What do you personally believe will decrease economic inequality

Economic inequality is something that is happening and increasing, but what do you guys think that can be done to decrease it? I'm assuming it will be ideas, as opposed to just one idea, but I'll be interested in what people say.

Also, if you think economic inequality is not causing problems in society then get into why you think that's the case.

Simple. Laziness or a lack of motivation or ambition.

What? Being lazy and unmotivated will decrease economic inequality? Did you misread my post? Cause that happens.

@Serraph105: I’m saying it’s the cause of income inequality. Reverse what I said for a solution.

I think the thing that can only mitigate it greatly is a change in what people value as a society.

Right now everything one values, ones self worth as a human is tied far to much to income...sad

If history is any guide, a large scale catastrophe, a massive economic crash, or a violent revolution.

There are other solutions, but they usually prove to be politically infeasible until a situation above forces our hands.

@Sevenizz: "I'm saying it’s the cause of income inequality."

Lol. You really buy into that bootstrap stuff, don't you?

@mattbbpl: How do you get anything done otherwise?

You can bring down the rich to the level of poor, but not the other way around. So true communism, where everyone is poor, unless you'll create a source of unlimited energy/resources.

Well I don't think the solution is to completely remove inequality, just reduce it to a degree so that it isn't impossible, or feel impossible, to get to the top of the ladder.

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Re-charter of the Bank Bill (1809)

“… The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.” -Thomas Jefferson

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.” -James Madison

“The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.” -Abraham Lincoln

“Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to…provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Despite these warnings, Woodrow Wilson signed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. A few years later he wrote: “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” -Woodrow Wilson

@rmpumper: You certainly can go the other way around. It's just a matter of policy choices.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/glass_steagall_act.asp

The Glass-Steagall Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1933 as the Banking Act, which prohibited commercial banks from participating in the investment banking business. Glass-Steagall was sponsored by Senator Carter Glass, a former Treasury secretary, and Rep. Henry Steagall, a member of the House of Representatives and Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee. The act was passed as an emergency measure to counter the failure of almost 5,000 banks during the Great Depression. Glass-Steagall lost its potency in subsequent decades and was partially repealed in 1999.

Apart from separating commercial and investment banking, the Glass-Steagall Act also created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which guaranteed bank deposits up to a specified limit. The act also created the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and introduced Regulation Q, which prohibited banks from paying interest on demand deposits and capped interest rates on other deposit products. (It was repealed in July 2011.)

The Glass-Steagall Act's primary objectives were twofold: to stop the unprecedented run on banks and restore public confidence in the U.S. banking system; and to sever the linkages between commercial and investment banking that were believed to have been responsible for the 1929 market crash. The rationale for seeking the separation was the conflict of interest that arose when banks were engaged in both commercial and investment banking (e.g. the tendency of such banks to engage in excessively speculative activity).

The Glass-Steagall Act's partial repeal in 1999 by the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) is believed in some circles to have contributed to the 2008 global credit crisis. Commercial banks worldwide were saddled with billions of dollars in losses, due to the excessive exposure of their investment banking arms to derivatives and securities, tied to U.S. home prices. The severity of the crisis forced Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, top-tier independent investment banks, to convert to bank holding companies. Coupled with the acquisition of other prominent investment banks Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch by commercial banking giants J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, respectively, the 2008 developments signaled the final demise of the Glass-Steagall Act.

https://www.wnd.com/2008/03/59405/

Despite the varied theories espoused by many establishment economists, it was none other than the Federal Reserve that caused the Great Depression and the horrific suffering, deprivation and dislocation America and the world experienced in its wake. At least, that’s the clearly stated view of current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

The worldwide economic downturn called the Great Depression, which persisted from 1929 until about 1939, was the longest and worst depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world. While originating in the U.S., it ended up causing drastic declines in output, severe unemployment, and acute deflation in virtually every country on earth. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the Great Depression ranks second only to the Civil War as the gravest crisis in American history.”

Despite the varied theories espoused by many establishment economists, it was none other than the Federal Reserve that caused the Great Depression and the horrific suffering, deprivation and dislocation America and the world experienced in its wake. At least, that’s the clearly stated view of current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

The worldwide economic downturn called the Great Depression, which persisted from 1929 until about 1939, was the longest and worst depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world. While originating in the U.S., it ended up causing drastic declines in output, severe unemployment, and acute deflation in virtually every country on earth. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the Great Depression ranks second only to the Civil War as the gravest crisis in American history.”

The recession was an ordinary business cycle. We had repeated recessions over hundreds of years, but what converted [this one] into a major depression was bad monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve System, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States. There’s no other example I can think of, of a government measure which produced so clearly the opposite of the results that were intended.

And what happened is that [the Federal Reserve] followed policies which led to a decline in the quantity of money by a third. For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing from beginning to end, with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary.

At all times, the Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were all the time urging them to do that. So it was, in my opinion, clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression.

Although economists have pontificated over the decades about this or that cause of the Great Depression, even the current Fed chairman Ben S. Bernanke, agrees with Friedman’s assessment that the Fed caused the Great Depression.

At a Nov. 8, 2002, conference to honor Friedman’s 90th birthday, Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, gave a speech at Friedman’s old home base, the University of Chicago. Here’s a bit of what Bernanke, the man who now runs the Fed – and thus, one of the most powerful people in the world – had to say that day:

I can think of no greater honor than being invited to speak on the occasion of Milton Friedman’s ninetieth birthday. Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. …

Today I’d like to honor Milton Friedman by talking about one of his greatest contributions to economics, made in close collaboration with his distinguished coauthor, Anna J. Schwartz. This achievement is nothing less than to provide what has become the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history, the onset of the Great Depression – or, as Friedman and Schwartz dubbed it, the Great Contraction of 1929-33.

… As everyone here knows, in their “Monetary History” Friedman and Schwartz made the case that the economic collapse of 1929-33 was the product of the nation’s monetary mechanism gone wrong. Contradicting the received wisdom at the time that they wrote, which held that money was a passive player in the events of the 1930s, Friedman and Schwartz argued that “the contraction is in fact a tragic testimonial to the importance of monetary forces.”

there will always be inequality and that is ok. short of a fundamental transformation of the entire economic system, society will simply value certain kinds of work more than others.

"the question then is how much should there be, what is the ideal amount of inequality?" which is a much harder question to answer.

as far as decreasing it, imo one has to curtail the political influence of money on enabling policy that serves to increase is. it's the classic problem of those with the money have the money to bend the ear of those with the power to get them more money.

He said nothing about removing the inequality, just lowering it.

Truly equal opportunity.

That's it.

So many people are, from the second they are born, imbued with tremendous advantages, or disadvantages, over others in life. This includes job and career choices, education, social interactions, and more. Hell, as an overweight man, I've experienced discrimination during job interviews. I can't imagine what a person of color or a woman has experienced.

@Serraph105: Something you might find interesting.

@mattbbpl: I'll grab the audiobook and give it a listen.

Make college and vocational school free.

Reinstate Glass-steagall

Restore the interest rate to pre-Reaganomics levels

Immediately seize all offshore corporate cash stores

Green New Deal

Upgrade the highway system to work with next generation bullet trains and bullet freight trains

Fund the space elevator and work with private industry to open up resource exploration in space.

Focus the military on infrastructure projects.

End foreign subsidies to any country engaged in war crimes and illegal land settlements

Nationalize healthcare

Invest in nanotechnology exploration

Prepare for universal income when automation offsets the unskilled workforce.

Mandate all new housing construction to integrate energy independence

Build thorium salt reactors

Constitutionalize net neutrality.

Provide a more progressive tax system and level playing field when it comes to education, opportunity, etc. The rich tend to stay rich (or get richer) as labor has had diminishing returns on wealth over the last several decades when compared to just capital. Real estate and securities are taxed at lower rates and generally give you much higher rates of returns, but the buy in rate is far higher than simply going to work and getting a pay check.

TLDR: If you want to get rich, 'owning' stuff is a better way to do it than just producing labor. The system is built to support it, we should implement ways to reverse this.

@Serraph105: getting rid of patents, IP once and for all.

Proper government regulation where it makes sense only. For example protection of the environment would be one of the few areas where government would interfere.

Were would you get all the resources (i.e. for everyone to have a summer house by the beach)? You wouldn't, and that's the point.

@rmpumper: Mechanisms like the labor movement and the new deal have performed quite well at lifting people up.

Why does anyone think that income inequality can be fixed? Even in the Nordic countries who have some of the highest well-fare systems is there a rising "economic inequality" because people with an education, of course, is in higher demand than people without.

Also, inequality is not a bad thing, humans need something to strive for and we need something to strive for otherwise it will end up like in USSR where it ended up with poverty.

Difference between decreasing it and removing it.

Some of the Nordic countries have had recently or currently have right wing governments that have tax reductions that almost solely benefit the top 1% while removing or reducing funding for programs that helped poor people.

@Sevenizz: that’s a bit of an idealistic and naive viewpoint. Not everyone’s on equal grounding.

Besides Denmark, I do not recall Norway or Sweden having particularly right winged governments. I know Norway had a liberal government but it´s more moderate and closer to the Democrats than right-winged, but you live there.

The market of course also reacts if you can get a worker for 1/10 of a normal worker, Some scrupulous employers will not pay 10 times as much. It´s like you see in Texas, the welders there are among the faster-growing industries and the wages react to that but at the same time, you have an influx of illegal immigrants who come in and work for a much lower wage. As you saw in the thread about it a while ago.

So that creates a higher supply which causes the American welders to either be unemployed or forced to work for a much lower wage. Which increases the income inequality.

Rising Income inequality as mentioned is a result of a more modern educated workforce where you at the same time see a small but growing group of an uneducated group but again it´s not a bad thing.

But who should get to decide how high that ladder is from the ground? I think there are too many hurdles to even try and "smooth" it over. Even if you somehow got the populace to agree on what is needed to live a good life in order to make that a baseline, you're still going to have to change human nature between those who want to strive for what they want and those who prefer things to come to them.

For some the climb is always too high, and for others they need the hard climb in order to feel accomplished. Where should it be faked, for the sake of the other?

Inequality can be increased or lessened by policy. You can see this fluctuate throughout history and across countries' GINI coefficients in the present.

Increasing/high inequality is a bad thing because it causes a number of economic , political, and social ills.

Allow shareholders to control executive reimbursement. After all, the shareholders own the company.

Negative income tax. Something that has never been implemented but it's an interesting idea. People earning a certain income pay no taxes. Those earning more than that would pay a proportion of their income above that, and those below that level would receive a payment.

I like this idea because it redistributes income purely within the tax system. No need for great, "historic" leaders to take our money and spend it on welfare like Social Security, and greatly expand the bureaucratic system. Those who needed money would essentially get it in the form of a tax return. Keep income tax rates low enough so that a) people actually pay them, and b) the system only funds itself

The biggest downside to this is that poor people suck with money. They are so bad with money that it could actually be pretty damaging to a consumer economy if we just gave them money. This would have to be implemented slowly, with personal financial planning being an essential part of basic education.

EDIT: I don't actually think income inequality itself is a problem, there is just a lot of BS surrounding it that makes people think it's a problem, which makes it one.

Norway currently have right wing government. Have had it for some years now as well. European right wing, not US right wing. That's a major difference there. I don't recall what Sweden has at the moment, perhaps @Maroxad can enlighten us there.

Your example how people will break the law to get things cheaper. If someone is caught doing it, the fine should easily be more than the extra money earned by doing this. I assume the welders have some form of organization that should also work on protecting and promoting those who work legally.

Better and cheaper access to education is a good start. But it's an extremely difficult problem. The best way to make money is to invest money, but you need to have money to do that.

Sweden is in an... interesting spot.

For the last 4 years we had a left wing government, but now we had our general election and the left and right wing are tied and the next prime minister is yet to be determined.

Sweden is a leftist experiment :)

Anyways how is it going, still without a government or have you finally found one that suits the main parties?

Attacking the problem already on the wage received is probably the most effective way to decrease the income inequality.

Higher taxes on the upper class. Just gotta start taking it back, piece by piece.

So, social darwinism then?

Better regulations.

Ban stock buybacks and bring back glass steagall.

"Laziness, and lack of ambition" being the cause of income inequality is nothing, but another naive BS talking points from the right.

Income inequality is a big problem. Especially to those with any foresight. It will continue to get worse.

Stop giving the rich tax cuts. This is one of the main driving factors of wealth inequality in The States. Trickle down economics is largely BS. Stop subsidizing obsolete industries such as coal. Guaranteed income to offset automation, and AI. Better regulations. Universal Health Care. End the war on drugs! Stop having so many damn children.

Unions that work to ensure a decent salary for blue collar workers, You need to spend money to earn money and for businesses the more people that can afford your goods the better.

Realistically speaking, not everyone is suited for higher education whether graduating from a university/college or from a trade school. Some people just lack the gifts, some lack the ambition, some do not want to do it, etc.., The saying about the world needing ditch diggers is true to a point.

Sure, but that is the problem in the first world countries, those people are bound to end up on the floor when they still want a high wage and a 35 hour work week with time off to spend with the kids, while there are millions of immigrants from 3rd world nations who are willing to work 60 hours for a bare minimum wage.

Not to mention the outsourcing to places like South America, Asia and other 3rd world nations. Where you can get 500 people for the same wage as you would give 1 in America or Europe.

So it´s all good that people like Sanders and the Democrats want to fight the uneducated worker's cause and decrease the economic inequality, but all they are doing is causing more harm.

Oh look, more social darwinism.

Im moving to California. And I'm going to buy you a beer.

I think 3D printers are going to have a sizable impact on this. Not in reducing the income gap, but reducing it's relevance. It will put the means of production into the hands of the consumers, which was the intended goal of socialism.

I think ball bearings will have a much bigger impact than 3d printers. It's all ball bearings these days.

We should distribute wealth based upon race.

So let's say there's like 500 trillion dollars. Black people get X amount. Asians get X amount. Women get X amount. Don't take their skill levels into account, just hand out randomly. Muslims get X amount. But if the Muslim abandons Islam they get nothing. Also white people don't get anything though. Why? I have no idea. This is just the shit they taught me at UC Berkeley, I wanted to question it, but didn't want to get called a racist and nazi and be harassed constantly.

ironically, race is not even a scientific reality.

which is a different society problem

With a 3D printer, you can make all the ball bearings you want in the comfort of your own home :).