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I'm not sure what year the video's author is using for their data, but I'm not finding the stats you are posting as telling a significantly different story.
Really? 24% vs. 19% is a 20% difference. That's pretty significant.
I guess not realizing there is a problem is a big problem in itself...
It probably has to do with the socialist/communist bashing that has been going on for decades. Because of that, people don't dare to strive for a more egalitarian society anymore as they are afraid that would be considered socialism/communism which they have been taught is evil.
It's an interesting video. It's informative and it is well produced.
However, the important queston is - what changes does it suggest should be made?
Does the CEO work 380 times as hard as another employee? No, of course not. But should income be based on how hard you work? Should someone who strains his muscles digging a ditch make more money that someone who just fiddles his fingers performing heart surgery? The question isn't whether the CEO works harder. The question is whether what the CEO does is more valuable.
And the question is, regardless of how wealth is distributed, what right does anyone have to redistribute it?
My question would be, rather than immediately jumping to the conclusion that we should force wealth redistribution, how about we level out the playing field and see how that causes wealth to redistribute itself? I mean, how much of that unequal distribution was caused by the system, and how much by our very own elected officials enabling people to bend and break the system?
What that video shows me is not that free markets don't work, it shows me that crony capitalism doesn't work. Increasing tax rates on the top 1% will not fix that.
I think it is irrelevant how someone gets so filthy rich as to be part of those 5 or 1%. The bottom line is, NOBODY deserves it no matter what...
nobody deserves to be rich? rubbish pure and simple. bill gates EARNED the money he had, as did 95% of all those who made it into the 1%. they put in the time, they took advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves, and they put up the money and took the big risks.
Quote:
Sooner or later mankind will have to develop an advanced mentality based on not wanting to become rich, but on wanting to do something meaningful in their lives, meaningful to themselves as well as to society as a whole.
ideally you are right, however the reality is that people NEED a reward system to advance technology.
one thing that we have to understand is that wealth generation is matter of choices. the people that gain their wealth did so by making the choices and taking the chances that made them wealthy.
I'll grant you there are bona fide innovators who become wealthy because they truly improved life for the larger public.
I believe say, the inventor of the philips head screw to have earned penny of his wealth.
But tons of wealth is inherited. Are you OK with a sky-high estate tax that functions as the Founding Fathers intended, which prevents wealth from passed from one generation to another? That practice is what led to serfdom in Europe, which is what led to Europeans coming here for a better way of life.
Then there's the wealth which is acquired due to unethical practices, such as the infamous Rockefeller method of lowering your prices below your cost to put your competitors out of business, then raising them when you had no competitors left- this is something the founder of capitalism, Adam Smith, precisely warned against in his oft-misquoted Wealth of Nations.
bill gates EARNED the money he had, as did 95% of all those who made it into the 1%.
Bill Gates made a fortune largely off of reverse engineering other people's inventions. Windows OS? From Macintosh. Windows Explorer? Came from Netscape. Excel? From Lotus Notes. MS Word? From Wordperfect, etc.
Why would anyone subtract the value of one's home which is most people's greatest asset unless one was trying to skew the data?
LOL - you missed the housing bubble, I take it.
As for skewing the data, it speaks for itself, no, 19% or 24% doesn't really change the video's point, which is that 99% of us are getting screwed by the current system.
If you want a return to the prosperity of the 1950s, return to the tax rates of the 1950s. or do you believe Eisenhower was a closet liberal who hated capitalism?
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