What should be done to reduce income inequality?

I want to start out by requesting that we ignore the raising of minimum wage for this discussion.

Okay now that that's out of the way Airshocker's thread had me wondering what ways people would suggest when it comes to minimizing the gap a little bit between the richest and poorest among us. Most people agree that the gap has become significant enough to cause problems in society, but what solutions do people propose to this problem?

Poor people should just get more money.

Perhaps poor people deserve to be poor. Have you ever considered that? Perhaps the average poor person is poor because they aren't intelligent enough to succeed in the fields of study that provide the best paying jobs. Perhaps poor people are poor because they have low IQs.

HERPA DERP

I know this was a troll or silly shock value type of post but you kind of defeated yourself in the same paragraph. Ironic I guess.

I don't have a complete answer for this. I don't like to think anyone has the right to tell someone how much money they can or can't make. Having said that, I see some real problems in this country when it comes to how much people earn. I believe educated individuals who have put in their time, gotten a college degree and now work at a job that requires brainpower, should earn more than some bloke who didn't put in the time and just settles as a helper for some construction job. But then I look at the CEOs in this country and see how much they make and I just want to vomit. They make upwards of $700k to 900k a year. A surgeon, whose job requires significantly more responsibility and intelligence, makes far less.

Bob Nardelli, former CEO of The Home Depot, sucked so bad at his job, they booted his ass with a $210,000,000 severance package.

Are you shitting me?

@emil_fontz: nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Educate the workforce and devote more resources to Science R&D.

He did say it a little bluntly, but he has a point.

That doesn't solve the problem though. When poor people are given more money industry simply responds by raising the price of everything and while individuals may now have a higher dollar amount then they did before they can't afford anything more then they could before they were given more money.

It's a complicated question and to be honest I don't have an answer. It seems no matter what we do, people seem stuck exactly where they are.

Would be great if more companies kept jobs in the US (manufacturing specifically) and were willing to pay their employees more without jacking up the prices of their products. Might mean passing up the big bonuses and learning to budget better...so, not going to happen.

idk man, maybe get a gun?

cause that's the only way you are going to change the system at this point.

oh wait, that won't work either, the cops in my city make $11.50 an hour.

Steal all the money from rich people and burn it, then cap wages. There, no inequality as everybody is poor.

Improve the education system in this country so our workforce can return to being the most competitive and competent in the world. This requires funding, so impose drastically higher taxes on the top 1% income earners (more specifically, the upper 50% of that 1%) in order to acquire that funding. And drastically rage minimum wage. Done.

Won't be easy, because executives and big business Wall Street types will be up in arms, and corporations will just ship jobs overseas because all they care about is making profit, with complete disregard for the greater public good. Ultimately, income inequality exists in this country to the extent it does almost exclusively because of corporations and their complete control of the economy.

That the poster thinks that in order to live at what would be considered the standard in society that one needs the best paying jobs? Standard does not equate to best.

In order to be rich or poor there needs to be a standard or baseline that rich live above and poor live below.

The poster's point goes along with the sad state of affairs currently but disconnects not even 20 years in the past. But that goes along in hand with going from a producing nation to a consumer nation.

This also goes hand in hand with the middle class eroding away and the point of the thread to the issue presented.

Whhaaaa?? Where the **** do you live?

No, just no. Both would raise prices through the roof, kill wealth and job creation and just in general harm the economy. Do you not get that higher min wage is passed on to the consumer in higher prices and causes jobs to be lost? Also the taxation rates under Clinton were fine and would bring in close to 3.5 trillion a year.

I prefer getting rid of food stamps entirely. Once people start dying in droves from starvation and profits take a shit dive as tons of food goes to waste things will shift pretty quickly.

Also were you alive in the 80's? Like did you get to experience the economy back then?

A+. Everybody gets an A+.

Not trolling. I entirely do wish for the food stamp program to be abolished. The only reason min wage shouldn't be raised is because it will just be another reason for companies to raise prices as most figure for all and not just those "benefiting" from a min wage hike.

But food stamps help supplement the rise in food costs by making sure that quite a few people whose job pay hasn't kept up with the times are still able to afford it. So companies can continue to press the ceiling. If a great number of people couldn't even afford their food anymore then one of a few drastic things would happen.

As for taxes I am fine with the clinton era and I do not see a reason to tax the very wealthy any more than they already are. When i said the 80's I meant the wages paid then against the cost of gas, milk, and eggs vs the same jobs paying less now with a much higher increase in gas, milk, and eggs.

Or did you flip your shit for some other reason?

Can't... be a troll in this instance. And calling me a twit means less when you asked the other guy why he flipped his shit since the turnabout was lost...you twit? There we go.

You done? Good. I asked him why he flipped his shit because he did over a name I never called him and a minor disagreement. I say minor because I don't disagree with his logic behind the actions, just the actions. We both see the same problem, just disagree on how to fix it. Hence him flipping out is not needed.

(edited for sensitivity)

I've held that food stamps and the welfare system overall is highly abused and incites abuse for decades. When such a wide gap between getting food stamps and affording the same out of pocket exists the system itself becomes a problem that both consumers and producers wrongly rely on.

So no. Listen I'm not into the whole online warrior bit where we have a war of words. All I read was that I jabbed with flipped your shit and then you asked the other guy the same thing. Maybe something's wrong with you to understand but hey that's cool.

Also I don't know where you went to school but you should of taken certain social themed classes for your degree. You actually addressed everything my post mentioned so the "rest didn't make sense" comes off as a bit crazy given your supposed background.

Just because it is abused doesn't mean you end it, it means you reform it as millions including me need those things to survive. Do you even know what they are designed to do?

(Edited for sensitivity).

I've seen many times over what people on food stamps mean when they say they need it to survive. When I go to a grocery store and see someone's cart loaded up with all name brand expensive food that price for portion are heavily lopsided to the producer it's often a EBT'er.

Overspending because it's not REALLY coming out of your pocket. Since people overspend prices go up. Then people who teeter on the edge but refuse to get into the system get hurt the most.

Kind of like min wage hikes that you said you were against.

Utter insanity dude. There is a difference between surviving and maintaining.

The point is that you are being unnecessarily combative and downright rude to both of us. My last post got deleted because I called you out on being a confrontational ass, but I don't care because it's the truth. If you disagree with someone, explain why and leave the personal attacks and condescending "are you an idiot" tone out of it. You might actually win someone over to your viewpoint if you approach a disagreement with a more amiable kind of attitude. Otherwise you run the risk of unnecessarily pissing people off, as you have obviously done with the two of us.

Pot, Kettle Black. Calm down, there is no need for this.

Hahaha forget it. You win. You're clearly irreproachable. Your tone and condescension couldn't possibly be to blame for either of us reacting negatively towards you.

Ugh. Forget it, I am obviously not getting through to you. Keep that superior attitude.

Do as much to create jobs as possible. A strong economy is the only way to make things better.

Any ideas on how? Serious question, I would like to know.

A great first step would be to get a President who is less political than Obama. He cares way too much about playing the game instead of governing. The next thing we need to do is reform the tax code. Right now it's too complicated and it requires too much money to be spent in order to be in compliance. That hurts everybody. Obamacare needs to go. If we get rid of it and go to a single-payer system then all the business has to do is pay the tax levied on it by the government. No need to complicate things any further by having them do all the work to get people insured, etc.

The Federal government is basically the economy's worst enemy. It makes everything so much more complicated than it needs to be. Sure, the people who put in place these ridiculous requirements think they're doing the right thing, but they're actually hurting the rest of us.

Make things simple. If they can't be made simpler at least, for the love of everything holy, make it easier for people, or businesses, to find information on whatever they need.

I can agree with this. Government involvement should be minimal. I am 100% with you on that healthcare thing, I never thought companies should pay for that and that it should be the governments job.

Just a thought, I am starting to support voluntary but tax encouraged profits sharing. The company would share a small percent of their profits with low level workers, which would be taxed at a lower rate and the revenue shared with small business.

@Serraph105:

I don't know... but things are crazy right now. We are making almost 3k a month and can't manage to rent a shit hole apartment.

Where we live the minimum wage is $8 an hour, My wife is making 12 and i'm making 10. She is working full time with regular over time and commission and she averages about 2500 a month. I'm barely working because i'm taking care of the kid most of the time, lucky to bring in 600 a month.

Around here a 2 bedroom with no yard, no garage, shared laundry, in not very good condition goes for 900 and up and requires that you make at least 3 times the rent AFTER taxes. Oh, and they don't want to count her commissions and ovetime or my income (i'm technically self employed) because they aren't "guaranteed" so they will only count about 2080 dollars for our income.

We almost bought a 875sqft condo for 120k (that's considered super cheap around here, any less and it would be a mobile home) but because of our income not being "guaranteed" (even though that is what we have made consistently for almost a year at these jobs and 7 years including steady previous jobs) they couldn't give us the loan.

Implying there is something to be done.

Flat tax.

Rich people won't like it, but it's fair.

The top 400 richest Americans have more money than the bottom 150 million. Something should be done about that. One person doesn't need eighty billion fucking dollars; I'm looking at you, Bill Gates. Imagine if all the money that these rich fucks had was being pumped into the economy instead of being hoarded in several bank accounts. Maybe the minimum wage wouldn't be so fucking pathetic, and maybe drowning yourself in college debt wouldn't have to be damn near a requirement to get anywhere in life.

Also I'll just add that the 85 richest people worldwide have as much money as the bottom 3.5 billion people. The 21st century isn't that much different than the Middle Ages, where kings and queens ruled over a 99% poor peasant population; only today it's corporations and their billionaire pets with all the money and power versus the rest of the population trying to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We are one fucked up species.

Is her $2500 a month and your $600 a month a gross income or net income. I would imagine gross but I just wanted to clarify.

@plageus900: gross

Perhaps there should be limits imposed on how much profit you are allowed to make on a sale... that way nobody is over paying for anything, things that cost more will actually be worth more, no extra money will need to be given to anybody and the only people to lose out would be the people already making more money then they can reasonably spend.

But see then the issue is from the industry. Instead of increasing wages without increasing their prices, the industry uses wage increases as an excuse to increase prices. It's the same with min. wage. People are trained to believe that an increase with min. wage will just force businesses to increase their prices, thus negating the increase wage. Problem is that the prices are increasing for everything regardless of wage increase: rent, food, etc. So the issue is from the larger businesses and their bottom line. From a truly capitalistic perspective, wages would be higher since businesses would compete to get the worker, and the wages/price/profit margin of the company would be stabilized. Today, it is a convoluted bastardization of the system (and I'm not blaming socialists or any other such rhetoric). It's because the businesses themselves have moved away from capitalistic principles. Instead of businesses competing for workers, workers compete against each other to fill up whatever position they can get, in hopes that it pays the bills, because businesses know that the workers will come to them and accept whatever pay they give them. The system is failing because greed has taken control here in large industries. Large industries have excessively large profit margins, but instead of investing that back into the workers, they keep it for themselves. I mean the idea is simple: Increasing wages for workers will increase the value they have for their work and the productivity they give to the company. The increased wages the workers have will give the workers more discretionary income to spend, which in turn, will funnel it back into the original business (Walmart worker will spend more in their place of work if they have more money to work with). But, more importantly, the increased wages for workers will allow that money to be spent throughout the community and increase the standard of living. So the question to ask is why don't the large corporations dip into their billions of profit to actually pay their workers? Because they don't want to give up their money.

Is that so.

If anything the US worker has never been more productive. If you don't produce you get fired. Unless you are hard to replace in case you probably don't have a wage problem.

Sure and unless you are suggesting forcing then to "give up their money" it will continue to be so.

@Master_Live said:

Is that so.

If anything the US worker has never been more productive. If you don't produce you get fired. Unless you are hard to replace in case you probably don't have a wage problem.

@StrifeDelivery said:

Because they don't want to give up their money.

Sure and unless you are suggesting forcing then to "give up their money" it will continue to be so.

And don't you think that those increases in productivity have to do with other factors: better materials, better machinery, more efficient task management from headquarters, etc. Of course productivity has increased over the decades. I'm saying that productivity would be higher due to paying higher wages. More motivated workers will put more energy into the production of goods and will make fewer mistakes.

Also, I wasn't suggesting anything. I was stating the situation.

Bringing in 20 million illegal slaves from south of the border, has destroyed the natural progression of wages.

These people need to go home.

Back in the 70s, 99% of all labor, was done by American citizens. A laborer could support a family in a decent house. When I worked in CA in the 90s, we were told we couldn't have a raise, because they could hire 2 illegals for every one of us, so if we didn't like the low wages . . we could quit - those were the options they gave us.

Anyone who supports illegal immigrants, has no right to complain about "income inequality".

Huh? Is this a joke post? A flat tax would hurt low income citizens WAY more than rich ones.

How? With a flat tax across all income brackets, most people in the lowest income level would likely end up paying less taxes than they are now (where I live my GF and I are in the second lowest and pay ~25% per year) since they could lower the rate due to all the income coming from the rich at something even as low as 5%. The reason why the lower income levels have to pay so much more is because the rates are higher due to the rich skipping out on paying, with an enforced flat tax, they could easily be lowered.