I guess the link failed, but have a look if you're interested.

politizane - Wealth Inequality in America - YouTube

Educate yourself. If you are not happy with your station in life, upgrade your skill set. While it might not allow you to break into the top 1-10%, it should move you up the scale. Plan #2, marry one of the 1%'s slutty daughters.

Dogfish,

It's not about personal education or whether one is happy in life or one's skill set. Do you seriously believe the shift in wealth distribution over the last couple decades is primarily a product of the education of Americans, their skills, or their personal satisfaction with their lives? Pretty shallow right wing whack job response; I'd expect something more thoughtful.

Sg

I suspect that birthrate has a quite a bit to do with it. Having children you can't support puts you in hole now and them in a hole in the future.

If we give enough tax breaks to the rich we will all be in the one percent soon.

That was my shallow response.

We have a defacto royalty class in the US who control a number of industries and centers of production. Short of us taking it from them, what do you suggest to even it out. Really? I'm listening.

Their families have earned their wealth through shrewd investment and effort. Shall we just bitch about it because they could throw away a new jet sled daily without thinking, that most of us would take a few years to earn?

Show you work. Discuss the legal ramifications of taking their net worth away from them, and how you would protect those of us in the middle class. Where do we draw the line at who has too much? What do we do to keep that threshold from moving down to the level you and I are at?

Bitch about it, or do something about it.

Up the revolution!

Dogfish is a whack job.





That is a new one.

It has always been about personal education and ones satisfaction (or lack of motivation) in their station in life. As well as personal responsibility/accountability.

I believe the "redistribution" is directly related to the "education" of Americans, just not the "book learnin" kind. . .. . . I also believe it has come from the huge entitlement issue that has developed in this country. . .. "I am therefore I deserve", destroys the work ethic and spreads like a fungus. . ..

You guys are idiots if you think that the wealth inequality in this video has anything to do with lazy entitled Americans. Stop drinking the conservative radio Kool-aid.

There will always be lazy entitled Americans, but they aren't the majority by any means. And they are destroying themselves, but not this country.

There are a lot of people looking for work and opportunity in this country including me but it isn't out there like it used to be. It has all been carefully hoarded by a few powerful entities.

I agree with you and I like you ideas for taxation listed above.

I'll take that as a compliment.

When you see the yardage markers on Dogfish's driveway you'll understand what a wackjob he really is. I'll get worried when he starts raising pigs.

Pigs arrive in February. 127 yards from the gate to the front door, 100 yards to the "Y". No need for markers.

Dogfish,

Aha, second post much more interesting, especially since I know you're not a whackjob, Stam's allegation notwithstanding.

If I had the answers, I might already be the one in charge, or at least counted among the one-percenters. I don't and ain't. I tried to post the link because I thought it's a topic that could start two conversations, one interesting, and one consisting of drivel. And I was curious to see what the conversational distribution would be here.

I also think it's a subject of interest because it looks to be as if the super rich achieve their status through more than just hard work and shrewd investment. I think more of their hard work is expended in controlling the government and lawmaking and banking and financial systems to enhance their ability to shift the wealth distribution from what it was to what it is. And all that is independent of the education, skill sets, and ambition of the American work force. But that's just my personal conspiracy theory.

FP,

Nice to see you back, even though you pronounce me a technocrat and virtual communist. I otherwise enjoyed your post.

Since I don't have answers to the situation, I'm gonna' pull a Hankster and share a C&P of excerpts from a couple essays by writer/philosopher Sam Harris. Here goes:

Most Americans believe that a person should enjoy the full fruits of his or her labors, however abundant. In this light, taxation tends to be seen as an intrinsic evil. It is worth noting, however, that throughout the 1950’s—a decade for which American conservatives pretend to feel a harrowing sense of nostalgia—the marginal tax rate for the wealthy was over 90 percent. In fact, prior to the 1980’s it never dipped below 70 percent. Since 1982, however, it has come down by half. In the meantime, the average net worth of the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled (to $18.5 million), while that of the poorest 40 percent has fallen by 63 percent (to $2,200). Thirty years ago, top U.S. executives made about 50 times the salary of their average employees. In 2007, the average worker would have had to toil for 1,100 years to earn what his CEO brought home between Christmas in Aspen and Christmas on St. Barthes.

We now live in a country in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 percent of the wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much inequality can free people endure? Have you seen Ralph Lauren’s car collection? Yes, it is beautiful. It also cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “So what?” many people will say. “It’s his money. He earned it. He should be able to do whatever he wants with it.” In conservative circles, expressing any doubt on this point has long been synonymous with Marxism.

And yet over one million American children are now homeless. People on Medicare are being denied life-saving organ transplants that were routinely covered before the recession. Over one quarter of our nation’s bridges are structurally deficient. When might be a convenient time to ask the richest Americans to help solve problems of this kind? How about now?

It is easy to understand why even the most generous person might be averse to paying taxes: Our legislative process has been hostage to short-term political interests and other perverse incentives for as long as anyone can remember. Consequently, our government wastes an extraordinary amount of money. It also seems uncontroversial to say that whatever can be best accomplished in the private sector should be. Our tax code must also be reformed—and it might even be true that the income tax should be lowered on everyone, provided we find a better source of revenue to pay our bills. But I can’t imagine that anyone seriously believes that the current level of wealth inequality in the United States is good and worth maintaining, or that our government’s first priority should be to spare a privileged person like myself the slightest hardship as this once great nation falls into ruin.

And the ruination of the United States really does seem possible. It has been widely reported, for instance, that students in Shanghai far surpass our own in science, reading, and math. In fact, when compared to other countries, American students are now disconcertingly average (slightly below in math), where the average includes utopias like Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Albania, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia. President Obama was right to recognize this as a “Sputnik moment.” But it is worse than that. This story was immediately followed by a report about giddy Creationists in the state of Kentucky being offered $40 million in tax subsidies to produce a full-scale model of Noah’s ark. More horrible still, this ludicrous use of public money is probably a wise investment, given that such a monument to scientific ignorance will be guaranteed to attract an ovine influx of Christian tourists from neighboring states. Seeing facts of this kind, juxtaposed without irony or remedy at this dire moment in history, it is hard not to feel that one is witnessing America’s irreversible decline. Needless to say, most Americans have no choice but to send their children to terrible schools—where they will learn the lesser part of nothing and emerge already beggared by a national debt now on course to reach $20 trillion. And yet Republicans in every state can successfully campaign on a promise to spend less on luxuries like education, while delivering tax cuts to people who, if asked to guess their own net worth, could not come within $10 million of the correct figure if their lives depended on it.

American opposition to the “redistribution of wealth” has achieved the luster of a religious creed. And, as with all religions, one finds the faithful witlessly espousing doctrines that harm almost everyone, including their own children. For instance, while most Americans have no chance of earning or inheriting significant wealth, 68 percent want the estate tax eliminated (and 31 percent consider it to be the “worst” and “least fair” tax levied by the federal government). Most believe that limiting this tax, which affects only 0.2 percent of the population, should be the top priority of the current Congress.
The truth, however, is that everyone must favor the “redistribution of wealth” at some point. This relates directly to the issue of education: as the necessity of doing boring and dangerous work disappears—whether because we have built better machines and infrastructure, or shipped our least desirable jobs overseas—people need to be better educated so that they can apply themselves to more interesting work. Who will pay for this? There is only one group of people who can pay for anything at this point: the wealthy.

To make matters more difficult, Americans have made a religious fetish of something called “self-reliance.” Most seem to think that while a person may not be responsible for the opportunities he gets in life, each is entirely responsible for what he makes of these opportunities. This is, without question, a false view of the human condition. Consider the biography of any “self-made” American, from Benjamin Franklin on down, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make, and of which he was a mere beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress.

Consequently, no one is responsible for his intelligence, range of talents, or ability to do productive work. If you have struggled to make the most of what Nature gave you, you must still admit that Nature also gave you the ability and inclination to struggle. How much credit do I deserve for not having Down syndrome or any other disorder that would make my current work impossible? None whatsoever. And yet devotees of self-reliance rail against those who would receive entitlements of various sorts—health care, education, etc.—while feeling unselfconsciously entitled to their relative good fortune. Yes, we must encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage free riders wherever we can—but it seems only decent at this moment to admit how much luck is required to succeed at anything in this life. Those who have been especially lucky—the smart, well-connected, and rich—should count their blessings, and then share some of these blessings with the rest of society.

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research. For instance, the billionaire Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, recently helped kill a proposition that would have created an income tax for the richest 1 percent in Washington (one of seven states that has no personal income tax). All of these funds would have gone to improve his state’s failing schools. What kind of society does Ballmer want to live in—one that is teeming with poor, uneducated people? Who does he expect to buy his products? Where will he find his next batch of software engineers? Perhaps Ballmer is simply worried that the government will spend his money badly—after all, we currently spend more than almost every other country on education, with abysmal results. Well, then he should say so—and rather than devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to stoking anti-tax paranoia in his state, he should direct some of his vast wealth toward improving education, like his colleague Bill Gates has begun to do.

There are, in fact, some signs that a new age of heroic philanthropy might be dawning. For instance, the two wealthiest men in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, recently invited their fellow billionaires to pledge the majority of their wealth to the public good. This is a wonderfully sane and long overdue initiative about which it is unforgivable to be even slightly cynical. But it is not sufficient. Most of this money will stay parked in trusts and endowments for decades, and much of it will go toward projects that are less than crucial to the future of our society. It seems to me, however, that Gates and Buffett could easily expand and target this effort: asking those who have pledged, along with the rest of the wealthiest Americans, to immediately donate a percentage of their net worth to a larger fund. This group of benefactors would include not only the super-rich, but people of far more modest means. I do not have 1/1000 the wealth of Steve Ballmer, but I certainly count myself among the people who should be asked to sacrifice for the future of this country. The combined wealth of the men and women on the Forbes 400 list is $1.37 trillion. By some estimates, there are at least another 1,500 billionaires in the United States. Something tells me that anyone with a billion dollars could safely part with 25 percent of his or her wealth—without being forced to sell any boats, planes, vacation homes, or art. As of 2009, there were 980,000 families with a net worth exceeding $5 million (not including their primary residence). Would a one-time donation of 5 percent really be too much to ask to rescue our society from the maw of history?

Some readers will point out that I am free to donate to the treasury even now. But such solitary sacrifice would be utterly ineffectual, and I am no more eager than anyone else is to fill the pork barrels of corrupt politicians. However, if Gates and Buffett created a mechanism that bypassed the current dysfunction of government, earmarking the money for unambiguously worthy projects, I suspect that there are millions of people like myself who would not hesitate to invest in the future of America.

Imagine that Gates and Buffett raised a trillion dollars this way: what should we spend it on? The first thing to acknowledge is that almost any use of this money would be better than just letting it sit. Mindlessly repairing every bridge, tunnel, runway, harbor, reservoir, and recreation area in the United States would be an improvement over what we are currently doing.
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Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft—and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment.

Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. Markets aren’t perfectly reflective of the value of goods and services, and many wealthy people don’t create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy.

But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others.

In fact, there are people who rank far below Gates and Buffet in net worth, who still make several million dollars a day, every day of the year, and have throughout the current recession.

And there is no reason to think that we have reached the upper bound of wealth inequality, as not every breakthrough in technology creates new jobs. The ultimate labor saving device might be just that—the ultimate labor saving device. Imagine the future Google of robotics or nanotechnology: Its CEO could make Steve Jobs look like a sharecropper, and its products could put tens of millions of people out of work. What would it mean for one person to hold the most valuable patents compatible with the laws of physics and to amass more wealth than everyone else on the Forbes 400 list combined?

How many Republicans who have vowed not to raise taxes on billionaires would want to live in a country with a trillionaire and 30 percent unemployment? If the answer is “none”—and it really must be—then everyone is in favor of “wealth redistribution.” They just haven’t been forced to admit it.

Yes, we must cut spending and reduce inefficiencies in government—and yes, many things are best accomplished in the private sector. But this does not mean that we can ignore the astonishing gaps in wealth that have opened between the poor and the rich, and between the rich and the ultra rich. Some of your neighbors have no more than $2,000 in total assets (in fact, 40 percent of Americans fall into this category); some have around $2 million; and some have $2 billion (and a few have much more). Each of these gaps represents a thousandfold increase in wealth.

Some Americans have amassed more wealth than they or their descendants can possibly spend. Who do conservatives think is in a better position to help pull this country back from the brink?
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So after looking at the graphs and charts and reading Sam's stuff, what do you think?

I think that your copy and paste from 'Sam' was a House of Cards built on a Foundation of Sand in a Wind Storm.

Rev.,

Well, that's succinct, but not substantive. Ergo, much closer to drivel than having something interesting to say.

Yes it was succinct, entirely unlike the drivel that you c&p-ed.

As I have often said it is hard to respond to an argument where the logic is as scattered as a shotgun pattern.

I don't disagree that the 1% use their power and influence to steer additional deals their way, an avenue unavailable to you and I. Even in Aberdeen I see this on a daily basis, based on the relative 1%'ers here in Grays Harbor County.

Somebody more famous than I once said: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention".

That quote would have been a great ending to the vid.