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US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

nytimes.com

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Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#71

Post by mattmanser »

dsacco wrote: post #39
dvdhnt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.

But the economy is not zero sum, like that bag. If I have a process that increases the total number of skittles in the bag, is it still unfair for me to take more skittles from it?

Depends on your view point.

You could argue that the process was never really "yours" in the first place.

Society, our laws, our armies and natural resources, our roads, bridges, power lines, telecoms structure, are 99% of that process and you added 1%.

You simply took advantage of a lot of luck, a little bit of hard work and probably a bunch of your parents' money to end up owning it.

Maybe you should get a chunk of the rewards, but all of it?

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#72

Post by tomtemplate »

KZeillmann wrote: post #12
tomtemplate wrote: post #5

"Most Americans would look at these charts and conclude that inequality is out of control. The president, on the other hand, seems to think that inequality isn’t big enough." Would nobody else reading this want some further information to back up this statement? Its a shame it wasn't nearer the beginning of the article as I could have stopped reading earlier.

It's literally in the preceding paragraph. Notes about how the proposed healthcare law was essentially a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how the proposed tax cuts mainly benefit the richest Americans, and plans to cut school funding.

"how the proposed tax cuts mainly benefit the richest Americans"

Did you gather this view from reading the tax reform?

https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/trump-tax-reform.pdf

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#73

Post by mcguire »

autokad wrote: post #14

It looks to me that QE3 was a huge part of that later uptick. its no surprise to me that if you juice the markets and inflate asset prices (mostly stock), that the richest benefit most. what was surprising to me is how bad actually making stuff did. I understand that juicing the markets might not benefit that, but it seemed as though QE3 actually hurt producing tangible things.

The line becomes flat around 1990, and the spike on the right appears immediately and grows quickly. Post-2008 looks like a fluctuation on that growth.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#74

Post by bendmorris »

spo81rty wrote: post #34
dvdhnt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.

Except when it comes to wealth there is no limit. Ones success does not mean another's demise. If I mine for Bitcoin and make millions, who did I steal wealth from to get mine? Your Skittles analogy does not work.

It's not so simple. Wealth can be used to gain access to limited resources such as land. Greater wealth inequality means a small segment of the population can afford to buy up all of the housing, driving up prices and blocking others (who may not otherwise be any worse off than they ever were) from owning land. They can then perpetually rent out this land, creating an effortless income for themselves and siphoning value from everyone else.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#75

Post by mcguire »

humanrebar wrote: post #45
nsebban wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In other words, why graph income and not wealth? I think it's because people's wealth is really hard to estimate. The border between people's assets and their companies', foundations' and what not are usually blurry enough that you would get a graph that shows no insight. Although income is not a great KPI, at least there are reliable methods to figure it out, or at least make estimates with a quite acceptable prec…

Sure, but there are downsides to this approach as well. Say someone could have a small business that takes off and retires after a few years with a reasonable retirement fund. This doesn't fit the mold of a hoarding 1%-er. It seems like discouraging this kind of income spike would actually decrease social mobility.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-...

"“The probability of ending where you start has gone up, and the probability of moving up from where you start has gone down,” Carr said. For instance, the chance that someone starting in the bottom 10 percent would move above the 40th percentile decreased by 16 percent. The chance that someone starting in the middle of the earnings distribution would reach one of the top two earnings deciles decreased by 20 percent. Yet people who started in the seventh decile are 12 percent more likely to end up in the fifth or sixth decile—a drop in earnings—than they used to be."

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#76

Post by wonder_er »

creaghpatr wrote: post #8
PeachPlum wrote: post #6

If everyone gets 2x as much tomorrow as today, income inequality rises. Ask people if they would support everyone getting 2x their income tomorrow.

Yes, this is how inflation is leveraged by those at the top to dilute the bottom 98%. People think in terms of dollars instead of purchasing power, the fed need only boil the water slow enough for people to remain compliant.

Not sure why the downvotes. Purchasing power is all that matters. Would you rather earn $1/hr or $15/hr?

All that matters is what that money can purchase.

This is the funny thing about our steadily increasing minimum wage laws. I've not seen many people discuss why purchasing power keeps declining.

In 1990, $15/hr then was equivalent to $28.72/hr today. [0]

Obviously, something is happening to purchasing power of our dollars, but it doesn't get discussed much.

[0] https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#77

Post by mcguire »

dsacco wrote: post #39
dvdhnt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.

But the economy is not zero sum, like that bag. If I have a process that increases the total number of skittles in the bag, is it still unfair for me to take more skittles from it?

If you end up with a mountain of skittles that you can use to crush anyone who irritates you while everyone else is eating all the skittles they get in order to survive, then yes, that might be a problem.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#78

Post by wonder_er »

jly wrote: post #67
logicchains wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like, if we had a big patch of strawberries and every day I picked 100 and you picked 1000, why should I get to take yours?

You shouldn't, but this example is not the way the existing capitalist economies of the world work. In your example, a shared resource has labor applied to meet a clear human need, and those that physically do more of it reap more rewards. In the real world, someone owns the field, does no work, pays individuals (potentially) far less than the value of their labor to do the picking, and reaps most of the rewards. The…

Buying land and establishing a farm is not "no work".

Passing physical goods to offspring goes in the same bucket as passing monetary units to offspring, goes in the same bucket as passing valuable ideas to offspring.

In other words, parents should be able to pass whatever they want to their offspring.

To inject the state in that process and break it... you're making (basically) a god of the state. It's all powerful, benevolent, and able to do anything in any capacity in any situation.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#79

Post by mcguire »

bendmorris wrote: post #74
spo81rty wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when it comes to wealth there is no limit. Ones success does not mean another's demise. If I mine for Bitcoin and make millions, who did I steal wealth from to get mine? Your Skittles analogy does not work.

It's not so simple. Wealth can be used to gain access to limited resources such as land. Greater wealth inequality means a small segment of the population can afford to buy up all of the housing, driving up prices and blocking others (who may not otherwise be any worse off than they ever were) from owning land. They can then perpetually rent out this land, creating an effortless income for themselves and siphoning va…

You are not thinking big enough. Wealth is about power. Siphoning value is a distant second order to commanding the peons to trim your lawn with nail scissors.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#80

Post by dsacco »

mcguire wrote: post #77
dsacco wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the economy is not zero sum, like that bag. If I have a process that increases the total number of skittles in the bag, is it still unfair for me to take more skittles from it?

If you end up with a mountain of skittles that you can use to crush anyone who irritates you while everyone else is eating all the skittles they get in order to survive, then yes, that might be a problem.

But does this actually describe the current state of affairs? If not, how would we get there? That seems like a cognitive jump from people taking unequal amounts of skittles.
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