[quote=SD Realtor]im wondering if we could all agree that it would be best for society if the wealth were generally spread around. I don’t mean that it should be taken from you personally but…just setting up our ideal society, from scratch, can we all agree it would be best if it tends to have wealth distributed about, and not concentrated intensely at the very top, and not with very few people in the middle, and lots and lot of very broke people?
Except that your idea of all being equal is incredibly hypocritical. Like CAR you define the ideal society within the context of your cushy lives in the USA. You don’t really want everyone to be equal because if you wanted to include everyone you would include all of the impoverished humans in the world. This means your standard would go down in a very drastic manner.
So really your utopia is build on a hypocritical foundation. If you took the however many billions of people on the planet and applied your principals then you would not live in a beautiful climate where you live… if you were lucky you may have an outhouse or a ditch to crap in. You may or may not have electricity. Your children would most likely be working a hell of alot harder then they do now.
I think that the equality statement that is bantered about is the biggest load of BS I see on this entire site.
Say it like it is… I love the idea of equality as long as I get my home in southern california, enjoy a pension, and get to enjoy freedoms and benefits that billions and billions will never ever see.
If the REAL EQUALITY you guys speak of were to be implemented over the entire planet, you would be quite sorry.
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Scaredy I will say that yes, it is sad that the middle class is withering away and that our politicians have no will at all to reverse that trend. The disparity has only increased regardless of who is in power. I don’t have any answers, I wish I did… however history always has shown that having the govt make the decisions about who gets what always ends poorly because those in or aligned with govt always took advantage of the situation creating the very class based society that was supposed to be avoided.[/quote]
SDR,
You are 100% correct about the random luck that enables us to enjoy the lifestyle most Piggs enjoy. I think that’s one of the main reasons many of us believe that those who are most fortunate (pure luck, in most cases, though few are willing to admit it) owe something to others who are not as fortunate. It is precisely why we believe in “sharing the wealth.”
I don’t think anyone is advocating for totally equal wages/benefits for every single person on the planet, but can we agree that the incredible disparity seen today is more likely to cause serious problems than not?
One of the aspects that has distinguished the U.S. from undeveloped, poverty-stricken countries has been our relatively large middle class. The middle class existed largely because of concessions made to labor over many years. As a rule, we tried to prevent massive concentrations of wealth and the rule by a few over the many.
If you look at some of the poorest nations on earth, you will see that they tend to have the greatest wealth/income disparities. The most civilized/developed nations that offer the greatest opportunities to their citizens tend to have a more balanced wealth/income distribution.
More (there is so much excellent information at the following link, and I strongly encourage everyone who has an interest in economics and/or social sciences to check it out):
Here are some dramatic facts that sum up how the wealth distribution became even more concentrated between 1983 and 2004, in good part due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and the defeat of labor unions: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%. A whopping 94% went to the top 20%, which of course means that the bottom 80% received only 6% of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s (Wolff, 2007).
The rest of the world
Thanks to a 2006 study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research — using statistics for the year 2000 — we now have information on the wealth distribution for the world as a whole, which can be compared to the United States and other well-off countries. The authors of the report admit that the quality of the information available on many countries is very spotty and probably off by several percentage points, but they compensate for this problem with very sophisticated statistical methods and the use of different sets of data. With those caveats in mind, we can still safely say that the top 10% of the world’s adults control about 85% of global household wealth — defined very broadly as all assets (not just financial assets), minus debts. That compares with a figure of 69.8% for the top 10% for the United States. The only industrialized democracy with a higher concentration of wealth in the top 10% than the United States is Switzerland at 71.3%. For the figures for several other Northern European countries and Canada, all of which are based on high-quality data, see Table 4.
Table 4: Percentage of wealth held in 2000 by the Top 10% of the adult population in various Western countries
wealth owned
by top 10%
Switzerland 71.3%
United States 69.8%
Denmark 65.0%
France 61.0%
Sweden 58.6%
UK 56.0%
Canada 53.0%
Norway 50.5%
Germany 44.4%
Finland 42.3%
…………..
Income inequality in other countries
The degree of income inequality in the United States can be compared to that in other countries on the basis of the Gini coefficient, a mathematical ratio that allows economists to put all countries on a scale with values that range (hypothetically) from zero (everyone in the country has the same income) to 100 (one person in the country has all the income). On this widely used measure, the United States ends up 95th out of the 134 countries that have been studied — that is, only 39 of the 134 countries have worse income inequality. The U.S. has a Gini index of 45.0; Sweden is the lowest with 23.0, and South Africa is near the top with 65.0.
The table that follows displays the scores for 22 major countries, along with their ranking in the longer list of 134 countries that were studied (most of the other countries are very small and/or very poor). In examining this table, remember that it does not measure the same thing as Table 4 earlier in this document, which was about the wealth distribution. Here we are looking at the income distribution, so the two tables won’t match up as far as rankings. That’s because a country can have a highly concentrated wealth distribution and still have a more equal distribution of income due to high taxes on top income earners and/or high minimum wages — both Switzerland and Sweden follow this pattern. So one thing that’s distinctive about the U.S. compared to other industrialized democracies is that both its wealth and income distributions are highly concentrated.
Table 7: Income equality in selected countries
Country/Overall Rank Gini Coefficient
1. Sweden 23.0
2. Norway 25.0
8. Austria 26.0
10. Germany 27.0
17. Denmark 29.0
25. Australia 30.5
34. Italy 32.0
35. Canada 32.1
37. France 32.7
42. Switzerland 33.7
43. United Kingdom 34.0
45. Egypt 34.4
56. India 36.8
61. Japan 38.1
68. Israel 39.2
81. China 41.5
82. Russia 42.3
90. Iran 44.5
93. United States 45.0
107. Mexico 48.2
125. Brazil 56.7
133. South Africa 65.0
Note: These figures reflect family/household income, not individual income.
Source: Central Intelligence Agency (2010).
The differences in income inequality between countries also can be illustrated by looking at the share of income earned by the now-familiar Top 1% versus the Bottom 99%. One of the most striking contrasts is between Sweden and the United States from 1950 to 2009, as seen in Figure 8; and note that the differences between the two countries narrowed in the 1950s and 1960s, but after that went their separate ways, in rather dramatic fashion.
