It is also frustrating when the response to “Income inequality is increasing” is something like “People have cell phones now! What are you complaining about?!” or “Do you want to go back to the 50s when we had inefficient refrigerators and no vaccines?!” I have not really seen that sort of thing here, but I have seen it in other places.
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The problem is our extractive economic institutions. Replace those with more inclusive ones, and the problem will solve itself. Democracy in government alone will never be enough. For a good example of how we might go about fixing this mess, google the Mondragon Corporation. It’s by no means perfect, but it is definitely a shot in the right direction.
In the trade we call this a revolution, but that’s far too much like communism so the USA will just ignore it, I can’t help thinking that the French and Russian revolutions were based upon a much lesser disparity, the only reason there hasn’t been one today is the level of poverty is higher than it was in those days, so what they called poor and what we call poor now are different.
The whole chocolate factory, actually.
Bring back estate taxes. They were as high as 90% at one time. The idea of taxing huge fortunes at the end of life makes perfect sense, so that a ruling class does not establish itself (as it has in a very short time since estate taxes were all but eliminated.) Taxes like this support the social safety net, and if you can’t take it ALL with you, or pass it directly to your heirs, it’s an incentive to do some good with it while you still live.
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And surely you’re not alone.
So where’s all the love for this idea?
Inequality is literally a measure of how well the political economy is working. In our case, it is working well for 1% - especially 0.01% of us - and failing everyone else. If you are a millionaire, it’s probably not working for you either. You are a million dollar peasant. You are growing poorer every year like the rest of us. (There is no demand for your products because too few people have jobs (are none) or social insurance (is none). No jobs, no consumers, no customers. The economy is financial now.)
Thanks for your reply! That makes a lot of sense. I wouldn’t have cited it
anyway since it’s not actually a primary source, but it’s nice to know what
the errors are without having to spend a few hours reading through that
paper and whatnot.
Taxing individual labor, rather than assets, investment appreciation or corporate income, is how the idle rich prevent social change. You’re too busy earning money (that they control, after their puppet governments confiscate it) to rise up against them. So enjoy your junk food and shiny consumer gewgaws; they pay for the caviar and mansions of the ruling class.
Didja know that income tax was supposed to only apply to the income of corporations, and justified because the conditions necessary for their existence and profitability are created and maintained through the expenditure of tax money? An individual can profit from hard labor even in total isolation or complete anarchy, but businesses require an enforced social framework (notable exception: Murder Incorporated loves laissez faire).
Nowadays people are so heavily propagandized they honestly believe passports and individual income taxes aren’t insanely oppressive impositions on their freedom. They think corrupt, amoral governments run by sociopathic opportunists actually have a natural right to limit their movements and take part of the fruit of their labor, even if said governments are actively working to reduce the services provided to the people being oppressed.
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What I wish this video would have addressed is the distribution of wealth by age. People grow into wealth as they get established in their career. A 20 year old who is just starting out will not have the same amount of wealth as a 50 year old who has 30 years of savings/investing.
Similarly, dividing the distribution by education would tell us if the distribution is due to an uneven distribution of education.
I also question the “pie” analogy. If 1% of the population has 40% of the wealth does that really mean that the remaining 60% of the wealth is insufficient for the remaining 99%? Are the 99%ers incapable of creating their own wealth? Is wealth really finite?
Controlling more resources doesn’t just mean that rich people get more toys to play with. It means more influence, especially in an era when the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that unlimited campaign contributions are a form of free speech.
Do you think it is possible to live in a truly representative democracy if less than 5% of Americans control as many resources as everyone else put together? What if that power was concentrated to less than 1% of Americans? Or .001%? Or one incredibly wealthy individual?
It’s not just a matter of making sure people near the bottom can scrape by (though that’s part of the problem too). Once the distribution of wealth tips too far toward the top you don’t have a free society anymore, you have a Plutocracy.
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It can be a useful metaphor, especially considering that modern industrial economies are based upon specialized labor, and are therefore, irreducibly, collaborative efforts, so a group of people contributing to the creation of a complex whole, a pie, and then sharing that pie, seems apt.
Wealth is used to recreate labor – e.g., to feed people – or else is invested in the production of new wealth. Given modern levels of productivity, which is exponentially greater than in pre-industrial times, it seems like 60% of all wealth produced should be enough to provide everyone with the basics of living and still have enough to invest in new growth, if managed equitably.
There are two problems with this, however. First, wealth is very unevenly distributed within the 99%. Omitting the top 1% from the picture still leaves you with a tiny number of people controlling most of the wealth. It would be like travelling back in time, to an era that still had the same fundamental injustice, just not quite as severe as now.
Second, you can’t omit the 1% from the picture. The amount of wealth they consume as individuals is negligible controlled to the amount of wealth they control; most of it is invested, which means they have overwhelming power over the future shape of the economy, and thus human society as a whole.
Obviously, the 99% are capable of creating their own wealth, since they’re the ones creating all new wealth now. The trouble is that they don’t get much say about what happens to the wealth they create. One generation builds a factory, but doesn’t own the factory; the next generation works in the factory, but doesn’t own the factory or what the factory produces.
The wealth that exists at a given moment is finite, obviously.
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