Income Inequality

[C-Mag]

I think we had a thread on the DCF on Income Inequality. What is the opinion here?

Is a a non issue?

If not;

What made the trend change?
Can you fix it?

Yeah, I can fix it. But you're going to have to give me the powers of an Old Roman Dictator for a few years. You have to pass my Dictator Mandate, before I tell you what I am going to do to fix it.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I think that it is an issue without an easy solution. It's complicated.

The tech revolution completely changed the relationship between pay and productivity. Just because I can now do things on a computer in 1/100th the time it used to take my using paper and pencil doesn't mean I should now get paid 100x as much.

Yes, it absolutely does mean that. Productivity is the measure of Revenue generated per employee. Your employer is gaining 100x the amount of revenue from your work, yet you are being paid the same. If there's no connection between that, then why bother learning new skills? This is why we have 'skill inflation' - you have to be MUCH more learned to fulfill the same function, for the same pay, as what your father did. Not only that, but you're taking on DEBT to get that learning.

This is why we have megacorps now, and "elites". It has little or nothing to do with tax policy. If people ever wake up and realize this en masse, we will see burning banks and bodies on lampposts.

[Ex-California]

It's the biggest issue in our society, IMO. And I don't think anything is going to stop it, so long as our politics are distracted by social issues.

This is how civilizations collapse.

You can trace the political history, and see how it changed. 1981 = Ronald Reagan and "Trickle Down" BS, along with the birth of the modern GOP and redefinition of the term "Conservative". Then Clinton manages to fuck a duck and remove financial controls like Glass-Steagal, and the brakes are removed. We hurtle into corporate madness, and dot-com bust happens in 2000. Then Bushie 2 does the same thing, letting the banks go apeshit with mortgage lending. We crash hard in 2008, and Obama bails out the banksters with our money.

All of this was enabled by the tech revolution, exponentially increasing worker productivity, and covering up the fact that workers are paid a fraction of what they were for what they do. So, corporate-backed politicians tell them it's their fault, and social issues, and some nonsense about the Constitution dictating that corporations should reign supreme, lest we become Communists.

Now the nation is broke, the citizens are broke, and a few fatcats control everything. Let freedom ring.

What is your definition of broke?

Broke = heavily indebted, unable to invest in anything new, beholden to creditors and hoping to "get by" as a best-case scenario.

The vast majority of all of us are wage serfs

[Speaker to Animals]

Stop being wage serfs, then. The internet provides some options.

Hell, if you go freelance as a software developer or something, you can go live and work out of Bocas del Toro. You could take a huge pay cut and still live okay there.

Or you can go into business for yourselves, but I suspect if you guys did that you'd change your tune about the evil businesses right quick.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Stop being wage serfs, then. The internet provides some options.

Hell, if you go freelance as a software developer or something, you can go live and work out of Bocas del Toro. You could take a huge pay cut and still live okay there.

Or you can go into business for yourselves, but I suspect if you guys did that you'd change your tune about the evil businesses right quick.

There's no conceivable business that I'd actually want to run, given the risk to the well-being of my family, the insane difficulty of getting enough credit, the regulations involved, and the impossibility of competing with corporations.

Remove those issues, and I'd just grow and sell food from home. I'd be a farmer.

[Speaker to Animals]

Stop being wage serfs, then. The internet provides some options.

Hell, if you go freelance as a software developer or something, you can go live and work out of Bocas del Toro. You could take a huge pay cut and still live okay there.

Or you can go into business for yourselves, but I suspect if you guys did that you'd change your tune about the evil businesses right quick.

There's no conceivable business that I'd actually want to run, given the risk to the well-being of my family, the insane difficulty of getting enough credit, the regulations involved, and the impossibility of competing with corporations.

Remove those issues, and I'd just grow and sell food from home. I'd be a farmer.

So if you took on that risk, including the uncertainty of cyclical trends on your revenue, how would you feel about employees deciding they deserve a huge percentage of your revenue, when you may or may not even be turning a profit, because "productivity"?

It's not that I don't sympathize with your argument, but I suspect running a business like that is not as profitable as many on the left imagine.

When you are talking about a huge corporation, sure. But those are no longer acceptable places for a man to work unless he is temporarily trapped in it.

[clubgop]

I am still waiting for the Beanie-Baby market to come back around so I can offload my warehouse of Mystic Unicorns.

I am 50/50 on whether this a joke or not.

[Speaker to Animals]

Pretty sure it's despair masked as a joke.

[apeman]

There's no conceivable business that I'd actually want to run, given the risk to the well-being of my family, the insane difficulty of getting enough credit, the regulations involved, and the impossibility of competing with corporations.

Remove those issues, and I'd just grow and sell food from home. I'd be a farmer.

This is called romanticizing poverty.

[C-Mag]

Stop being wage serfs, then.

The landscape is not easy. But it's still true in America that if you are willing to work harder than the other guy, you can rise above being a wage serf.

I hate to bring Trump into this, but it's the most available example. Trump won the presidency because he out worked Hillary and was not bound by conventional thinking. While the rest of the GOP saw the Rust Belt as just what the Dems told them it was, a Big Blue Wall, Trump saw opportunity. Then he went in there and outworked her.

Same, same for the average person. If you are willing to look hard for opportunities and outwork the average person you can succeed. But the mind set Meritocracy is no longer talked about, looked at like a virtue or valued in this country. What is sold to us is an easy life, with lots of entertainment and hard work is devalued.