Wealth Distribution in the USA

Well, yes; those rich people should be giving some back. But they aren't.So now what?

That is not a reply to anything I actually wrote. Nor is that.

We see the statistics in the first post. We read many pro and con articles about political ideology. This is a recent one: Billionaires Now Own American PoliticsAs a Christian, I believe that human nature will never become truly altruistic without a changed inner nature. I also see the trend in America of more and more people becoming poorer rather than wealthier. Becoming wealthy is an exception rather than a rule.I also see many smart people...such as my Niece, having Masters degrees and making what I make.What solutions do we have except imploring the rich to be more generous?

Fire politicians that oppose increasing taxes in a progressive manor.Fire politicians that oppose revising the inheritance taxes to avoid the creation of a wealthied class.Fire politicians that oppose limiting corporate activities in elections, legislation or tax expenditures.Fire politicians that oppose banning corporate advocacy.These of course are all longstanding Republican positions.I thought a few comments from Republicans might help.

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"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

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"Now, this means that our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice -full, fair, and complete -and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, and I most dislike and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."

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"There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done."

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"We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and specially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs."

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Theodore Roosevelt

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I respect your opinion...it is supported by a quotation from a statesman of the past. Unfortunately, todays political climate has very few if any people as wise as Teddy.Now we contend with this:

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An analysis by the liberal think tank Demos found that out of every $10 raised by super PACs in 2012, $9 came from just 3,318 people giving $10,000 or more. That small club of donors is equivalent to 0.0011% of the U.S. population.

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To me, if a spiritual war actually exists in the world today...(and yes, I believe it does) then it is between people who love and have money and those who love people...be they wealthy or poor.The love of money is indeed the root of all evil. Money itself is simply a tool. The love of power is synonymous with the love of money.

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Today, politics is a rich man's game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season's biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to help Republican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cyclenearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that's only the money we know about.

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How on earth can a willfully ignorant populace with barely enough money to take a few days off once in awhile or afford higher education even begin to compete with a casino mogul who throws money at politics as if it is a high stakes poker game?

If they are willfully ignorant then they will get the society they make.Learn or suffer.It really is that simple.Spiritual wars are simply silly and a total waste of everyone's time.

Well there is Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.I did point out in my post that I don't have any answers but a few suggestions would be to simplify our income tax forms so that the average schmuck can fill them out partly so the top 1% can't find a ton of loopholes and to increase the exemption for charitable donations.Simplify the process for starting small businesses.There should be ways of encouraging businesses large and small, possibly through tax incentives, of being more involved in the communities in which they operate.The problem still remains though that what people really need is a job giving them a sense of self-worth. Welfare can be a trap that is extremely difficult to break free from.I wish there were better solutions however I do agree that the salaries paid to many of the CEO's, top executives, boards etc of corporations is obscene. In many cases they are simply old boys networks. The idea that they should be paid huge bonuses while they lay people off is something that certainly bothers me.When it comes to functioning in this world we aren't all created equal. I grew up in a home where I was loved, valued and encouraged. Not everyone has that and sometimes I marvel at the resilliency of the human spirit that some people who grow up in abusive situations are able to function as well as they do.As I said though there aren't any easy answers, (for that matter I'm not sure there are any answers at all), but those are a few thoughts off the top of my head.

One of the things that we hear from conservatives is that higher taxes on millionaires will take away their incentive for working, and so they'd stop working, thus stopping them from showering on us the incalculable benefits that they currently do.Of course, some of them don't work, and some of those who do don't do any good for society, but let's think about those who do benefit society. By the conservative account they must be an odd bunch of people.Suppose I were to say: "I will do no work unless I get ten million dollars a year after tax. Nine is not enough, and if you offered me that I'd decline to work."You would then think I was:* Lazy. When millions of Americans are willing to work for minimum wage, apparently I won't get out of bed for less than ten million a year.* Greedy. For the same reason.* Incredibly stupid. Because nine million dollars is better than nothing.So according to conservative ideology, it would seem that the rich are lazy, greedy, and stupid. And yet these lazy greedy stupid people are absolutely essential to our economy, so much so that if you raised their taxes and they stopped doing whatever it is they do, they could not be replaced by people who are less lazy, greedy, and stupid, and who would be willing to do the same job for a mere nine million dollars a year.The curious thing about this rule is that it's scalable. After all, some millionaires do work for a measly nine million dollars a year after tax. But they would stop working if they only got $8,100,000 after tax. And the guy who works for a mere million net dollars a year? He'd stop working if he only got $900,000. It seems that what influences their decision to either earn huge amounts of money or to earn nothing is not the net dollar amount that they would earn by working, but the proportion of their gross income that will go to things such as education, federal highways, or national defense.Like I say, they're a funny bunch. I could hardly imagine that they exist, but fortunately conservatives, who have more imagination, can. It's good that we have conservative ideologues around to imagine these things for the rest of us.Meanwhile, conservatives are outraged that the poorest Americans, the notorious 47%, pay no federal income tax. You'd think they'd applaud this as giving people incentives to work. But no, apparently this applies only to millionaires. Poor people are best motivated by poverty.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But the trouble is that you can't do both. You can't at once simplify the tax forms, and introduce an extra section in them that gives tax breaks for community involvement.I remember in the last election, or possibly the one before that, someone asked Obama if he could pledge to make taxation fairer and simpler. I forget what he answered, but I thought: "No. Because every time someone makes taxation more complicated, they're doing it in an attempt to make it fairer (at least as they see it)."In any case, how complicated are tax forms? I've filled 'em out, they don't take that long. They're a few pages, but most of what I have to do is tick the boxes that say "this doesn't apply to me, I am not a self-employed farmer", and "this doesn't apply to me, I am not a disabled veteran" ... and so on, I can't actually remember what the boxes are. Once a year one has to look through a few pages, tick a few boxes, fill in a few figures, and sign one's name a few times. And yet every time there's a discussion of tax reform, there's always someone who'll imply that it would be a significant boon to the life of the nation if, once a year, we each had to cope with ten minutes of bureaucratic tedium rather than fifteen.

I know what you mean. I guess I'm suggesting a major revamp. My wife is dual so I have to fill our both US and Cdn. tax forms fro her. I do fing the Cdn. forms simpler but they are reasonably complex partly because I'm retired and have investment income.It seems to me that if we simply recorded earned income plus investment income, inherited income over a million, eliminate capital gains and then tax that on a progressive scale allowing for deductions for charity and health costs and let it go at that, it would be simpler.After that I would have one welfare program based on minimum income. People would receive assistance to bring them to a designated minimum level and then reduce it gradually until it becomes zero at another designated level.All things being equal I prefer the Cdn health care service but I disagree with our almost exclusive public ownership of health care facilities. I am in favour of a universal health care insurance plan that covers necessary health care that allows for people to buy additional insurance for things like elective surgeries, private rooms etc.I don't have sufficient knowledge of business taxes to even comment but I have to believe that the bureaucracy could be made less bureaucratic and more supportive of small business and maybe give them a tax free year on start up. I don't know your circumstances but I think they are simple if you only have employment income. It gets progressively more complicated after that.I do know that any time I have called the IRS requesting information on my wife's taxes as a non-resident. I have never received a direct answer to any specific question. If the people who are hired to answer these questions can't answer them then there has to be a problem somewhere.AbE I thought after posting this that I should add that I realize my proposal is extremely simplistic and I realize that it isn't all that simple. My thinking is that would be the basic structure with which to base a whole new tax code.Edited by GDR, : No reason given.

Why?What about a hobby that gives them a sense of self-worth?If there is enough wealthand there is, then what is wrong with letting the people who want to get paid for 'working' get paid for 'working' and the people who want to get paid for 'hobbies' get paid for 'hobbies'?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

That would depend on what these hobbies actually achieve. If they're really worthwhile, then those people aren't so much having their lifestyles subsidized as being employees of the federal government. If they aren't, why pay them for it?

Yes, obviously. There are some taxes that the poor pay. Many successful people claim to have done exactly this. So we should enact policies that minimise the number of paupers by ensuring a certain distribution of wealth. But they only get rich and richer by taking more money than they spread. Indeed, as the economy grows, the richest seem to be the only ones who benefit from this growth - even though the poorer people worked hard for it too.While rich people create jobs, it's clear that they only do so when they will profit from doing so. That is: if there is a job position that would net $40,000 a year for the company, then a rich person would 'create' a job that pays $20,000 / year (or whatever) and they take the $20k for themselves.The poor spread their money around by giving it to the rich.A company of 20,000 staff has $1 billion profits for the year. This means they could pay all of their staff, the people that did the hard work $50,000 bonuses. But instead, as is practically mandated by law they 'expand/grow the business', only to 'cut back' when profits aren't as good later, which generally means people losing jobs. I wouldn't demonize such people.But people who are earning huge amounts of money, and using that money to influence politics so that the rules can allow them to earn even more money...at the expense of the poor, the 'doing ok' and the reasonably affluent. People who have tried to keep the hard workers whose actual physical work generates the wealth, as far away from the profits as they legally can. Those that create growth in the economy, and hog most of the proceeds (an increasing proportion according to the video in OP), and then when the economy shrinks manipulate affairs so that the poor and affluent take the fall. The people who earn more a year than many people can expect in their life, and complain at 15% tax rates...Those people? Yeah, they should be demonized. Socialism doesn't function by people robbing a finite number of others sequentially. It's not the existence of people with wealth that is the problem. It is the problem of hogging growth and dodging the consequences of risk at others expense. There is no reason to put everyone into pauperism. I pay socialist health insurance every month. It sits around 100-200 a month. I am not a pauper as a result. The government has made sure that I can comfortably afford that amount of cost without worrying too much about it. And if I fall ill there's no deductible or premium rise or getting kicked from my insurer. I don't have to worry about any bills coming in unless I deliberately opt for private treatment (which I occasionally do).I am not a pauper because of this, I am much wealthier as a result. My private life insurance went up when I fell ill, but fortunately my national insurance rates stayed the same.The degree of taxes required to drive someone earning $5,000,000 / year into being a pauper would be phenomenal. A rate that nobody, I'm sure, is proposing. I'm sure the first million or so was earned through hard and maybe even honest work. But after that, the work starts to get easier. You can in fact pay other people manage your investments and do very little in the way of work at all.I'm not sure how much capital I would need to near effortlessly pay myself a liveable wage in perpetuity - but I'm pretty sure its an amount many of the wealthiest people have surpassed.I'm sure many of them continue to work hard, but they don't generally need to work 70 hours a week in sometimes physically difficult jobs, just to meet the basics requirements of survival as many of the 'paupers' do.

What happens to the wealth if everyone does that? A lot of people work very hard just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table and nothing more. Do you want them to have some of that taken away for those who want to spend their days organizing a stamp collection?I also suggest that our sense of self worth comes from contributing to our world and not through self gratification for its own sake, and from feeling that we have worked for and earned what self gratification we enjoy.I suggest that doing what you suggest would bring short term satisfaction but in the long term it just leads to a pit of misery.We only have to look at the issues surrounding our First Nations in Canada. Our ancestors saw them as a problem. The answer was to give them tracts of land and pay them to live there with no strings attached. We now have living conditions on those reserves that make most of the third world look good. Canadians as a whole want to resolve the issue and help make a better life but nobody has any idea how to go about it. As usual the answer is to pump in more money but we do that and nothing changes. Our European ancestors have essentially robbed them of their self worth and it becomes intergenerational. People who have low or no self esteem raise children with low or no self esteem. They have the time and money to indulge their hobbies but more often than not the hobby becomes self destructive habits such as substance abuse. IMHO what you are suggesting would do this to our whole society.

But if there is extra money to go aroundso much so that the people who have it, their children, their children's children, and their children's children's children could never possibly spend itwhy not? How do you measure this?What's the 'worth' of a hobby?Are we worthwhile? What about the unemployed guy who starts a blog on his favorite pastime: refrigerator repair?What's a hobby 'worth'?