While you're right that not every dollar earned is not taken from someone else, some dollars earned are taken from someone else. If more corporate money was shared by employees that would reduce income disparity while not limiting income growth overall.

So the call is for something more than just higher taxes then? I don't hear a people being so specific on that, but OK.

Let me put it this way - if taxes were raised tomorrow to levels that most liberal democrats would agree with (so not the super-far left, but the reasonble left), and we still have wealth disparity, do we still have a problem? And how would that be dealt with - passing laws that would require lower salaries for CEOs, and mandatory profit sharing among employess? So let's say we do that, and there's STILL a huge wealth disparity (because most high-income people are not corporate CEOs). Is this still a problem, and how do we take that on?

I see wealth disparity as more of a world trend than a U.S. policy injustice. Countries should encourage the super-rich, and take advantage of them to fund their governments, of course. But we shouldn't aim to eliminate them, IMO (and eliminating them is the only way those wealth disparity issues are "corrected" - unless regular U.S. officer workers are going to start earning six and seven figures somehow.)

It is more than just taxes. Not sure why you keep wanting to make it a single item issue to resolve.

The current income disparity is pretty much a complete repudiation of the theory of "trickle down economics". Just as the detractors said it would do, it overly concentrated the economic growth into the hands of the very few, to the detriment of the many.

I don't think I quite understand the point you're making here - but aren't these lists assuming a static X amount of money? That if you tax one person more, than that money will both go to the government, and but also result in someone else earning more money somehow?

Nobody around here wants to eliminate the rich. I've said a few times that taxes are just one part of the equation. We also need a strong upward force on wages to balance the natural downward force from management. That force has come from unions, but the power of unions has shrunk dramatically over the past few decades. Financial regulations that forced management to look past the next bonus check would help. Public disclosure of compensation packages and shareholder means to lower compensation would help.

Nothing will or should change the dynamics quickly, but reducing the spread over the next decade or two would be a boon to the economy as lower income brackets spend more that upper income brackets.

That's the part I don't understand - if the top 1% is the only group that's creating economic growth, how is that "to the detriment of the many". 1% is succeeding more in an interntional economy. That creates more tax revenue. If we tax them more, even more tax revenue. But how does the mere fact that they've increased their income been so terrible for everyone else (when as someone else put it a few pages ago - the other lower 99% is becoming much less compeitive in an international economy, and the U.S. salaries for those kind of jobs are regressing to the global mean).

I'm not saying anyone wants to eliminate the rich, I'm just trying to get a handle on why people think it's so bad that they're SO rich. Why can't we just be happy someone in America is keeping up and thriving, while the rest of us are largely falling back in the global economy, and take advantage of their success through higher taxes?

That is the point you are missing. The Top 1% isn't the only group creating economic growth. They are the group reaping the disproportionate share of the growth.

I think the concept of "trickle-down economics" is becoming obsolete. We're just one country on a big stage. The rich having money isn't "better" than the poor having more money, I'm not arguing tricke down economics in that sense. The fact is - that's the way it is. The only question is how to take advantage of it, or how to "correct" it if it's some huge problem.

This is my thing. I've never thought that it's a bad thing that some people are ultra rich and have no inclination of wanting what they have earned. I don't deserve it. To me, when I hear wealth distribution, it sounds like taking money from these rich people and giving to people who did not earn that money.

It's like taking one year of high school, dropping out and then demanding a diploma that the students who went the full time got.

They're the only group earning more taxable income. The rest of us are largely replaceable by cheaper Indians (and are, frankly, overpaid on a global level).

Again, you are focusing on only one issue, tax. I stated that 2 policies, of which tax is a part but in no way the only part, could have two different outcomes, with the same overall GDP. Earlier you were making the statement that taking money away from the top 1% is permanently removing it from the taxable base, when that simply isn't the case.

I think this discussion is kind of affirming my point.

I'm conceding that higher taxes on the rich is very likely a reasonable response to the trend of wealth disparity. (not to fix it, but to take advantage of it, and to respond to global trends in a way that benefits the country as a whole). But that's not enough. It's the very fact that these super-rich even exist that is itself still a problem. Which seems crazy to me, when the global earning potential of most of us continues to regress, and there's a bunch at the top that are still kicking ass.

I'm focussing on tax because tax is the its the government's role in this, the "how do we fix it" part. Income, I think, the government controls less, because so much of that is impacted by international factors, and the private portion of our own economy (though, in these times of bailouts and hybrid corpo-government organizations, that might not be true anymore, but that's another discussion.)

I think in the future - regular Indian workers will be worth more, and regular American workers who do the same things will be worth less. I don't know if there's any way to really fight that other than some kind of extreme desperate protectionism. (Aside from of course, trying to make ourselves better, rather than just trying to be more equal).

But as Indian standard of living creeps up, they get more expensive, become worth less, and things even out. They also become a larger market for our goods and services, leading to more jobs here.

Potentially, of course.

Let's reframe this from cartman's question. You need to raise $30M from the following people. How do you get it?

1 person making $100,000,000
2 people making $25,000,000
7 people making $10,000,000
10 people making $1,000,000
40 people making $500,000
240 people making $100,000
500 people making $50,000
200 people making $25,000

There are a lot of ways to do that and there are a lot of ways to say what is fair. There's a reason we have regressive taxes- a 1% hit to someone making $25K is much more detrimental to their standard of living and buying power than a 1% hit to someone making $100M even tho it's $250 vs $1M.

SI

Well I find public executive compensation structures and Wall Street pathetic, what would you consider reaping wealth? Income? If a stockholder, business owner, or an entrepreneur sees the value of their investments grow (and the income as well), wouldn't their wealth and income grow? Why should they be punished for that?

That's true - they won't surpass us, but that gap is going to continue to close. It's going to be harder and harder for us to make what we feel like we're entitled to make. We're just not that valuable anymore.

And that market - ya, that's huge, and its our top 1% that is at the forefront of those emerging markets. (and people who can figure out how to suceed in those emerging market will quickly join that top 1%). And they're competing with the top 1% of Russia and and the top 1% of Europe. (And of course, the other 99% has a huge part in that competition, and in that success too, but by indicators I'm familiar with - our 99% are losing those battles. We cost more and we don't work as hard and we don't educate our children as well).

Isn't this one the concerns that China is having? I do think, depending how fuel costs are in the future, we'll see manufacturing be spread out more around the world, in regional "hubs", to help reduce the associated transportation costs. If paying a worker costs slightly more in Mexico compared to China, but the costs to get the goods to North America are higher, I think it will become a balancing act.

I don't see an economic policy that caused a single investment to grow $9 million in equity instead of $10 million meanwhile as a result of the policy 2,000 people saw their earnings rise $5K as punishing the person that made $9 million.

But it is pointless to say doing X will result in Y, things just aren't that simple. It sure would be nice if that were the case, but the real world is just more complex than that. That is why focusing simply on any one aspect is not doing the discussion any good.

But there's all sorts of jobs that aren't able to be outsourced. Why should we accept that those people should be paid as little as the management can't get away with? For that matter why should we accept that on a global scale?

I keep coming back to Germany because there workers have real say in the operations of the business and they make far more than third world workers and get pay and benefits that exceed comparable U.S. workers. And their economy is better than most right now.

The return of a social Darwinist mindset amongst a lot of our country is really depressing.

I think a better question is "why is that unacceptable". Everything in the marketplace has a value & the truth is, the average American worker has a value far less than what that worker imagines it to be. Most are simply incredibly easy to replace.

You're judging how well off the American middle class is strictly by comparing it with the richest Americans. I think that's a flawed comparison. What about comparing the American middle class to the German middle class? I don't know easily such a comparison could be made, but that would be a lot more telling than trying to claim that our middle class is decimated just because they're people here who make a lot more. (Obviously their health care is a hell of a lot better, but I'm sure we spend more per capita on health care, so that's more of a government effectiveness issue).

Social darwinisim is the bottom line truth. From there, we can and should apply taxation/regulations, ect. But social darwinism is always going to be what's underneath, and it's always going to be the driving force internationally until there's a world government. (Which sounds scary to me, but its what Einstein wanted, so who knows.)

I'm pretty sure we do better working together than just letting everyone do their own thing, tho. It's kindof like saying "well, just take the 5 basketball players and throw them on the court"- I think we do better if we actually have a coach direct them what to do. Then again, one can also have a bad coach that does worse than if they had no coach at all...

So, no, Social Darwinism is not the "bottom line truth". Having everyone work solely in their own best interest is *one* way to do things but certainly not the only way.

SI

And I think that's profoundly immoral. To condemn men to suffer because they have been deemed unworthy of money is shameful.

If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he feeds himself for a lifetime. Unless he's lazy and would rather you fed him every day.

We haven't deemed anyone "unworthy of money". Many have just decided they don't want to work for it and would rather have it handed to them. Our system allows for anyone who wants to work at it to climb into those heights. And for anyone who doesn't want to work at it to fall down from them.

It's amoral. It certainly doesn't stop those who care from becoming involved humanitarian efforts around the world, or even people's day to day decisions about how they relate to people. Economic forces don't have morals. Though I think it's amazing what we've accomplished, with the help of those who take action and helped.

And one could argue that it's a lot more fair than the regular Americans clinging to our entitlements while the rest of the world remains trapped in poverty. Let's not forget that WE are the top 1%, or close to it, globally. Everyone else is trying to get their seat at the table too, and there's going to be corrections and adjustment periods. Should the Indian guy feel bad that the white American christian male can no longer support a 6-person family and a house on one factory income? Americans look at flat middle class incomes as injustice, I think a lot of the rest of the world would consider it well overdue.

Edit: Though, I would definitely find Franken, ect, less douchey if their pitch was - "Regular Germans all have robot butlers and two vacation homes - and regular Americans can too under these policies I'm proposing", instead of "there's people in this country who have way more than you and that's not fair"." There's an underlying American entitlement that's being sold under both pitches, but the first one seems a little more honest and less designed to just irrationally stir up people's emotions in unproductive ways.

It's not an issue of people having more. Over the past three decades or so the gains i the economy have gone almost exclusively to the top 5% and it got that way because of choices made at the corporate and governmental levels. It didn't and doesn't have to be set up that way as many other industrialized countries have had a much more broad distribution of income. Why are you fixated on this being an argument against anyone being rich?

Much of this argument hasn't had anything to do with teaching anybody anything. Look at the posts above. The general argument is that a large portion of Americans and/or humans don't deserve anything more than what those at the top are willing to give them.

I believe that an unbalanced capitalism leads to excesses and right now the balance has tipped way too far towards management. That's why I believe there needs to be a strong upward pressure on wages.

Kind of an amusing side story on the WI thing, but a Republican State Senator's wife is going to sign the recall petition against him. Apparently he has moved in with his 25 year old mistress outside the district.

I seriously have to get out of this country. I know that much.

Because that's the only way you've ever framed the argument. If all one cares about is wealth disparity, it would be a good result if the middle class had less, and the super-rich had a LOT less. I wouldn't find that to be a positive change.

Germany does a lot of things great, there's a lot we could learn from them. But if we dropped 100 billionaires in there tomorrow, or 1,000 millionaires, by your logic, everyone else would be worse off just because there's more rich people around and there'd be greater wealth disparity. I think the billionaires would be a huge benefit - that'd be a ton more tax revenue (especially with German tax rates). Though, to be fair, I guess its possible that the mere presence of billionaires could corrupt a government - that their government could look more like ours - but nobody has made that point.....it's all been about fairness, about some having more than others. But ya, if rich Germans forced a virtual merger with the government like we've done here through bailouts and corporate stimulus packages, I could see that. That would be a much more compelling argument, at least, then just that other people have so much more than others.

If one is concerned about tax rates, about corporate fraud, about government corruption, I get all that. But THOSE are the problems. Other people having money is not. That's just pandering. That's just emotionally exploiting people. And that, and party politics, keeps us distracted from those real issues.

I don't think that's a fair characterization. India and China have been improving their standard of living at our expense. Not only have we (the ones on the top), not "given" that to them, we're actually making a social justice argument that we should keep our world entitlement status. Hell, I bet we can earn back that white, male, middle class 1950s standard of living in the U.S., or get closer to it, if we go back to pushing women and minorities towards the fringes of society. If we want to pretend economics is a moral thing, Americans are not going to come out on the right side of that one (either party - I guess except for those who actually step outside those economic roles and help people directly, as many do.)

Edit: To get to this "top 1%" of income of U.S. households, but the way, a household has to make about $250,000. To reach the top 5%, they'd have to make about $157,000 (which would be a two-teacher income household in a handful of wealthier places in the U.S). That's but that group contains a lot of people outside corporations, outside labor/management situations altogether, a lot of people who wouldn't even know how to "exploit the bottom 99%" if you asked them to. I bet we have a handful of them on this message board. I bet a lot of them would be surprised to learn how they're the symbol of what's wrong with America.

You and me both.

I agree and have always been one who defended wealthier people. Mentioned how they do pay in a lot, how many did work really hard to get to where they where. And that we should be rewarding hard work and innovation in our society if we truly want to advance it.

But there is a bad element that has been hiding behind that defense. I run a small business. If I make bad decisions and lose a lot of money, my business goes under. I lose my livelihood, I don't get to cut a giant check to myself on the way out. But if a guy who owns a lot of shares or sits on the board of Bank of America makes bad decisions and loses a lot of money, our tax dollars make sure that he doesn't fail. Make sure that he does walk out with a nice check.

Now that's not necessarily the social darwinism we should want. We should want the guys who worked hard, learned a valuable skill, made something great to be rich. Not the guys who bought off a few Senators or had the right roommate in college. It's not Darwinism if you're playing in a game where you can't lose.

It's not really a surprise, people that find some modicum of success have been told how evil they are for years. That's one of the reasons there's such a fatigue with the spiel, it's simply gotten old.

It's impossible to have a discussion with you when you revert to your cartoon version of liberals hate rich people. If I were emperor I wouldn't take anything from anyone. I'd like to implement policies that over a decade or two would help broaden the distribution of income growth. That's it. If I were successful billionaires would still be billionaires, millionaires would still be millionaires, but the great percentage of Americans would see their income grow a little bit rather than stay flat.

I agree with this 100%. It goes against the economic strat movement I talked about earlier. They should have let them fail, then let others step in to take their place. Take the pain then, not this long drawn out pain we're dealing with now.

Or even if you prop up the companies, they should have made them fire the executives first, with no golden parachute, cleaned house, and brought in new management. Instead the guys that drove the companies and nearly the entire country to the brink got rewarded. That's a major problem.

Agreed. The government's merger with the banks/corporations makes me mad enough as it is - I couldn't imagine how I'd feel if I was putting it all on the line as a small business and wasn't a part of that tax-payer protected elite class. (and you even left out the perk of criminal immunity for crimes committed on the job).

Exactly. True capitalism would have allowed them to fail. That would keep risk in the system which is what capitalism needs to work. When we bailed them out, we took away that risk.

We were forced to bail out the banks as sticking to principles would have only led to a far greater economic collapse. The problem is, as Greg said, there were no consequences attached to the bailout. Once they got the money for free we were fucked.

OK, so there's one thing everyone here agrees on. Certain wall street criminals were not properly dealt with in the sense that not only were they not prosecuted, they were actually rewarded.

Isn't it telling that this is something everyone on this diverse message board can agree, but yet its something that neither major political party gives a shit about?

I definitely agree with that. But, you don't bite the hand that feeds you. The bailouts without consequences was nothing more than the dog petting his master.

That what happens when all the Senators are millionaires. Congress acts on what rich people think is important.

It's only one report, but, an interesting read.

Huge productivity gains barely benefitting workers - Yahoo! News

Yeah, its another article stating the undesirable end result but not really focusing on the root of the problem.


The 1st sentence alone tells you all you need to know about the real thoughtfulness of the author.

So what is a good job? Manufacturing? What would the alternative economic policy have been over the past 30 years...protectionist policy which basically forces US companies to use US labor and thus, become unable to stay in business when the Indian or Chinese business learned how to make the same products?

I know it isn't the truth that people want to hear...but it is the bottom line. The former 3rd world countries of the world were not going to sit back and accept living in straw huts & slums forever.

It's sort of the counter argument that I hear liberals (not on this board...but in media) slam the right for. The notion that the 50's were such a great time for them while they gloss over the fact that not everybody had it so good such as women & minorities. Well...the same argument can be made for many 3rd world citizens as well...they didn't have the life depicted in Happy Days...they had a life of living in shacks & corrupt dictatorships. And now that their value & worth are coming closer to the average US citizen's we're all of sudden blaming the wealthy in this country. Like it is the top 1%'s responsibility to drag the 1950's unionized, manufacturing worker into the global economy and make sure their standard of living is still better than somebody in India who is hungry, can live on less money, and has a desire to improve his/her lifestyle.

The increase in efficiency is the the result of technology breakthroughs and companies purchasing products which make their business run better. It is not the goal of the company to figure out ways to save money so that they can pass it along to everybody that works there. Not in this day of global competition. 50 years ago, we had "calculators"...no, not Texas Instruments calculators...but actual people who computed numbers. We replaced these people with machines that could do it quicker/better/cheaper. Nobody pontificated whether the human calculators would have their standard of living decrease...it was their responsibility to go find a new line of work.

This is how society moves forward. The difference now is that the society is in competition with other countries & wont accept that some ground has to be given in an unskilled person's quality of life in the US and an unskilled person living in another country. I would submit (similar to Jon's example of secretaries with Bachelors or Master's degrees) that we should stop trying to enforce this idealism that everybody should be a doctor, lawyer, etc. and just simply allow people to have a lower cost of living with less complications if that is what they prefer to work towards. And by work towards...I mean that they are ok with not working as hard (or as many hours) in exchange for a salary more on par with global norms. The problem with this...is that nobody wants to accept that we have citizens that are content with the global norms (or that they should not be subject to such harsh conditions...but certainly its acceptable for the rest of the world).

It is absolutely the elephant in the room. The problem is that both political parties are to blame so its off limits.

Its proof enough that we're an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy (or a democratic republic).

Plutocracy.