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They lie to us and say "only the rich will pay", but it's never true. Everyone pays, often in indirect ways, but in this case, in very direct ways. Time to stop believing some magical "other" is going to take care of us.
Well Bernie Sanders just said that he would raise "everyone's payroll taxes. I'll bet his supporters thought he would just raise other people's taxes. Wrong!
The problem is not wealth inequality, the problem is that we have no middle class.
The fact that someone with a full time job can't get everything his/her family needs is honestly nonsense (mod edit).
It doesn't matter if someone earns a million times what you earn, if you have enough to live comfortably.
Why do people think a full time job equates to getting everything you need for a family?
A 40 hour work week? I'd love to work a 40 hour work week, shoot any resident would love to work a 40 hour work week, but residents don't work 40 hour weeks, they work north of 70, and for right around $50,000 a year.
($15.00*40) + 1.5($15.00*30) = $63,750, which is $13,750 more than a resident makes in a year.
Heck even if you ignored OT, 70 hours a week at $15/hr for 50 weeks a year is still more than a residents salary.
And a resident has at minimum 8 years of training over a fry cook making $15/hr.
If 40 hours at your skill set doesn't provide for your needs, get a new skill set, or work more hours, or contemplate your needs (like not having a family before you can afford it).
And yes, residency is a training wage, SO IS MINIMUM WAGE WORK. You do it to open up doors to better things, you don't just settle for working 70 hours a week, you do it when you have to inorder to be able to provide for your family.
What's your opinion on income inequality? It's future? Should it be fixed and will it be fixed? I ask that no lefties answer this question because I can guess your answers.
We already have the answer.
The question was asked 150 years ago in the midst of similar technologically-fueled socio-economic changes. Change the language to 19th century syntax and people were having the same arguments.
The best answer anyone has come up with is social democracy. Recall that Marx and the Communists hated social democrats like Bismarck MUCH worse than they hated capitalists. The reason for that was because they felt social democrats only attacked the symptoms of capitalism, not the disease which was ownership of capital, but enough to blind the masses to their own exploitation. The social democrats considered their actions necessary to reduce violent social upheaval, of which there was a lot in the 19th century.
So we already know the answers:
Universal education
Universal health care
Universal old-age pensions
Worker's Comp / Workplace safety regulations
Some kind of checks against graft/corruption in business and government so there's some perception of fairness and opportunity.
Besides running the military and environmental protection, that's pretty much all I think the government should do. Those are all pretty tried and true ways to lower the inequality fever so to speak, and they've been proven by more than a century's worth of experience. All the developed world has those things, some just do them better than others. Yes, the U.S. even has universal health care because no one gets denied care in the U.S. who needs it, it just administers it and finances it about as poorly & inefficiently as can be imagined.
There are two things I would add:
Subsidies for developers to build working class housing and/or transportation to and from new developments so that working people can always find a place to live they can afford.
Governments need to run mental health facilities / homeless recovery centers. It's clear the private sector won't do that.
Last edited by redguard57; 10-19-2015 at 04:35 PM..
The problem is not wealth inequality, the problem is that we have no middle class.
Christ this forum is like the haven of people who like to set the hyperbole meter at 11, I'd love to hear your definition of middle class for this statement to be supportable.
Income by quintile for families in 2014
Lowest: $0 - $29k
2nd: $29k - $53k
3rd: $53k - $82k
4th: $82k - $129k
5th: $129k+
So you're saying despite 50 million families in US making at least $53k none of them are middle class? All those cars clogging the highways in the morning commuting downtown from suburbia, none of them is a middle class American they are all uber rich or living in poverty. All my neighbors, friends, family who appear to me to be middle class Americans are cleverly putting on a facade they are actually either 1 percenters or peasants.
Anyone watched Elisium?
That's the future of the income inequity. Maybe not in form of a toroid flying in space. But, more likely, in form of 250 enclaves, where the rich will live. The rest of the world will be - well, on its own. Why 250 enclaves? Because that's what the map was drawn off. Enclave may be called a technopolis, or megapolis, or what else. But that's where it's headed.
[*]Universal education[*]Universal health care[*]Universal old-age pensions[*]Worker's Comp / Workplace safety regulations[*]Some kind of checks against graft/corruption in business and government so there's some perception of fairness and opportunity.
Besides running the military and environmental protection, that's pretty much all I think the government should do.
So you're okay with me mixing rancid meat that nobody else wants with sawdust to expand volume, canning it, and calling it food to be distributed in grocery stores?
How about I stamp some pills out of a compound that is 20% expired aspirin stocks and 80% flour, adding some purple dye then declaring it a cure for cancer to be marketed and distributed nationwide?
We don't need anything controlling the thousand of flights around our nation's airspace, just let those planes jostle for flight lanes and landing slots like people in grocery store parking lots. Heck no need to enforce standards for the planes either, I've always wanted to create an airline by buying an old 707 and hire someone with 500 hours on Microsoft Flight Simulator to fly it.
And so on. You can look up for yourself. What already started on local levels, will eventually splash out into the Elisium type world. Unless something happens, of course.
Well Bernie Sanders just said that he would raise "everyone's payroll taxes. I'll bet his supporters thought he would just raise other people's taxes. Wrong!
Well, if he admitted it, at least he wasn't lying. The impression I had from the article was that no one thought he'd even propose raising taxes on the poor or middle class in any way.
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We already know the answer
