Wealth Distribution in the USA

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

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.

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'?

It gets distributed, obviously. I never recommended taking from the dirt poor to give to the rest of the dirt poor.But the folks whose wealth is so vast?Do you think they have a little to spare?Where do you think their wealth comes from? Maybe yours does; but everyone is different. I don't think this example scales.

And right now goes mostly to a few people who do neither of those things.What's stopping us from distributing it to the rest of the people who also do neither of those things? Exactly; it's the work of others that creates their wealth. They don't actually create any of it themselves. Is it hard to imagine this billions of dollars of wealth being shared with the rest of the people who also didn't create any of it? How? Maybe we don't want to be 'prosperous', but just happy. That nation would still exist. Notice that my proposal effectively changes nothing. Right now:

• We have happy people working hard to create wealth.
• We have people not working to create wealth.
• We have people receiving wealth they didn't work to create.

My proposal is that we move to a system where:

• We have happy people working hard to create wealth.
• We have people not working to create wealth.
• We have people receiving wealth they didn't work to create.

The only difference in my proposal is that it is more equitable.What do you have against equality? How so?

But neither is the current system; not by far. Well then you'll love the system I've proposed; it's a system of wealth redistribution. If you ain't got wealth, then you ain't got worries.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

I find that hard to believe.I think it will still buy the same amount of bread.Do you think otherwise?

Nonsense. If an employee's actions generate $10/hour in revenue for the company, then the company will be non-profitable unless it pays that employee less than (= a fraction of) that $10/hour. It's always a fraction; if not, he's out of a job. Then how do the CEOs do it? How does the managerial class decide whether to hire more people if there is no way whatsoever to figure out the value that those extra people contribute to the company vs. the cost of hiring them?Do they really just pull decisions from their asses? If so, sign me up. No one wants to pay people an amount equal to the value they contribute, just a larger fraction than they get now. The people creating the product that gets sold and creates the company's revenue are paid next to nothing while the CEO, who contributes nothing on account of it being apparently impossible for him to do the job he has been hired for, takes a salary hundreds of times larger than any of the other employees in his company.Do you not think this a problem? Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

No one wants to use this system. No one. What is the one that I think they use?

Businesses are responsible to the societies that make their existence possible. Western companies plow over farm land to build factories and slums. Once subsistent and content rural farmerswith their farmland now goneare forced to slave in sweatshops for hours upon hours making less money than they require for their survival.Does this 'improve' economic conditions as measured against a few meaningless standards of GDP, etc.? Sure.Does it improve quality of living? Hardly. Who cares about 'poverty'? When people grow their own food, and enough for their families to survive comfortably, their income is admittedly low, perhaps even zero.That doesn't mean forcing them into a $2/hour job that doesn't provide for even the barest of essentials makes them better off just because their income is now greater than zero. That's a joke, right? Rising living standards? Increasingly competent populous? Native industries?How is moving into a slum constructed of scrap building materials a rise in living standard?How can people forced to perform mindless work every waking hour of their lives increase their 'competence' at any meaningful skill?How can people without enough money to feed their families invest in and build native industries?Don't be blinded by the numbers, Percy.Improvements in one category don't always bring improvements in others.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

There are different types of responsibility. Legal responsibility is but one type.

Absolute nonsense.The wage offered for any job is the absolute lowest wage possible given the market for that particular job.Just like you will pay as little as you can for a bag of peas (remember those?) McDonald's is going to pay as little as they can for my labor.The value the company places on the job directly equals how much revenue (=benefit) they think the job brings in (however they arrive at that figure/estimate).This understanding of 'value' fits perfectly with all other concepts of value based on willingness to pay as a marker of perceived utilityi.e., the concepts of value that actual economists use.This also makes sense in the world where words have unambiguous meanings allowing for less-than-chaotic communication.There's simply no room for Percy's made up definition of 'value', and no need for it either, since we already have a word to describe the concept: wages.Jon

What about a minimum income paid for with a highly progressive income tax?

The argument is that wages aren't as high as they should be because some wages do not provide income enough to live off of.

Apparently no one likes the idea of a minimum income.