Goodspeed wrote:Not in your opinion, though?Dolan wrote:I'm not particularly interested in fiscal policies. The subject kinda becomes necessary to discuss, though, when issues such as "economic inequality and ways to fix that" come up.
Exactly. Most of the time when I am in the position of discussing such topics it's not because I think they are consequential to the issue at hand, but because people believe them to be so. And so, it becomes necessary to touch on those subjects simply because one needs to dispel some misconceptions first, to clear the way for a proper discussion.
It's also the reason why I'm often in the position of explaining the reasons behind why "things are the way they are" in the current establishment, even though this makes me appear like I'm defending the establishment or I'm supporting it, which I'm not. It's because people are so uninformed, unfortunately, and they do not understand how things work. And I don't say this with any degree of arrogance or conceitedness -- there are good reasons why they don't understand: they are too busy with their own lives and jobs and don't really have the time or the interest to follow everything that happens in politics or finance. Or they do follow to some extent, but they just lack the practical experience, so they come at it from very philosophical and idealistic angles. Some of them even fall for the cheapest conspiracy stories, as we've seen during the Trump-Clinton electoral clash.
I'm not talking about increasing taxes. There are many other ways to reduce inequality FYI.
Such as?
Among other things: Social security, health care reform, higher standards in public education, higher minimum wage.
The world has made huge progress on all those fronts, during the last decades or even last two centuries. For example, a few indicators:
Minimum wages have also been going higher and higher, though that's a less relevant indicator, it should be collated with purchasing power stats. Purchasing power has also been going up, with the exception of the lowest level of income since the 2008 crisis. But that's another story, because nobody really knows how to fix the current state of economies around the globe. There's a paradigm vacuum that officials don't want or like to admit. In many ways the world economy is in unchartered territory, with authorities still trying to make it work like in the pre-2008 era and scratching their heads when it doesn't work anymore according to the prevailing textbooks.
But anyway, the point I was trying to make here is that there's way too much negativity around the subject and we often forget the huge progress the world has made during the last two centuries. We forget where we came from, a place where poverty was way way more widespread, where infant mortality was very high and most people were living on under $1.70 per day (in purchasing power equivalent).
A lot of things exist in practice. That doesn't mean introducing it everywhere is realistic. And it's not.That idea already exists in practice, as I've mentioned before, it's called profit-sharing schemes. I was just proposing to extend it to every kind of business and standardise it as a way to improve workers' participation in the economy (not just to "reduce inequalities", which is a rather vague and fanciful objective).
Simply saying it's unrealistic doesn't make it so.
It works fine, just not in the USA (among other places). For many reasons, one of which is that SCOTUS set a disastrous precedent in the citizens united case. Sure, it's hard to stop people from using money to support their favourite candidate, but there are plenty of ways to discourage it, including and not limited to explicitly forbidding it.
So yeah, the US tried it, SCOTUS fucked up, and their decision should be rectified by the legislature. In most other developed economies it works just fine.
Does it really work fine though? For example, the Netherlands is known for its very permissive legislation which allows corporations to declare their registered offices there and move their profits to foreign subsidiaries which are most of the time fiscal paradises. This enables lots of corporations to get away with lots of shady operations that work on a global level. One such recent case was the Bayrock BV corporation registered in the Netherlands which apparently operated as a joint venture by Trump and some Kazakh/Russian associates. The story was reported by the left-wing investigative arm of a Dutch TV station (Zembla, part of Omroepvereniging VARA).
When I think of lower classes I think of people living in poverty or barely making do while working 3 jobs. A common sight in the US. Factories in China put there by big Western corporations to reduce production costs also come to mind.
And yet, overall the world has made great progress in eradicating poverty:
This was New York sometime at the start of the 20th century:
Dunbar, Louisiana, March 1911:
Child labour in a USA cannery in Dunbar, Louisiana (1911):
In 1910, the USA was one of the biggest world economic powers, by 1920 it was the supreme economic power, after displacing the UK at the top spot.
And yet, pictures from its most developed cities show a level of development and public services that was comparable to Soviet-era run-down backwaters.
Fast-forward one century later, primary education is compulsory for everyone, public goods have improved massively, basic public health indicators are probably at their highest level ever, etc.
But since people have not experienced those times, they tend to project their unhappiness on differences in relative wealth, because people are naturally competitive animals and can't stand if someone is doing better than they are. Or, for those of leftwing leanings, they can't stand that there's always some segment of the population that is always doing worse compared to other segments. Which is how things have been ever since the dawn of this species, as far as we can tell.