Making the rich poorer is the easy part. How do you make the poor richer?
I said negative income taxes.
Ack, so you did. My mistake.
Why stop at Americans? Why not reduce income inequality across the planet? Heavily tax all Americans who make more than $100/day and pay for infrastructure in other nations.
Corporations absolutely DO want laws. They just want to be the one to make those laws. And, by and large in the US, they do. Lobbyists and regulatory capture ensure that our laws and regulations are by, for and of the corporations.
The reason is that in the absence of law, you have to actually compete. And nothing is scarier to entrenched businesses than competition. When you make the law, on the other hand, you get to outlaw your competition. You get to enforce “standards”. You get to make consumers buy your product whether they want to or not.
If anything, the discussions on this thread so far show that the solution is in your assumption. The first step is getting people to admit that wealth inequality is a bad thing. Which is to say that we must first get people who make millions of dollars to admit that it’s bad that they make millions of dollars (if, in fact, that’s true). Without this assumption being accepted as a universal truth, the people who own the majority of the nation’s wealth will never be inclined to voluntarily relinquish it. Thus we’ll require more and more laws and regulations to forcefully take it from them, which in turn will only dig the trenches deeper on each side.
I think that’s why a discussion of “how” so often evolves into a discussion of “why.” If I said, “How can we solve the problem of everyone owning a car?” wouldn’t your first reaction be, “What’s wrong with owning a car?”
Corporations like them.
Plus 7.65% SS and Medical, FUTA, Worker’s Comp (Variable) + SUI (Variable) + SDI (Variable) + Employer Contributions towards insurance and IRA/401K (Variable) which can make closer to a minimum of $11.50 or much higher, not counting the operating costs of the physical plant that they would be working at.
Maybe a world wide minimum wage applied to any American owned/established company might be a stepping-stone to that ultimate goal. Encourage other off-shoring companies in other countries to pay a world-wide minimum wage. Heck, it may be the equivalent to $5/hr. American, but that would be far better than what’s going on now to end World Poverty*.
That is the goal, right?
Or is it just about American Labor?
- = (At least that what was bandied about in the 70s and 80s, IIRC.)
You do realize that’s only because you see implicit assumption as non-existent; i.e. you don’t agree that there is inequality in US so asking about “how” is a waste of time.
Boy, if we solved all debates this way :o
At this point you’re both incoherent and derailing the thread, to be quite honest. Babbling about how corproations like the rule of law but don’t like the rule of law (which appears to be your position) isn’t answering the question the OP asked.
What do other countries do? Smarter tax policy.
Here’s a list of the nations that receive the most foreign direct investment. Is it filled with nations that have…
?
Let’s see…
You have to get down to #36, Saudi Arabia, before there’s anything remotely like the nations you’re describing. This seems odd, shouldn’t investors be pouring funds into nations without the rule of law? They seem to be doing precisely the opposite.
Yes, that is the goal, at least for me. I’m worried that a world-wide MW would have unforeseen negative effects but at least you’re talking about a potential solution. I guess I get irritated by people who want to solve income inequality in just the US; it sometimes feels like we want to pull down those fat rich bastards and I suspect that many of those in favor of income equality mean to pull down only those richer than them. Yet the difference in qualitify of life between me and Bill Gates is smaller than between me and someone in Haiti. Income inequality amongst Americans is not that big of a deal IMO. The income inequality between Americans and Haitians is monstrous. That said, I really don’t know what to do about it.
I think you misunderstood me. I do believe there’s income inequality in the US, (just as I genuinely believe that most people shouldn’t own a car). What I was trying to illustrate was that the answer to “How can we fix this problem” is to first successfully argue that there is indeed a problem that needs fixing. In other words, answering “Why?” is the first step to answering “How?” Because any solution presented in the form of passing more laws and/or regulations doesn’t actually solve the problem. The greedy, the wealth-hoarders, and their allies will all see these attempts as basically theft and will constantly fight against them. So what’s the best way to stop them? Convince them that they’re wrong. Demonstrate that economic inequality does, in fact, exist, then convince them that it’s a bad thing.
In which case, why don’t you try measuring inequality in Europe and then compare it to the US? I do believe things would look a little different.
See the GINI map linked upthread. The only European country that’s worse off than the US on that front is Bosnia.A* war zone*.
Beyond that, and anecdotally speaking from my own experience living in France, we do have rich and poor, and some very rich ; the working class is sort of hopelessly fucked too (but when has it *not *been ?) - but things are nowhere near as off kilter as they are in the US, I don’t think. Our working poor don’t have to work 3 different jobs to make ends meet, they aren’t financially doomed if they catch a nasty disease or a bad break, our education system isn’t in complete shambles even if of course it could still use more help (most notably, college access is emphatically not restricted to the upper crust nor crushes poorer student under extortionate loans)… and on the flip side, our very rich seem just as hedonistically insane as yours - they too have large empty houses in many places, private jets, kitchy yachts, overpriced art, cocaine fueled parties, tabloid antics, the works. Honestly, once you’ve got a couple dozen mil’ under you belt, there’s not much having moaaaaar can buy in terms of worldly comforts that I can see.
You’d need a global government to efficiently, fairly pull that kind of thing off.
I think it’s past time we had one honestly, but getting over every nation’s tribalism and twenty centuries of mutual mistrust and outright antagonism is easier said than done.
I don’t think you understand my point. You said that the US is one market the same way as the US. If you really want to stand on that point, inequality in Europe taken as a whole must be the consideration, and you can’t do that by looking at inequality country by country. In other words, Bosnia’s poorest citizens must be compared to France’s richest, not just Bosnia’s richest. On the other hand, you could look at US inequality state by state.
Ask and ye shall receive. None below .41.
As for the EU as a whole, this cite rates it at ~30.5, both when only considering the “core” 13 members (the rich boys’ club) and the extended 27 membership roster. Interstingly enough, the global GINI of the recent additions (mostly Balkanic states, plus Cyprus) has actually regressed over time, from 37.4 upon receiving membership, to the same ~30.5 now.
Push the people at the bottom up, but at the same time remove other restrictions that hamper productivity. Have a negative income tax in place, but remove things like minimum wages and healthcare benefits tied to jobs. If you want to be a welfare state, don’t make private citizens do the welfare that the public has decided is needed. Those just cause distortions.
But my point was, inequality is something of a zen thing. Focus on it by not focusing on it. Focus on growth, and providing equality of opportunity to participate in that growth. For instance, in the western world, considering a slightly longer time frame(a couple hundred years), I’m willing to bet consumption inequality is at its lowest ever. And that’s happened without any conscious attempt to address the issue. It’s happened through technological breakthroughs and relatively free markets that allow those breakthroughs to spread. There is no doubt that investments in public goods like law and order, education, infrastructure, public health (as distinct from healthcare) have supported these advances. Make governments continue to focus on them.
Governments are, by their nature, highly inefficient. They have a broad set of responsibilities, with limited resources to address them, and even more limited ways to measure their success or failure. Once equity gets decided as a goal, politicians will invariably look for highly visible, quick fixes that will show their constituencies that they are “doing something about it” but end up doing far more damage than good, in pursuit of a goal that is questionable at best. To give an example, again from India (sorry, it’s where I’m from, it’s what I know best). Emphasis added to ease readability.
I’m not entirely certain the numbers are comparable. The cite for Europe says
Emphasis mine. That makes it sound as though PPP considerations may be involved. Which kind of defeats the purpose. I may well be wrong on this though.