Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think (Scientific American)

While income disparity is a real thing, these stats are overblown. They assume that one person can cross a threshold where it becomes "bad" how much money they have.

Just to use a lame example.

If everyone on my street earns 100,000 a year, but 9 out of the 10 of us spend 90,000 a year while 1 only spend 20,000 a year, in 10 years the 1 would have 8 times the resources of everyone on the street combined. The wealth disparity can be heavily skewed by the fact that many people can compile wealth over generations and they just make money off of their money. The Walton family for example. It's only inherently bad if you assume that them having that money means someone else was unfairly kept from earning that money, which there is no reason to believe.

What is the solution to the Walton family having more than 47% of families combined? We should take their money and give it evenly to everyone?

Before anyone flames me with talk of tax increases, I'm all for them. That's not going to do anything to change the wealth disparity, unless you are talking about wealth taxes that are just punitive and designed to take people's money. To which I again would argue that requires you to believe it is somehow inherently wrong for a person to have more money than other people.

I think there is a difference between income disparity and wealth disparity. Key point.

 

Isn't in inherent that the more economic prosperity a country generates the more skewed it'll become? The top limit of wealth is infinite and the bottom is always 0? I dunno...

 

Nope.

 

This is the scary part. This is what capitalism is designed to do ultimately, larger amounts of wealth concentrated with fewer and fewer people.

 

My commentary was about wealth disparity which I consider a more difficult issue to offer up a solution for.

I don't agree that wealth inequality necessitates the loss of political liberty, widespread social mobility and the functioning of the Republic so I believe you've given me a false choice.

 

Your attempt to defend the status quo wrt to wealth distribution fails

So silly as if income disparity is not the primary driving force for wealth inequality. Try to get beyond the experience of your neighbors whose incomes may not very that much and whose total wealth may depend a lot of how frugal they are.

Do you know that this generation of Waltons inherited their billions?

BTW the vast majority of high or very high income earners save a higher percentage of their income than the vast majority of low to moderate income earners. Let me know if you want me to suggest to you why this is the case

 

There's a thing called the Gini Coefficient that most international NGOs use to measure inequality with 0 being complete equality and 1 being complete inequality. The worst countries in terms of inequality are around .6-.7 while the US is currently at .4, very close to .5, and trending upward since the 60s. Most developed countries are around .2-.3. The US has always been terrible in terms of wealth inequality for advanced nations. A lot of it has to do with our terrible estate tax system.

 

The usual suspects understand that facts have an inherent liberal bias.

 

Well, that and Citizen's United.

But don't want to derail a good thread.

 

Here is the problem:

Apple made $40 billion in net income last year. Until you can convince them and similar companies that it's okay to only make $30-$35 billion annually and hire US workers at living wages to put together the icrap then we continue down the inequality road to hell.

 

It's like you just respond to a post randomly without reading.

 

I assume you have a pension. Apple is the largest component of Nasdaq, at 10%, and comprises 4% of the S&P. If you do, uh, 'convince' Apple to decrease their margins and make less money, it would probably have a material effect on the value of your 401k (depending on how and where you invest it of course), and millions other of Americans.

Of course, you could argue that it's better to accept a hit on your pension and allow more Americans to get jobs as Apple sends its factor work back to the US. But would this be the most productive use of those American workers? How can you guarantee you'll be increasing the same number of jobs as China will be losing them, since USA will naturally employ fewer people by using more machinary. Oh, and let's not forget angering Chinese politicians by taking away their jobs too.

 

Americans do not have a satisfactory level of charitable giving. This is sadly the direct result of people leaving the Church. Christians are so generous with their time and money and this spirit of giving to the less fortunate is a pillar of the religion. That's why so many hospitals, shelters, soup kitchens, and aid facilities are funded by churches. The move away from these type of honorable values is leading to a society of shallow, self centered, superficial people -- Kardashians. Americans spent over $300 million on Halloween costumes for their pets last year. We live in a decadent society whose sold purpose is self pleasure at the expense of lifting others out of poverty.

The worst way to lift people out of poverty is by assigning the task to the government. We have a system of entitlements and an entitlement culture which permanently dooms generations of Americans to poverty. Successful Americans need to give back through charitable giving and through their church's outreach efforts.

 

So your argument is this is bad because it would hurt the stock market where equities are primarily in the hands of the uber rich?

And we might piss of Chinese politicians?

Pensions still exist? Nope I invest in Apple through a mutual fund in my 401k actually but reducing their margins a bit wouldn't sadden me in the slightest. Especially since that mutual fund is diversified and Apple is a small portion.

What would make me happy though is more blue collar workers employed at good wages and good benefits who actually spend their money and create jobs via demand with additional discretionary income.

Do you even middle class brah?

 

You're right, this is a terribly lame example because it pretends that inequality exists in a vaccuum and doesn't really do a good job of explaining the real world consequences thereof. Meanwhile in the real world there's a boatload of evidence about the far reaching effects (see Piketty, Stiglitz, or plain old common sense) to the point where even the Republican party is forced to acknowledge the inherent problems of it (of course, their solutions all would tend to make economic inequality even worse, but the important thing is that they want you to think they think it's a problem...)

The real kicker though is the gratuitous morally upright saver from your example vs. profligate spenders comparison is about the world's biggest, most obvious tell - why do anything about economic inequality in your lame example when it's only the undisiciplined poors who suffer from it? You answer your own question.

Let's take a better example. Pretend like all of your street folks are on a desert island, and they all have barely enough food and water to just barely make it until the rescue plane arrives; meanwhile the morally upright saver randomly discovers a huge cache of supplies that make him the Walton family of the island, which he secretly hoards, even though there is enough to feed everyone many times over.

Is there anything "inherently wrong" here?

 

your joking. you want ppl to believe in something you cant prove? most ppl im meeting today dont believe in jesus, god or church no more. they not going back there and im not too since i stopped believing this last xmas. if they become rich without a gun to their head [govt] they will not give $ to the poor so your charity idea fails. system of entitlements? my entire family is military vets so they earned their entitlements. you dont gotta be a military person to earn entitlements though. i think you confusing bad govt spending with the idea of govt and entitlements. i thought all dps offices were **** but then i went to rosenberg and seen how good it can be.

 

Firstly, I think it's kind of silly we are just debating over one company.

The stock market is also held by the majority of Americans, regardless of how much of it is owned by the wealthy elite, a downturn in the stock market is pretty bad for everybody, period.

And yes, international politics means USA sometimes has to take into consideration other countries politicians, it's called diplomacy.

Great to hear it wont sadden you, hopefully it won't sadden the rest of the US too. I think you underestimate just how large Apple is/impact on stock markets. S&P earnings growth was 2.1%. Excluding Apple, it was 0.3%. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjo...xxons-outsized-impact-on-the-sp-500-earnings/). So a blunt policy of just simply 'Forcing Apple to bring jobs back to USA' sounds fantastic on the outside, but ignores the nuances and other reprecussions such a policy would bring.

What I would suggest is closing the ridiculous loopholes US has. Obama made a decent start in suggesting foreign cash piles be taxed (which will never happen btw) but at least it's pointing in the right direction. Apple, Google, whoever, have far too much cash stored outside the US, and it needs to be targeted. That policy, I would agree with. A blunt one like what you suggested, no.