Income Inequality in America

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Anyone else been noticing it?

There is income inequality world wide. Notice it?

ruveyn

There is inequality in ability and willingness to work; notice it?

And the people are allowing it to happen. Not sure when the pendulum will swing back the other way.

Dont know how it is in your country, but the problem in my country is that an increasing amount of working people, have less and less income. From my personal oppinion social offices should be about helping people, that cannot work on their own due to different reasons (illness, ...) But more and more its about helping people that are working fine, but dont get payed sufficient.

So from my oppinion I am asking myself, how it can be, that from my taxes I earn with working, I have to pay other people that are also working, so that they are able to work for another person, that is not willing to share his profit for me, while I pay his worker. I have no problem with company owners not willing to share their profit, but then they cannot demand that I pay a part of their production costs.

Well, the good news is that global income inequality is going down. It is income within nations that is getting more unequal. Virtually every nation outside horrendously unequal Latin America has seen this.

Technology, particularly IT, is probably driving inequality in most societies. The Internet and various ancillary technologies, like Skype, are allowing already productive individuals to sell their services literally anywhere on the globe. They are no longer limited to regional or even national markets.

There are definitely some fixes that may or may not reduce income inequality in America, but will certainly blunt any social impacts it may have. I personally feel we need a major rethink of our primary and secondary education systems, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 19th century. Alas, the income equality that existed just after World War II will probably never return, and that may not be a bad thing.

Technology is making good things available to more people at lower cost than any other single factor

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 11 Mar 2013, 11:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

Those who can not or will not adapt to a technology-based society will fall behind those of us who do and will make such an adaptation.

How many more people do we need with Art, English, or History degrees?

We need more engineers. mathematicians. scientists, and technicians; and fewer dreamers, poets, and liberal-arts majors.

Of course its noticed. The system is very much rigged to help rich people get richer and to make poor and middle income people stagnant at best, but really they're getting poorer and poorer.

And its not about talent or effort or willingness to work hard. That's a red herring cited by people who actually support this high level of economic stratification that we see today - by those who benefit from it (the rich) and those who aren't rich but have been brainwashed by the rich people into thinking the situation is somehow good for themselves. There are plenty of well-educated, very hard working people who will never make it out of the middle class because the barriers to enter into the upper class are such that its more about luck than it is about talent or effort.

Rich people make gobs and gobs of money with very minimal effort - its just wise investing coupled with tax policies (generally set up by, guess who? The rich!) that are so heavily skewed in their favor. It takes money to make money, but once you have money, its not difficult to make more and more. They do this while advocating socio-economic policies that repress everyone else. Why let a single mom or a young struggling couple have an abortion when instead you can saddle them with a kid to support, destroying their education and their career before they even start? Why make access to education and thus a good career affordable for everyone, when you can erect financial barriers of entry to people who don't already have a lot of money - thereby keeping them from ever making a lot of money? Why regulate corporations so that they have to play fair when you can just let them pray on the average consumer with anti-competitive practices, when the average consumer doesn't have a lot of money to start with? Why not repress people economically by loaning them more money than you know full well they can ever hope to pay back? Why not make bankruptcy laws more and more draconian so that once you've defeated someone with all of these methods, you can prevent them from ever recovering? Why not give tax breaks to the wealthy, who don't need them, in the name of creating jobs, then let them keep the money they saved in taxes whether or not they actually ever do anything with it that creates new jobs? Why not take huge risks as a wealthy company, knowing full well that if the risks pay off, you'll be hoarding the proceeds for yourself, but if the risks fail, you'll be the recipient of a massive handout from all the tax payers who never stood a chance to benefit from your schemes?

I think the kind of degree (assuming we are talking about a bachelor degree) is less of a factor with income inequality than degree attainment. A history major may work the first few years waiting tables and such, but over a lifetime, that major will likely make more than someone with an associates degree, or none at all. College Board did a wonderful study in 2011 that shows a strong positive correlation between educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Those without any college saw much higher unemployment rates than those with. The numbers were even more dire for the 1/6th of Americans who do not have a high school degree.

These people at the bottom of the educational ladder are not dumb. Rather, they are left to rot in bad schools in bad neighborhoods or towns that already have few economic connections to the rest of the U.S. These inequality conditions have been around for decades, and yet they are getting worse because of the nature of the world we now live in.

I do not oppose the "rich" getting richer. I do not believe in redistribution, and frankly, I think income inequality is a natural economic state. That doesn't mean we cannot or should not give everyone a fair shot. Higher education has massive problems, but I'm pretty confident MOOCs and the like will reform it. Reforming education takes political will, both from the left and right. I personally favor privatizing all schools and letting states give generous vouchers to students to spend on any school they please. That would end the tyranny of school quality based on ZIP code alone, and would probably solve other social problems. And while it may not decrease inequality, education is the best way to spread around gains. Even a high school degree is enough for some workers. But no one can adapt to the new society alone. I got a lot of help along the way, and everyone should get that advantage.

Yes. But some of us do a better job of mitigating it than others.

And why is that a good thing? Because higher levels of income inequality are demonstrably correlated with higher levels of violent crime, higher levels of mortality and diminished marginal utility of wealth. Interestingly, some of the studies demonstrate that in industrialized countries it is not absolute income per capita that is most strongly linked to health outcomes, but rather low levels of inequality. Being more proserous probably won't result in your community being healthier, but being fairer might.

Against this are disincentives to production, limitations on growth and inefficiencies in mechanisms for mitigation of income inequality.

Between these, then, there is a balance to be found. How much productivity are we willing to spend in order to have a healthier, more peaceful society?

There is no right answer to that question, each country and community must arrive at the answer themselves. However, that question must be answered in a fashion that is not controlled by vested interests. What leads me to believe that the United States has the answer wrong is that the United States is making its political discourse one-sided. When unions could effectively oppose capital interests, government was free to find a middle ground. Now that organized labour is being demonized, there is no force to stand in opposition to capital. As a result, income inequality skyrockets, and communities fall victim to violent crime and diminished health indicators. But equally, to far in the other direction, and you have a European example, where strong redistribution of wealth has led to economic stagnation.

Find the middle ground--that way true prosperity lies.

There is inequality in what some are expected to do and what others receive for them doing it.

there is a deficit in available jobs and people looking for jobs, notice it?

Income inequality IS a problem.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ7LzE3u7Bw[/youtube]

This is a really good analysis. I agree.

Last edited by daydreamer84 on 11 Mar 2013, 6:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There is an abundance of jobs, and an abundance of people who do not qualify for those jobs. I have noticed this especially when those jobs requiring applied science or engineering degrees go unfilled for months until someone from outside America applies on a worker's visa.

It's a sad state of affairs when a company has to seek qualified engineers from outside the country simply because there aren't enough qualified engineers within the country to fill the jobs.