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I would like the Leftists to explain the term "income inequality." What is it? How does it occur, and what should be done to correct it?
In your posts, please discuss wealth, wealth distribution, wealth creation, and the moral issues involved in creating wealth, which would include the right to own property, and the right to the fruit of ones labor, and the exclusive right to ones intellectual property.
You may also want to answer the following:
How does one improve ones standard of living; i.e., rise from poverty to middle class, to wealthy?
How should one put their money to work?
What does it mean to own stock?
What obligations does a company have to it's employees?
What obligations does an employee have to his employer?
Hi, I'm going to try to answer these questions, as an actual, out of the closet Socialist. First, I have to start by suggesting that most Socialists, such as myself, do not want to simply do away with free market economies. Rather, we want to balance them more carefully with the needs and desires of the workers who make the goods that support that economy. We don't buy the premise that once you enforce some restrictions on Capitalism, capitalism becomes mortally wounded. In turn, I will accept that you are not an evil corporate scumbag who just wants to kill off the poor even though I may secretly suspect it.
Question 1. I would suggest that one improves one's standard of living by working hard, being in the right place at the right time, getting a good education and so on. These are things that most Socialists are not opposed to. The problem in the United States with this logic is that it has served as a particularly nefarious ideological apparatus in the interest of hording profits amongst a very few Americans. In short, this logic has served to limit rather than to promote opportunity, since it is used as a justification not just for reasonable betterment of one's material standing but rather for wholesale exploitation of nations and peoples. If you don't believe me, you should note that the United States has for several decades seen a decline in class mobility, relative even to European Socialist nations. One is less likely in America to move up from poverty to middle or upper class than one is in many Socialist nations. (See the conservative Business Week's "Waking up From the American Dream" for the necessary statistics).
Question 2. This question is basically unanswerable since it involves the assumption of having enough money that it will "work" for you, which is simply not the case for most people I know. You are not referring to an abstracted citizen in this question, but to a particular kind of citizen whose relationship to the whole of society is based on a number of factors.
Question 3. To own stock means that you have purchased a portion or "share" of a company's overall worth at a given point in time.
Question 4. This is where it gets tricky because the basic unit of an economy is for a Socialist the material goods that circulate within it. These are produced by workers. Thus, the company owes its very existence to its workers. Therefore, I'd say the biggest obligation a company has to its workers is a "say" in all of the levels of its operations. This means that workers should have representatives that help to determine things like salary, benefits and so on. A CEO assumes no more risk than a stock boy, since when either man loses his job, he is simply without pay. Actually, a CEO assumes less risk because he'll still get compensated handsomely.
Question 5. An employee has to show up to work and to do their job to the best of their ability.
Zoning laws in some communities require a minimum lot size and prevent parcels of land from being broken into plots smaller than the minimum. So, for example, if the zoning requirement is a minimum of 1/4 acre, the owner of such a lot is not going to be allowed to break it into 1/8th acre lots. That poster views zoning as discrimination against the poor who cannot afford the standard lot size.
It's a variation of an argument against zoning laws that prevent mobile homes from being placed on lots in many communities.
Of course, sometimes it's aimed higher up the income scale; minimum lot sizes greater than one acre make for very exclusive communities.
Yes and history is on my side. History is also on the side of the Left, total failure.
Got a cite for that? The rising tide of the '80s left me worse off; I faced five rent increases in five years, had to move three times because I could not afford the higher new rent, and ended up homeless (sleeping in my employer's offsite storage area) for four months because I couldn't find a plce I could afford.
Consider income equality where everyone in the population earns an equal amount no matter how a person earns it versus income inequality where people earn differing amounts depending on what people are willing to pay others and/or what payment people are willing to accept from others.
I didn't realize that income inequality was something to be corrected.
Now the degree of inequality can be a problem in that if there is a large degree of difference in inequality then most of the wealth of an entire population can be tied up into a small portion of the population. If one believes that the economic growth of a nation is based on consumption; then a small portion of the population can only consume so much. And, if the majority of earners can only consume staples, then a whole lot of potential consumers of luxuries is wasted, and economic growth suffers.
I think...
Income inequality is important if you think marriage and family values are important.
But the term "income inequality" as it is used by the Left seems to indicate it is a bad thing, and that it indicates there is something wrong in our society. That is what I want to get at. What does the Left think "income inequality" is and why is it bad? How do they think it occurs? How would it be possible to "equalize" incomes for all people? That doesn't sound like freedom, to me.
Well, it seems you think that people who think that massive income inequality is bad want everything to be equal. If I flip burgers or rake leaves, I should make the same as a brain surgeon or hedge fund manager (the latter of which does so much for society). I mean, it's only fair, right? Everyone on the left thinks everyone should be absolutely equal, right? No. There might be a few wackos out there that believe that, just as there are some on the right who would support going back to slavery if we could.
And i know that you don't see anything wrong with the fact that as the economy has grown, and inflation along with it, that the incomes of those in the upper percentages have grown my multiples, while the incomes of those further down the ladder have barely grown at all or have gone down. This is of course due to the reason that those further up the ladder have worked tremendously hard to increase their incomes while the bottom 50% of the country don't work hard at all, or don't even try. By the way, that was sarcasm.
I don't see inequality itself as a bad thing. It's a given. People in more skilled jobs do, and should, make more. However, that's not what we have. We have people in more basic jobs making a mere $7.25 an hour, while a marginally effective CEO or other executive can pull in the equivalent of $2,500 an hour or much more. Hell, Apple gave a single bonus last year that a minimum wage employee would have to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 945 years to achieve. The median-paid individual in the US would have to work 1,405 years of regular time to achieve it. And that was a BONUS. You might see nothing wrong with that, but it's kind of ridiculous.
Now, your next question is the obvious: "what difference does it make to you?" Well, let's see. Let's take a guy I worked for. I was a freelancer for him, but it was more like perm-lance. We had a great team and were very family-like. The guy who started the company was a very nice man, and we all loved working for him. He paid us well, gave us plenty of perks, and jumped in to help sometimes to get the projects completed in time, and always hosted a "thank you" dinner at the end at a high-end type restaurant with all expenses paid. Then, we started an extremely successful project where the money started pouring in. Within time, he faded out of sight and never even showed up any more, we started to get pressured to "cut costs", several people were bumped off the team leaving the rest of us with a lot of extra work, and the dinners became "we'll by you a beer" before being cut completely. You expect this if the project is losing money, but it was hitting record highs. So after bumping people and cutting everything else out, what's his next move? He accidentally links some of us to the photo album for his new mansion, which dwarfs most houses out there.
Am I jealous of him? Not at all. I'm happy for him. Do I think he doesn't deserve such an expansive house? Hardly. Am I angry that he cut half my team in the name of "cutting costs", doubling the work on the rest of us, while building himself a castle? Yes. And he's a small fry in a field of potatoes. Things out there are much worse than what this guy did.
What I'm saying is that someone getting rich by running a successful company which pays employees well and treats employees right is fine by me. Someone getting enormously rich by paying a bunch of people bargain basement wages while cutting every possible benefit will not get respect from me. It has nothing to do with jealousy.
Save the "then start your own company" or "business is not charity" spiel.
It's not inequality that's bad. It's having an extremely small subsection of your citizenry holding the vast, vast majority of the country's wealth (as well as the vast majority of the income) through little more than manipulation while leaving the rest to fight over the crumbs. This is not an admirable outcome or something to strive for. And telling the other 60% to just work harder isn't going to fix anything. No matter how hard everyone works, how smart or skilled they become, WalMart will still need over two million people.
We need some inequality. That's the only motivation to go that extra mile. We don't need to pay some people $20 million or more per year while at the same time saying that other people who are out there working their asses off aren't worth enough to afford even a decent meal, doubly so if those two people are in the same company.
And that's my opinion.
And as a disclaimer if you think I'm a mooch wanting free stuff, I usually fall in the 85%-90% range or so for income and somewhere in the 70% range for net worth (hard to find actual figures)
Between income inequality and social instability? Income inequality tends to be symptomatic of other issues. It's an indicator. High income inequality plus a fast-growing economy may not be as much of a problem, since people feel as though the future will be better than the present-day. High inequality with sluggish growth and declining prospects is not so great, because then economic "participants" begin to lose faith in the system, and look for alternatives.
Wow, who'd have thought that doing the same thing over and over might become unrewarding, so people would try something new. And that's 'bad' by your logic.
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In that sort of environment, people feel as though the overlcass is oppressive and parasitic rather than a function of capitalist success. Something like the 2008 bank bailouts kicked off an undercurrent of social anger that still isn't well-understood or appreciated, but it could be a much larger issue in the future.
So, government interfering with the financial services industry leads to government needing to rescue said industry from predicted collapse - and this is proof that government MUST regulate things more. Yeah.
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What you're looking for is something called "wages and salary accruals" (WASCUR), which is often expressed in terms of division by GDP. So for example:
As you can see on the chart, wages have been declining in terms of GDP since the early 1970's. Since most people draw their "wealth" from wages, this has led to a growing impression of "stagnation" for many Americans.
What this has to do with the topic is unclear to me.
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That's a problem, because the worldview you're trying to "sell" here (that everyone gets what they economically "deserve;" that effort = prosperity, etc.) is going to be increasingly rejected by masses of people who feel as though their hard work is getting them less and less reward over time, and that shadowy external agents such as big financial firms are robbing them in some fashion.
That's true in all societies, prosperous or not. There will always be a class of people who see conspiracies to control the world everywhere they look.
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That's not good for society, any way you look at it.
It's even worse when government is the one making everyone suffer.
Saying this shows a glaring willingness to ignore the political, economic, and cultural conditions in countries with high inequality...compared to the stronger economies, lower crime rates, and better education rates in countries countries with lower inequality.
The correlations deserve recognition...whether you like the significance of the correlation or not. In any other situation, I feel that people would acknowledge this a too strong a correlation to be merely coincidence but that is the funny thing about politics...It makes normally reasonable people completely unreasonable to bolster whatever their ideology is.
I agree entirely. I believe it is the mark of a decent and moral government to provide an opportunity for people to get out of poverty...
Government has no such ability. None, whatsoever.
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but people must be willing to take the hand up and then move on. Means tested programs in this country are almost designed these days to hinder growth it seems and it needs to be reformed very badly...not only for the wellbeing of the recipients but also the solvency of the programs themselves so that we may continue to give a hand to those who need it.
You defy your own arguments. Elsewhere you argued that it's political suicide to deny anyone anything. Yet, you think politicians can be trusted and should be given the power to decide the winners and losers. You recognize the fatal flaw - that politicians will never say "no", and then you insist that the only possible means of making the nanny state work... Is to say "no more".
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I'll agree with you there all day long, my friend.
At issue is that you simply agree with anything that sounds good to your political aspirations.
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