It’s funny that you think gerrymandering and “vote suppression” are things that didn’t happen in the past. That things are somehow worse than they were, say, 50 years ago.
They are different - and fuck yes I want both. And I say that without having to give it any thought whatsoever. If there is a way that I can carve out an advantage that will increase the likelihood of success or prosperity for my kids that I am comfortable engaging in, I’m going to do it. I don’t think it’s common for parents to strive for the chance that their kids will have the same 50/50 shot as the next kid in their peer group.
First off - yes I disagree. Life isn’t fair. I don’t have any misapprehensions that life is fair. I have no desire for fairness with respect to advantages that can be provided to children. Second - you say there is a practical consideration but your examples don’t make any point. What is the practical consideration you are referring to?
I’m not making the claim, you are. You are claiming that CEOs in the 1950s were just as smart and entrepreneurial and hardworking as they are today. I’m questioning the source of this claim, and how you measure it.
You make this claim as if it’s prima facie correct. I question it. It may be true, but you’ve done nothing to demonstrate it. For example, today large companies must do several things that large companies in the past did not. They have to maneuver the internet, mass and social media, navigate increased regulation, operate in a more litigious society, understand more complex financial guidelines, all in an effort to stay competitive with their peers. Whether or not that environment translates into CEOs of today being smarter, more entrepreneurial, or more hardworking I can’t say. But the world of today is markedly different than in the 1950s, it’s not a stretch to think that being successful today requires more or different skills than it did in the past.
Think of it in terms of science. In the 1950s the study of DNA was new and a growing. Do you think biologists of today, having the entire history of human knowledge to build upon, are just about the same in their ability to analyze science and apply those discoveries to new fields of study? Perhaps Watson (still alive, I know) and Crick would flourish in today’s scientific community along with the best and brightest, but the type of skills and knowledge base that exists today dwarfs what was available 60 years ago. Your claim is unsupported.
Okay - well it’s a guess sure. If your point is to bemoan increasing political influence of wealthy folks, that’s fine. It’s a giant leap to say that increases in income inequality is caused by that influence.
If you are making an observation without any inclination to recommend some type of change it’s not sinister at all. However, it seems to me the implication of complaining about the lack of intermingling of different socio-economic or other diverse backgrounds goes hand in hand with some proposed action to reduce or impact that reality.
Okay, that definition is pretty nebulous. A teacher who gets a 2 bedroom house in a low income high crime area, drives an $800 used car, and has 1 kid going to community college and vacations by driving 50 miles to some tourist attraction is not necessarily middle class in my mind. That would meet your criteria but I think it’s weakly laid out. Because of this, your complaint about the shrinking of this group that is fairly nebulous is weak.
Oh, gee. I took Econ 101 also. Since you obviously didn’t bother to read my post, you wouldn’t have noticed that I explicitly mentioned IPOs. Transaction in an IPO represent a tiny percentage of all transactions. Now it is true that IPOs would not be possible without a market for the stock in the long term, but that in no way refutes the point that the rich get most benefit from the market.
Do you really understand so little about how the market works? If I go and buy a share of Apple, Apple does not see a penny of the money. Apple theoretically could issue more stock to fund stuff like this (and have their current investors get very unhappy) but since they are sitting on piles of cash and can borrow at low rates, it is not very likely. Far more likely for them to buy back stock, which is an absurd thing to do in your model.
You should maybe put away your 1950s vintage high school econ book and listen to Marketplace once in a while.
Much of the run up in the market happened before unemployment dropped significantly. We are finally seeing an increase in consumer spending which is helping to drive the market also. Now, a rising market can help drive spending since people feel richer (rising housing prices also) but I haven’t heard much to indicate that this has been a factor lately. I’d doubt it, since so much of the increase in wealth is going to the rich.
I don’t think anyone would claim that things that make rich people richer are worthless - they kind of aren’t be definition. Worth much to the economy as a whole, or to most people in it, though, is a different story.
They’ve got internet in other countries also you know. 
BTW, unlike bubble 1 which I lived through and was theoretically wealthy in, this runup consists of companies mostly making money, or following in the footsteps of companies who managed to monetize social media.
I advocate towards lower inequality primarily for two reasons.
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We need more demand rather than supply. After 30 years of supply side economics it is time for demand side economics. It is no longer the case that making more capital available to companies will allow them to expand and grow the economy. Companies are awash in capital. They could expand if they wanted to, but there is no reason when there is no one out there to buy their products. Rather than expanding they are using their capital to pay out divdends, or buy back their own stock. Putting more money in their pockets isn’t going to change anything.
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Economic Utility. In spite of how is is portrayed by economists, maintaining a strong economy should be viewed as a means not an end. The true goal is to improve the well being of citizens. Even if you increase GDP by 50% but in the reduce the overall well being of your citizens by 10% you are worse off. The degree to which wealth increases your well being is largely proportional to the proportional amount by which your wealth increased. An increase of $10,000 will have very little change on a person who brings in $500,000 a year, but will vastly improve the life of one earning $25,000 per year. For this reason smoothing out income inequality even at the cost of some reduction in GDP is the right thing to do. Of course it is possible to go to far as was shown in USSR and Mao’s China. but I don’t see we are at the point where reducing billionaires to $900 millionaires will eliminate all incentives to achieve.
Cite? http://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php shows 1950 GDP as 2,184 billion in 2009 dollars and 2013 GDP as 15,710.3 billion in 2009 dollars.
A factor of 7 is quite far from the at least 100x increase that was claimed. I don’t know a good cite (or measurement method) of wealth over that period but it’s possible that land prices have bubbled, er, appreciated enough in that time to make that first claim arguably true.
I don’t think it would either. OTOH, there are 526 billionaires in the US. Taxing each of them $100 million, and redistributing it to the other 300 million of us gives each of us a little more than $175. I doubt that will achieve much towards income equality.
Regards,
Shodan
On the other hand, continuously cutting their taxes so that they have an ever increasing share of the nation’s wealth is like pouring gasoline on the fire. You can’t think of it in terms of taxing A to give to B, it’s more like keeping A from writing all the rules and keeping B well below him.
What taxes were cut for billionaires that weren’t cut for anyone else?
Regards,
Shodan
No, you can only vote for the choices you’re given. And even then, those choices are constrained by the fact that only two candidates in any election ever have a chance of winning. It’s like giving a starving person the choice between bleach and battery acid and saying “if you’re still hungry, you can wait four years and choose again”. And sandwiches will never be on the ballot, because the battery acid and bleach manufacturers got to pick the candidates.
In my state, they allow write-ins. You could also run for office yourself, and if you can get enough people to vote for you, make what changes you can.
Of course, not enough people may agree with you enough to vote for you, but that is the point of representative democracy.
Regards,
Shodan
So the only “choice” we’re given is between throwing our vote away or giving up our lives to an unrewarding career in politics?
Good point. There are NO democracies on earth. Glad we cleared that up!
Alternatively, those are not what make or break a democracy. People can vote in the primaries to pick who the choice is going to be. But they don’t. Now, if your contention is that we’re will be going from low voter turnout to revolution with no steps in between, then you need to show us what historical precedent you are basing that on. Fact is, our democracy has a pressure relief valve well short of revolution, and that is for people to give a shit about whom the elect and do something about it. Because it’s not that hard to do something about it-- it’s much easier than revolution.
Seems like your biggest complaint is that people don’t vote the way you want them to. In a democracy, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Just a small point of clarification. I used the word “borrowing” as being more accurate and less provocative than “taking”. Yes, stocks are structurally different than bonds, but at the most fundamental level both are just a way for an investor to use money to make more money by making it available to a third party, in both cases in the hope of getting it back along with a healthy premium. The existence of special issues like preferred stock and non-voting stock further blurs the distinction between stocks and bonds. And when I used the term “bonds” I was mainly thinking of corporate bonds, where selective availability to privileged buyers is especially rampant.
So you agree it’s a nuanced question but you want a “yes” or “no” answer anyway?
It’s a lot like asking, “are unions good or bad – yes or no?”. There are some who would point out unions’ historical role in saving workers from the most egregious exploitation, or say that they owe their livelihood and their financial security to a union. Others would, with equal correctness, point to cases where unions have destroyed a company or become so intransigent and out of control that they have nearly decimated an entire industry. So which is it? Good or bad? Yes or no?
Here’s my general overall answer to all the points you made, which are perfectly valid as far as they go. The OP asks about income inequality. Let’s understand first of all that the unfairness of capitalist systems that I pointed out that actually occur in real life are a matter of degree, basically the extent to which corporations and financial systems are regulated, and the extent to which the government mediates between private and public interests in matters such as progressive taxation and the provision of public services.
In a sense we are both right – you’re right that stocks and bonds and the other workings of capitalist economies have an essential utility, and I’m right that these workings also have inherent inequities and are fraught with the perils of corruption and thievery. The important question here is the delta – if you look at different points in time, which way are we heading? Are the systems getting more weighted in favor of the rich, are the rich getting richer and more powerful in a vicious circle of increasing inequality while the poor stagnate or get poorer? I think the answer is yes, and if so, then it seems to me that my point about unfairness and inequality would be the more persuasive argument, because it points to an increasing problem that needs to be addressed.
To my knowledge, no one in this thread, no. But Republicans say it all the time. And it appears to be the disturbing single-minded obsession of this particular Republican-dominated Congress.
I agree. But here’s the real problem. Change is not going to happen by either means as long as a ruling oligarchy controls the heart and minds of the voters. And when they control all the principal means of public persuasion, when they are permitted unlimited access to all of the means and methods of public communication that their money can buy, then hearts and minds inevitably follow.
When voters are persuaded that they live in the best of all possible worlds, where there’s no such thing as “poor” but only “rich” and “soon to be rich”, when pundits on conservative media inform the rabble that people in “socialist” Europe are so poor that they can’t even afford washing machines (I’m not making this up), and that their public health care is literally killing them (I’m not making this up either) then you’re not going to get a large majority to vote for change.
If income inequality is so bad, and people are so oppressed, talk radio isn’t going to convince them otherwise. This isn’t North Korea, and Americans aren’t sheeple. But just as a point of clarification, how many Americans think Europeans are so poor that they can’t afford washing machines? Since you used that as an example, it better be a sizable number, else your argument isn’t very persuasive.
I’m all against high incarceration rates. But I have to ask for a cite. Are high incarceration rates really associated with revolution? I doubt that.
Are you thinking of people in Russia who were exiled to Siberia? If so, I’d point out that exile to a cold region is not really incarceration. Maybe if the US dumped our prison population into Alaska, there would be insurrections, but we aren’t doing that.
As for gerrymandering, again, is that associated with revolution? Where is the evidence for this implausible claim?
This is just one data point, but rotten boroughs (extreme gerrymandering) didn’t cause revolution in England.
Good books have been written on what causes revolution. While opinions differ, high gini does not lead to revolution. I think there is much more chance of revolution in low-gini Pakistan than high-gini South Africa (or United States).
I’m for less income inequality, but fear-itself mongering over revolution is not the way to go.
Estate taxes. Republicans are perpetually trying to cut or repeal them, and that would benefit the mega-rich nearly exclusively.
I asked for a cite for what you claimed.
Regards,
Shodan
The European-poverty thing was just a semi-humorous example of how ridiculous the right-wing rhetoric can get. I doubt that a really sizable number truly believe that kind of extreme bullshit, although as I said, I was not making it up – but there are truly sizable numbers that believe, for instance, that private for-profit insurance is the right way to provide health care coverage, and they believe this not because of any factual evidence, but despite all the evidence to the contrary. You’re taking a very simplistic view of the reality of public opinion if you think of it in terms of North Korean ironclad control of all information or simple “sheeple” who just believe everything they’re told. Public relations and advertising and propaganda are insidious art forms and much more subtle than that.
There’s nothing new here that we haven’t talked about before, but I’ll just remind you of a few things. Maybe very large numbers don’t believe the European-poverty thing, but there are certainly very large numbers that believe that the entire industrialized world is being screwed by a socialist health care system and that America has the best system in the world. Why is that? Certainly not because it’s true. It’s because of the kinds of propagandizing described here. Why are so many Americans so skeptical about the well established facts of climate change? It’s because of the kinds of propagandizing described here. Or how about Fox News, or this giant propaganda machine? Sheeple or not, do you seriously believe that the cumulative effect of all this incessant propagandizing isn’t having a hugely major impact on public opinion?