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With economic income inequality negatively affecting a sizable portion of people in the United States what can be done to reasonably decrease this inequality?
This problem, according to the data, seems to be getting worse, not better. If true, this means more and more people will be suffering and struggling as long as this issue remains unchecked.
You Tube Video (this video uses an easy to understand graph that puts the articles listed above in an easy to understand format) Wealth Inequality in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
Roads have to be built, railroads have to be maintained, we need someone to answer the phones when we dial the local emergency number and people to come to our rescue when called (police, fire, EMS) etc. etc. . The list goes on and on. Reasonable things cost money.
If we lower the tax on everyone this helps everyone financially but this will not get these reasonable expenses covered. If we raise taxes on everyone, these reasonable things are better covered but it negatively affects everyone financially.
The question also must be asked, is $1 to a person who makes $20,000 a year the same thing as $1 to someone making $200,000 a year?
Last edited by txbullsfan; 12-19-2017 at 02:59 PM..
The question also must be asked, is $1 to a person who makes $20,000 a year the same thing as $1 to someone making $200,000 a year?
This conversation can get into the weeds really quickly...
1) I think inequality is natural to an undefined degree. Hierarchiacal structures exists in lots and lots of other species and to our knowledge goes back to the beginning of multicellular organisms, when single cells began to "sacrifice" themselves for the better of the whole. This does NOT in any way suggests that I think it's fair or that we shouldn't try to even the playing field. I just think it's important to recognize... same that world peace will ever exist (although I think we're pretty close right now).
2) Inequality in the most simplistic form is the uneven distribution of power over resources. That's it! So the only way to "close the gap" would be to give more power over resources to more people. How do you do that? Well, I think Karl Marx had some ideas about that, but I can't say this country is particularly fond of them.
3) I don't get your point about the worth of $1 being the same thing to people earning different amounts of money. I know people who make $80k but live like they make $200k where as my husband and I make closer to $200k, but we live on less than $80k (and send everything else to investments). A dollar is a dollar... some just have more while others have less.. some can spend more while others can't...
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story about a society that enforced equality. Successful people were handicapped in some way to reduce their abilities to match those of unsuccessful people. For example, talented ballerinas were forced to dance with heavy weights attached to their limbs so they would not perform better than untalented people who thought they should also be ballerinas. Intelligent people had implants that produced random loud noises in their heads so they would not outperform less intelligent people. Etc. As I recall, it didn't end well.
...3) I don't get your point about the worth of $1 being the same thing to people earning different amounts of money. I know people who make $80k but live like they make $200k where as my husband and I make closer to $200k, but we live on less than $80k (and send everything else to investments). A dollar is a dollar... some just have more while others have less.. some can spend more while others can't...
The assertion is that there's a diminishing rate of return, or hedonistic ennui, or in any case an asymptotic trend. For instance, if I am starving, and am offered 100 calories of food, that is indisputably essential, as it quite literally saves my life. If I am merely hungry, but not starving, those 100 calories will improve my well-being, but won't have nearly the same magnitude of impact, as my condition isn't so parlously desperate. If I've been generally well-fed, but happened to have skipped lunch that day, then those 100 calories are probably welcome, but if I'm still to busy to eat, or unimpressed with the food, I may politely reject it. And if I've just eaten to satiation, I'll only consume those additional 100 calories if they're particularly tasty, or if I wish to show respect to the person offering the food. The idea, then, is that the same 100 calories affect different people differently, depending on their degree of need.
While I agree, that the marginal return of $1 to a wealthy person, is less than to a middle-class person, and in turn less than to a poor person, this doesn't imply that there ought to be an overarching mechanism, to allocate those extra dollars in accordance with need. The reasons for this are multiple, not the least of which being, that mechanisms to increase fairness generally not only fail, but actually exacerbate the very same unfairness that they seek to reduce. However, we should not muddle into smugness and conceit, claiming that no intervention of any kind is ever useful or justified. How then to find the golden mean, in how to mediate our gold?
While the economy is good we won't see much trouble, so probably nothing for the next 1,2, maybe even 3-6 years. Inequality is expanding, yes, but since the overall economy's growing people will overlook it. The public's perception of the economy right now is suprisingly bad, especially given how good it looks on paper.
Average is 49. It should seriously be better than this right now. I really don't understand it, but economic optimism should be MUCH higher. The economy has not been so good since the 1990s. It is more or less as good as the 1990s.
The next deep recession will probably bring about a severe reaction given how angry people are when things are good. It literally cannot get much better. Think Occupy Wall Street but 2x as bad at least, with elections swinging hard toward populism. I expect the people will call for, in no particular order:
Universal health care
More educational opportunities that are more affordable
Higher taxes on the wealthy
Heavier regulation on banks/Wall Street
Higher minimum wage
If I had to make guesses as to why people are not acting happier about the economy - would be this:
Versus this: Wage Growth per year
The recession was over YEARS ago for businesses, rich, and affluent people. It has arguably never ended for the working class... they have not even recovered the kinds of wage growth they used to see <2007. TEN YEARS and things aren't better.
Last edited by redguard57; 12-19-2017 at 05:05 PM..
We are all wealthy these days. The issue is some people are jealous. They think more stuff will make them happy when everything they really need is free.
The next deep recession will probably bring about a severe reaction given how angry people are when things are good. It literally cannot get much better. Think Occupy Wall Street but 2x as bad at least, with elections swinging hard toward populism. I expect the people will call for, in no particular order:
Universal health care
More educational opportunities that are more affordable
Higher taxes on the wealthy
Heavier regulation on banks/Wall Street
Higher minimum wage
While these are reasonable reactions for a jilted and stymied people, it's hard to imagine that we'll ever see mass support for these things in the mainstream. The populism of today is rather anti-populist. It blames "the elite", immigrants, globalism, educated people, the Coasts, the bogeymen and scapegoats of the moment. But very few in the dominant populist movement of the moment would support for example universal health care. Instead, any motion in that direction is panned as "socialism", a wealth-grab, the rapacity of invidious government, the overreach of bleary-eyed idealistic fools. If anything, there's a call for more privatization, and diminution of the public-sector... for lighter regulation and for reducing taxes on those - as the phrasing piquantly goes - who already pay the most taxes. While this isn't the place to debate whether such sentiments are the result of the gullible being hoodwinked by the sly and clever, or whether they're core to the American cultural and creedal ethos, regardless, Americans have never been a people to take to the barricades. I'd be shocked if they become such a people in any of our remaining lifetimes.
Until the Great Depression, there was no real political voice for the poor. But when Franklin Roosevelt was swept into office, a political line between Democrats and Republicans came into being. In the New Deal era and for 40+ years-on, the working class was the largest single group in the New Deal coalition, greater even than the Southern Democrats (a hold-over from the pre-Civil War days, when the party was either pro-slavery (in the South), or soft on the expansion of slavery to the Territories (in the border states). The breakup of this coalition within the Democratic Party has been due to sweeping changes in the structure of the US economy that hammered industrial workers and the related phenomenon, the decline of industrial unions. The Rust Belt was the sad result. So, to make things simple, the Democrats abandoned the working class, slowly but surely, but not for bad reasons, mainly racial equality. Rainbow rights followed. From the late 70s-on, this change in the composition of the Democratic electorate, led to the slow, then-rapid exit of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party.
So, the element of class disappeared from American Politics between the two parties and the debates between them focused more on social than on class-related economic issues, as they never had before.
Today, the US has a service economy, largely un-unionized. But silently, a new class distinction has arisen that nobody pays much attention to, the division between large oligopolies and monopoly capitalists, on the one hand, and consumers, on the other. Consumers, a large and diverse group (everyone in the US), are hard to organize because of the large transactions cost of organizing them and the diversity within the group. The two are related.
These are the new battle lines, and the oligopolists and monopoly capitalists are winning, big time, against the consumers. This is reflected today in the America First movement, which can not create lost jobs, but can enrich a small segment of the population through tax cuts and deregulation. The America First movement can also raise the prices of goods and services trough these measures and the "fair trade" trade policy that the movement champions.
We need less income inequality, that's why I support movements like the fight for $15.
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