Wealth Inequality in America

+100 for corporations -1 for consumers According to the book "Diet for a Small Planet" the beef industry gets $50 billion a year of free water from the federal government. Doesn't sound like fair market capitalism to me. It does sound like our elected officials can be easily bribed. The super rich have won. Hopefully not too far of topic, but a friend just sent me this video link about income inequality - an eye opener! [VIDEO]

I think the original source is on a youtube channel: [VIDEO] . The video aggregates data from multiple sources: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] How reliable these sources are, I'm not sure. If the information is wrong, I wouldn't blame it on Upworthy, it's a distribution channel after all.

For what it's worth, I agree, I think capitalism + some rule tweaks is fine. The culprit is really the beauty of capitalism: accelerating returns on investment. If you get to the head of the race you tend to start to accrue more and more wealth. The problem is that it's sucking the pond dry as there is a relatively stable money supply and much of it is circulating in the stratosphere (often as corporate stock buybacks). Hence the need for rule tweaks to enhance recirculation. This is a cool video I saw a while back that shows the current issue: [VIDEO] I also agree that movement between countries is a modern problem that probably invalidates the old solution (unless multiple countries coordinate - unlikely). So, we have a problem that wealth will continue to concentrate absent controls on the distribution. The US has a lot of political problems right now, and the major commonality is that people at the bottom get the shaft every time. I think it's too much to try to solve every problem facing civilization in one conversation though, so I'll stick to distributions. ;) For what it's worth, believe me, I'm not a hippie. I want to start a company and get rich one day like all of you. I just think it's important to pay attention to the steady state of the system we are participating in.

> I think sometimes a picture really does say 1,000 words. This short info-graphic video makes is pretty clear how dramatically top heavy wealth distribution in the U.S. is: [VIDEO] It also does a nice job of comparing the "ideal", to the "perception" to the actual.

This is the primary problem with the discourse. People can agree pretty universally a tyrant, dictator, or emperor is a bad thing. You do not want heredity to determine power, and you do not want one individual to have violent dominance over anyone else, because you will often be the "anyone else" if you are not the aggressor. But that is about the only difference between how the modern gears of power operate versus how they did millennia ago. Rather than just kill your brothers and claim the throne and execute the dissidents and having your firstborn son inherit the crown from you, your children inherit ludicrous wealth that translates into the same power to buy the violent arm of the state for your own ends. Except now the peasantry cannot just storm the castle, behead the king, and replace him with another. There are kings from across the globe that control your society through its economy, and the present incumbents of radically concentrated power will argue everyone is king when they own wealth in the global capitalistic system. That, in practice, is pure deception[1], but you will have people by thousands at the bottom congregating to defend those off the chart, despite the ones at the top constantly using their power to harm all those below them. If we did have what the rich claim we do - democratized distributed power - we would need dramatically less wealth inequality, because that wealth, and the distribution of it, represents who has authority in the global capital

While taking neuroscience it occurred to me that one could make an argument - depending on what one wants to show, the usefulness of a model is always limited by the intended use - to see a similarity between neurons and humans: The system outcome is not the sum of what each neuron "knows", and each neuron is really "ignorant" and "stupid". For example, why are people bothered that there are people who are into conspiracy theories? Or some who see dangers everywhere, while for others everything (everyone) is good? Maybe that's their role in the "humanity computer"! Some neurons' (humans') task is to be extra-paranoid so that the majority don't have to. and others are the opposite, nothing bothers them. What seems "crazy" is, when looked at from a higher plane, quite possibly a very reasonable organisation. Maybe "humanity" does not - should not - make sense on an individual level (i.e. ever single human be "sensible", "reasonable"), but on the level of "humanity". Why this obsession that everybody has to agree, and people who don't are vilified? If all neurons in the brain were to agree you'd have a very dysfunctional brain. What it needs are complex connections and (feedback) loops that enhance and suppress output depending on the overall input. "Overall" is important - not "what an individual (human or neuron) sees", but the sum of all inputs into the system. It does not have to make sense on an individual level. I like how Sherlock Holmes says it (short, 30 seconds): [LINK

Well if as a country you seriously suck at wealth equality and defending basic human and worker rights that 25% seems pretty low. Stupidity after all loves hard work. Of all this is just old news for researchers [VIDEO]

We could also just raise taxes on the top 1% of people in the country and do neat things like provide universal healthcare and provide public university programs for free to those who can get accepted. It's a bit skewed at the moment if you weren't aware: [VIDEO]

this video tells what the average american thinks of the wealth distribution, vs reality (vs ideal): [VIDEO] it's very enlightening.

Yeap. And for average people, that leaves a hollowed-out middle-class and not-yet-automated/underpaid tasks like caregiving, teaching, nursing, police, retail sales, retail foodservice, Amazon warehouse stocking, TaskRabbit and Uber driving. People are rightly freaking-out because their existences are threatened while simultaneously others are discussing who's going to be the first trillionaire (much more of the wealth created is only going to the very rich). It seems rational to argue that incel and domestic terrorists, rising homelessness and opioid epidemics are indirectly influenced by the socioeconomic fall-out of rust-belt decay. Infographic video of how bad it really is: [VIDEO]

Outrage is clickbait gold. So, that is production in for-profit blogging or pseudo-journalism, and also in the business of social media. That said, Bill Gates is both a public figure and a billionaire, so is fair-game for a lot of criticism. He does set a good example, in general, with immense contributions to global public health and policy. Also, there's no U-haul's behind Hearses, so I would buy 50 Singer Porsches and a 747-400ER and crash them into each other with a trebuchet. If someone has more money than they could ever spend, invest or give-away in a scalable manner, then why the hell not buy an aircraft-carrier or a hydrogen yacht? Furthermore, balance sheet inequality is beyond severe in many countries yet there are people in various economic strata who seem to blissfully revel in denying the real pain of others; "Upton Sinclair effect" (paraphrasing: It's difficult to get someone to accept facts when they benefit from pretending they doesn't exist.). For more details and because it's not worth getting into politics online, I suggest Robert Reich's channel [0] and his brilliant documentary Inequality for All [1] and the Infographics video on the disconnect between perceived distribution, desired distribution and actual distribution [2]. 0: [LINK] 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]

> Sure. You missed my point that they're not counted meaningfully. U-3 is what is typically reported, so the others are irrelevant. The "health" of the economy is a nebulous, academic abstraction when there are 100 homeless people camping under freeway underpasses outside my window, no federal livable minimum wage, workers gradually being paid less and less over decades while expected to work more and more, swelling ranks of billionaires cashing in on socialism they bought, and the burgeoning ranks of un- and underemployed who go neglected (maybe that explains part of Trump's base?) and undercounted. The MSM loves to parrot how "great" the economy always is because that's what advertisers want to hear, but it's tone-deaf when there was (and may still well be) more real unemployment than during the height of the Great Depression. Wealth equality and employment are all most people care about. No one cares about the "health" of the rich people's casino "economy." Wealth Inequality in America [VIDEO]

This canard is worn and untrue. They bought the best, complicated tax system that benefits them to reap even more. [LINK] Reality: "Wealth Inequality in America" [VIDEO]

Yep. Nearly everyone but equity owners is either hurting or not going anywhere while delivering more for the same or less. Graph after graph Robert Reich has put out there shows the dismalness of the situation. Another infographic video about the distribution of wealth in reality vs. perceived reality vs. desired: [VIDEO] Somehow there is also a systematic economic double-standard that works for some but not others: "free markets" of dog-eat-dog inputs (i.e., suppliers), but less free markets on outputs (i.e., monopolies, mega corporations, patents, proprietary-ness, closed-source). Unregulated greed fixes all problems by the "invisible hand", right?

> The real meaningful wealth gap in our society is between the HN poster income bracket and the poor, not the one between HN poster income bracket and the billionaires. This is billionaire propaganda[1] to get the middle class to fight thier class war - it is a class war against the poor and middle class . The tax rate of the ultra-rich are at an all time low 1. [VIDEO] shows the gap between people (like you) think the wealth distribution is vs the reality. It was made 10 years ago and has gotten further skewed since then. Start from to 2:40 if you're in a hurry.

> This is billionaire propaganda[1] to get the middle class to fight thier class war In my opinion, anything that tries to simplify the interests of billions of actors is a form of populist propaganda. It allows bad actors to prove that they're on the "people's side" just because they virtue signal against the "evil side" in order to advance their own interests: for example, crypto-scammers complaining about banks or Hitler complaining about rich Jewish bankers. > The tax rate of the ultra-rich are at an all time low Right. The problem is that the taxing the ultra-rich is difficult to do because they have the resources to avoid these taxes, and they don't actually raise that much money. So what happens is that the left always ends up raising taxes on the professional class like California. I personally wouldn't have an issue with this, if were better spent, like in the Nordic countries, but they clearly aren't in the US. > [VIDEO] This video just shows that most Americans are bad at math. Even if literally everyone made the exact same amount of income, the wealth distribution would look closest to the last one because older people would have more time to accumulate more wealth.

The video "Wealth Inequality in America" < [VIDEO] > at timestamp 0:35 shows a definition most respondents to the question agree on.

> These programs are about control, and wealth redistribution lets stop pretending otherwise Shrug , if it's all BS but it does something to the mind-bogglingly skewed wealth distribution[1] we can still chalk it up as a win. [1] [VIDEO]

They should keep patting themselves on the back for crumbs of improvement. And yet America is one of most unequal societies, far exceeding the inequality of the Gilded Age. Infographics: Wealth Inequality in America (2012) [VIDEO] (2023) 10 year update to Inequality for All (2013) - Robert Reich [LINK]

It's not a slight drift, it's a massive change since the 1950's. Looking at averages is completely irrelevant when talking about inequality. Here's a video from 12 years ago: Wealth Inequality in America [VIDEO]