61–70 of 184 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday.
They are certainly in the richest 1 percent worldwide.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the incentive to continue working once you hit a threshold to comfortably retire with a good quality of life then? Might a 100% inheritance tax remove significant capital from the markets which would affect growth? In this scenario, what is stopping people from transferring all of their money to their children before they die at a much lower tax rate? How would assets like real estate be handled?
You assume that such wealth was earned in the first place which is rarely the case and is less so every year. The meritocracy is broken and will be so exactly to the degree that there is inheritance, the two are directly connected. Inheritance is the exact definition of anti-meritocracy.
Fair point. It's true that my statements only applied to individuals who earned the money themselves, and I failed to consider people who had themselves inherited money.
My title is much less catchy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, but it also does not mean that he didn't take anything from me. Generally, the US tax code is designed in such a way that capital begets capital. Put differently, if you make money passively from the money you already have, you pay a lower tax rate then if you haul brick on your back, or teach children. Is this taking? No, not directly, but indirectly, sure.
I would argue that the state is taking, not the rich (which are not the only people with money invested in the market).
The fact that someone is rich does not mean he took anything from you, no matter how poor you are. Statements like "If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets" are not only stupid but also dangerous.
Rich people living in US got rich because of the healthy middle class who can afford to buy stuff (or get a loan to). They get rich because of the thousand of workers in their offices and factories.
So this is the way wealth is distributed in US. While the inequality is growing in all OCDE countries (and possibly all countries in the world), in US it's much higher than other countries.
The fact that someone is rich does not mean he took anything from you, no matter how poor you are. Statements like "If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets" are not only stupid but also dangerous.
So stop bringing up the strawman of "rich people are evil" when the article wasn't even trying to making that point. Can we have a discussion about income inequality without that bogus line of thinking?
Wow. Scientific American has really gone off the rails.
This is a well-intentioned advocacy piece. It would be at home on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the Washington Post or even the Wall Street Journal. It seems much of the reporting in SA has gone the way of editorializing the flavor of the month rather than reporting on well, science.
I miss that.
Is it just me, or does the article contradict its own conclusion? > They asked about 55,000 people from 40 countries to estimate how much corporate CEOs and unskilled workers earned ... the patterns were the same for all subgroups, regardless of age, education, political affiliation, or opinion on inequality and pay > One likely reason for this is identified by a third study, ... that suggests that our indifference l…
I always feel a number of important metrics are left out, either by accident or on purpose, when people talk about inequality. Most importantly when it comes to wealth itself, by most measures there is a very, very long tail of people with no wealth. 'No wealth' ranges from the most poor, to those living from paycheck to paycheck all the way to those who have as much debt as their assets. Many of these people are fin…
the fact that the population size (and correspondingly, the GDP) is larger today than it was 40 years ago has nothing to do with this.
And, it's only going to get worse while [1] 39% of Americans either believe they are already among the top 1% or believe that they one day will be. If your mentality is one of "Don't tax the top because that's me (or will be)", you're going to constantly vote against your own economic self-interest, and continue to support policies that help the real rich get ultra-rich. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/t…
There is an equality in possibilities, not in results. You can't blame anyone because you are bad in investments or can't do business. If you tax people who reach success, why not tax those who was failed? Let's redistribute bankruptcy, depression and suicides.
Moreover, it's worsened because life is more expensive in subtle ways as you move down the income bracket. [3] Even municipal fines -- as emphasized by John Oliver recently -- contribute to the problem.
[1] http://mattbruenig.com/2013/06/13/whats-more-important-a-col... [2] http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/00... [3] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/12/linda_tira... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto