry/services that would translate to jobs are sparse in Western world. That's also part of the problem for Westerners debt problem which could be seen as a way to mitigate the effect of industry and services (real production that is) going to Asia (mainly).

So, I'm afraid that if you expect things to change via rich themselves changing their ways (e.g. see the light and start redistributing their own wealth) you're gonna wait for long. After all just imagine being one of them. Why invest in the declining west with worker wages say 50% more expensive than in China? Never mind that competition will inevitably do the same thing to undercut you and this will end only when both of you are out of customers. In some ways, as a rich man, you can see the customers/labor as a dwindling common source where the tragedy of the commons apply under the rules of the capitalism.

(1) That's not to put a distinction between good industrialists that create jobs and bad bankers that create hot air. For one thing they largely are the same people and even if they were not they still have to play the game to stay ahead of competition.

PS: I bear no affiliation to this page but it seems to explain the point I'm trying to make much better than my limited English can: http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/crises/Crises01.htm

[logfromblammo]

Oh, I don't think they will change. There's nothing really in it for them. As I said, they not only have everything they want, but they have exhausted their imaginative ability to want things that do not yet exist.

You can sell a rich man a luxury yacht. You can't sell him a one-room habitat on the Moon, for other people to visit and live in, because it hasn't yet occurred to him that doing so might one day lead to more luxurious yachts. They are instead saving up their money to afford the next thing they want, the thing that doesn't exist yet, because no one seems willing to consume resources on research that other people might just copy and use for free.

If the rich don't start buying (not just investing in) costly megaprojects to employ them, the poor folk will simply build the default megaproject--war. And that will be used to redistribute some of the wealth and start over.

And as I said earlier, hoarding money is different from stockpiling actual goods and services. Hoarded money is ignored until someone actually tries to spend it, and then it triggers inflationary distortions. A stable economy requires that most of its money circulate continuously, rather than stagnating in pools.