What would you want to happen to diminish income inequality in the USA

[Trunkage]

Pestilence, plague, war, and famine.

I mean, three of those will be cured by better income distribution. Food turns up where the money is, we have more than enough food for the whole entire world. But it’s more cost effective to destroy food than send it to places that need it but don’t have enough money. A lot of diseaseS would eased if people could afford health care. I don’t know if had specific difference between plague and pestilences, but for Covid, this whole process would a lot simpler if we could afford testing kits and not rely on governments, everyone would be happier.

Some of this may require other tweaks (eg. Fast tracking FDAapprovals which would reduce costs) but the government wouldn’t have to be so involved if the average person could afford medical care

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

The abolishment of private enterprise.

 

[Agema]

I understand the idea, but I disagree with it. Like, if everyone got the same income exactly, would everyone be equally likely to achieve their dreams?

Reductio ad absurdam. No-one suggests a society where everyone has the same income. Not even the Eastern bloc communists had that.

Would nobody ever be homeless or hungry? Would everyone's health issues be equally provided for? i don't believe any of those things would be fixed just by distributing money. People would still succeed or fail in different ways.

You can't save everyone from themselves. But you can minimise the systemic influence on success and failure. The point of looking at social mobility is that it tells you to what extent systemic factors influence people's ability to develop. In a simple way, you could imagine it as a race where the rich have to do a 100m sprint, the middle class a 100 metre hurdles, and the poor a 100 metre obstacle course. The poor have to work harder and be better to do as well as the rich, and are far more vulnerable to setbacks and failures.

You want to talk about achieving dreams? Inequality stunts dreams. It stunts attainment, and it even stunts the ambition to attain. It's not enough to say that theoretically anyone can make it, it's how many people actually do. In a sense, I could tolerate income inequality, as long as a sufficient minimum existed for the people at the bottom that it did not equate to a large structural difference in ability to achieve. But that's not the reality out there currently.

 

[tstorm823]

By definition, no you can't.

Yes, you can. Can you really not imagine an egalitarian nation experiencing a famine?

I mean, three of those will be cured by better income distribution. Food turns up where the money is, we have more than enough food for the whole entire world. But it’s more cost effective to destroy food than send it to places that need it but don’t have enough money. A lot of diseaseS would eased if people could afford health care. I don’t know if had specific difference between plague and pestilences, but for Covid, this whole process would a lot simpler if we could afford testing kits and not rely on governments, everyone would be happier.

Some of this may require other tweaks (eg. Fast tracking FDAapprovals which would reduce costs) but the government wouldn’t have to be so involved if the average person could afford medical care

Food doesn't just show up where the money is. Food deserts exist where populations aren't high enough to justify a grocery store. Children of neglectful parents go hungry. Seniors who lack mobility are frequently served by food assistance programs. Income equality doesn't solve those problems. We have food banks, we have food stamps, we have lots of things to feed the hungry. The difficulty is not in financing them, it's in the logistics. Many people who are poor are so for a reason, and the same roadblocks are there if they have more income. We're going to fight the things that lead to poverty regardless of whether people have money because poverty is just one symptom.

Some healthcare isn't affordable, period. Some people will have health issues that actually cost millions to fight. If everyone had the same income, nearly all of the people bankrupted by medical bills would still be bankrupted by medical bills. That people get care anyway is a good thing. Modern society cares for people who could never possibly pay for it. Income equality is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve that issue. Why be distracted by it?

You can't save everyone from themselves. But you can minimise the systemic influence on success and failure.

But would you rather work towards minimizing the systemic influence on success and failure, or work on actually improving everyone's lives? America focused on the latter over the course of the 20th century, and the whole world benefited.

Real example: some groups effectively had a headstart towards a sars-cov-II vaccine. Is that fair and equal? No. Is it better for all of humanity? Very much yes.

 

[Buyetyen]

Yes, you can. Can you really not imagine an egalitarian nation experiencing a famine?

If the standard you measure your success of a society by is a state of catastrophe, then you've set the bar very low.

Food doesn't just show up where the money is. Food deserts exist where populations aren't high enough to justify a grocery store. Children of neglectful parents go hungry. Seniors who lack mobility are frequently served by food assistance programs. Income equality doesn't solve those problems. We have food banks, we have food stamps, we have lots of things to feed the hungry. The difficulty is not in financing them, it's in the logistics. Many people who are poor are so for a reason, and the same roadblocks are there if they have more income. We're going to fight the things that lead to poverty regardless of whether people have money because poverty is just one symptom.

How does this justify not paying people what they're worth?

Some healthcare isn't affordable, period. Some people will have health issues that actually cost millions to fight. If everyone had the same income, nearly all of the people bankrupted by medical bills would still be bankrupted by medical bills. That people get care anyway is a good thing. Modern society cares for people who could never possibly pay for it. Income equality is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve that issue. Why be distracted by it?

You approve of medical bankruptcy? You think it is a moral positive in society that people can have their lives ruined trying to pay for life-saving medicine?

But would you rather work towards minimizing the systemic influence on success and failure, or work on actually improving everyone's lives? America focused on the latter over the course of the 20th century, and the whole world benefited.

Why are those two things mutually exclusive?

Real example: some groups effectively had a headstart towards a sars-cov-II vaccine. Is that fair and equal? No. Is it better for all of humanity? Very much yes.

How are vaccines analogous to living wages?

 

[SupahEwok]

Many people who are poor are so for a reason, and the same roadblocks are there if they have more income.

Look dude, you can just say poor people deserve to be poor rather than hiding it, we can all see your stance on this.

 

[Agema]

But would you rather work towards minimizing the systemic influence on success and failure, or work on actually improving everyone's lives? America focused on the latter over the course of the 20th century, and the whole world benefited.

This is just a false dichotomy.

 

[Agema]

Income equality doesn't solve those problems.

You're right, public services can also help make up the difference. If you want to advocate taxing the public - chiefly by necessity the affluent - to provide public services for the poor, that's a reasonable alternative. In many cases, public services are effectively an income transfer to the household. Socialised healthcare, for instance, equates to giving every individual the value of comprehensive private healthcare insurance that would otherwise buy.

Of course, well selected public services can also provide more room for people on low incomes to earn. Better childcare services, for instance, improves the ability of parents to work. Better public transport increases the ability of people to get to jobs. The state can pay for skills training to help people to improve their employability. All manner of societal interventions to improve communities and the human development or people within them, and so on. We could take drugs: many models suggest that the best way to deal with addiction are rehabilitation programs rather than dumping them in the slammer for years.

If incomes for the poor go up, public services can potentially go down. These days places like the USA and UK have massive welfare systems of income credits which go to working households. In large part, these have developed because income growth amongst the poor has not kept pace with the nation. Rather than tackling low incomes, the state has stepped in to make up the difference. In a sense, it could even be viewed as a state subsidy to employers in terms of their labour costs.

 

[Silvanus]

You said there were 320 000 homeless people in the UK, the UK has a population of 66 millions! That's less than 0.5%, you could literally give all of them 80 000 euro a year and the statistic would barely reflect it, they're rounding error and you don't fix huge societal problem by worrying about rounding error.

They're people. If we as a country have any interest in addressing inequality, that will necessarily involve improving the situation for those who are worst off. If you address policy only towards the largest groups, you'll fail to address inequality in any meaningful way.

Between problems affecting 95% of the population and one affecting 0.5%, I think it's obvious which one should receive more attention, especially when helping the 95% will help some of the 0.5%.

"More" attention? It's not an either-or situation; that's a false dichotomy. One does not preclude the other.

Because, yes, 1-2 year is transient, unless you believe human lifespan is 1-2 year, so eventually they'll move out of being homeless, at which point they'll need to rent/buy a house, which means the price of housing will become important.

What nonsense. By that standard, absolutely everything is "transient", in which case, why use it as a determining factor?

Land availability is extremely scarce because the land in downtown London is not the same land as the one in the middle of nowhere, otherwise the price would be the same everywhere. People aren't stupid, they don't pay London house price because they don't know if they moved away it would be cheaper, they do so because it allow them to live the life they want to (usually related to them working in London). People become much richer when they live in large city, but they need to actually be able to do so, which is limited by the housing cost (ie supply).

Here's a breakdown of the typical budget of household in the UK (https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-uk-household-budget), you'll notice housing is #2 at 11%, but number 1 is transport, which is also related to housing (people who live far away from work and need to commute), together they make up 25%. By making housing much cheaper you'd lower both of these value and all the exatra money would be able to go elsewhere, greatly imporving people quality of life, which is the ultimate goal of reducing inequality, so even if that wouldn't reduce inequality (it would since easier access to properties would let people go from renting to owning house which would help them become richer) people would live better life.

Right. But none of this actually speaks to the necessity of vast building projects, let alone building upward. Forcing those tens of thousands of empty residences to be put to use, or repurposing the commercial buildings, would address the issue of scarcity much more quickly and cost-effectively regardless of whether the scheme is ultimately targeted towards reducing homelessness or reducing housing costs foremost.

Land cannot be said to be "scarce" when there is more than enough for our purposes sitting empty.

 

[Sneed's SeednFeed]

I disagree with your concept of poverty to begin with. Having less money relative to someone else is frankly a stupid way to measure poverty. You can have a society of all well off people and still have class division, you can also have a society of perfect equality where people starve to death. There are some practical downsides to wealth inequality in economic inefficiencies and social resentment, but measuring the problem of poverty based on whether or not rich people exist is nonsense.

You are so right comrade, I see you read your Imperialism well - it is not enough to be Bernsteinians, simply giving everyone the same amount of wealth is a social democrat's solution that does nothing to destroy the class structure that generates actual material, not currency inequalities. To abolish questions of income equity, we need to abolish the wage-labour system to begin with!

 

[tstorm823]

You approve of medical bankruptcy? You think it is a moral positive in society that people can have their lives ruined trying to pay for life-saving medicine?

Do you know what bankruptcy is, legally? It's a process by which people are relieved of their debts. Why would I not approve of a process to relieve medical debt? It's a current matter of controversy that you can't use bankruptcy on student loans. Since when is it something we're against?

Look dude, you can just say poor people deserve to be poor rather than hiding it, we can all see your stance on this.

I'm saying the complete opposite right now. I'm saying there are real reasons, real disadvantages that lead to poverty, and equalizing incomes wouldn't fix those. You can be 100% broke with nothing to your name, but if you're physically capable, mentally sound, proficient in communication, free from addiction, and make the right contact, you'll be on your feet in a snap. The permanently poor are likely so because they lack one or more of those things, often through no fault of their own, and handing out paychecks isn't gonna fix that. People leaning on need-based assistance is viewed by people on both sides of the argument as some societal deficiency, like if we just had the perfect system there'd be no poor to need these things, and that's just not true.

You're right, public services can also help make up the difference. If you want to advocate taxing the public - chiefly by necessity the affluent - to provide public services for the poor, that's a reasonable alternative. In many cases, public services are effectively an income transfer to the household. Socialised healthcare, for instance, equates to giving every individual the value of comprehensive private healthcare insurance that would otherwise buy.

Of course, well selected public services can also provide more room for people on low incomes to earn. Better childcare services, for instance, improves the ability of parents to work. Better public transport increases the ability of people to get to jobs. The state can pay for skills training to help people to improve their employability. All manner of societal interventions to improve communities and the human development or people within them, and so on. We could take drugs: many models suggest that the best way to deal with addiction are rehabilitation programs rather than dumping them in the slammer for years.

If incomes for the poor go up, public services can potentially go down. These days places like the USA and UK have massive welfare systems of income credits which go to working households. In large part, these have developed because income growth amongst the poor has not kept pace with the nation. Rather than tackling low incomes, the state has stepped in to make up the difference. In a sense, it could even be viewed as a state subsidy to employers in terms of their labour costs.

I'm amenable to most of this. Socialized healthcare is an awkward topic because people have an all or nothing mentality about it. Public systems typically either provide just common elements, like we build roads but don't pay for gas or build people parking lots, or they focus on where the need is greatest, which is something like Medicaid. Some combination of those two perspectives is probably plenty, but the Medicare perspective of the government managing everything for everyone has taken hold and wont let got. Plenty of nations have combined public/private systems that function better than the US health system on one extreme or something like the NHS on the other, that saying I'm for or against socialized medicine in a simple sentence would be a mistake either way.

And if you want to view public services as a subsidy to business, that's fine. To be really nitpicky, I don't like the use of the word employers because some people use employers specificly to conjure the image of specific people sucking up the money at the top, but businesses are a public good that I have no problem encouraging. Nor do I mind taxing the rich significantly. But not for the goal of income equality, just out of practical necessity that you can't take from those who don't have. This is the system we have established. That is the status quo.

 

[Buyetyen]

Do you know what bankruptcy is, legally? It's a process by which people are relieved of their debts. Why would I not approve of a process to relieve medical debt? It's a current matter of controversy that you can't use bankruptcy on student loans. Since when is it something we're against?

So yes, you do approve of charging people everything they have for life-saving medicine?

 

[tstorm823]

So yes, you do approve of charging people everything they have for life-saving medicine?

If that's what the medicine costs. Would you rather make the incentive to give people cheap crap instead? You approve of avoiding life-saving medicine based on expense?

 

[Buyetyen]

If that's what the medicine costs.

Your unnecessary hostility aside, why is medicine worth more than the lives it's supposed to be saving? Why is this a preferable system to a single payer healthcare system?

 

[Sneed's SeednFeed]

If that's what the medicine costs. Would you rather make the incentive to give people cheap crap instead? You approve of avoiding life-saving medicine based on expense?

You assume that the price going into the costs of medicine reflects its effectiveness and not something arbitrary, like say, market values decided by patents and insurance premiums. The same medicine is cheaper elsewhere in the world with no differences in the manufacturing processes.

2019 Medicine Price Index

Data-driven analysis of the costs of 13 prevalent medicines in 50 countries worldwide. Medicines esearched include Viagra, Xanax, and Prozac among others.

www.medbelle.com

 

[tstorm823]

Your unnecessary hostility aside, why is medicine worth more than the lives it's supposed to be saving? Why is this a preferable system to a single payer healthcare system?

You do understand, you started a sentence saying I'm unnecessarily hostile, and then ended it with an accusatory question, right? A question framed as "why do you think X?" isn't actually a question, it's an accusation. And while there is a time and place where accusations are appropriate, they're never not hostile. That question is more hostile than any goofy turnabout argument.

Medicine isn't worth more than the lives it's supposed to be saving. Medicine is sometimes worth more than the finances of the people being saved. When you get to things like transplants or people with rare genetic problems, some medical care is just beyond what an average salary could pay for. People don't require uniform levels of care. Even if every person had the same income and the same lifestyle, some people would still find themselves unable to afford their healthcare. A single payer system would spread out that burden, sure, but we already have systems that allow people to receive care that can't feasibly be budgeted.

You assume that the price going into the costs of medicine reflects its effectiveness and not something arbitrary, like say, market values decided by patents and insurance premiums. The same medicine is cheaper elsewhere in the world with no differences in the manufacturing processes.

I'm not assuming that. I have been saying for years that the US has the worst parts of every system at the same time. My criticism of the ACA is that it took all those worst aspects and mandated them by law (with a couple fluff benefits thrown in to make people think it helped). I don't want socialized healthcare, but anything's probably better than a mandatory private insurance system. It's not just market forces, patents, and premiums. It's monopolistic practices, hidden third parties, bureaucracy that would make Congress blush, and plenty of government mandates tossed on top. It' really sucks. But a couple things:

a) Even eliminating some of America's stupid on healthcare prices, some things really are expensive. It isn't all price gouging, we genuinely sink a ton of resources collectively into the development, implementation, and delivery of healthcare, and priced appropriately, some people can't afford what they need without assistance.
b) If you're trying to lower the individual burden of health expenses on people, you are making income equality even less relevant. Which is sort of my point.

 

[Buyetyen]

You do understand, you started a sentence saying I'm unnecessarily hostile, and then ended it with an accusatory question, right? A question framed as "why do you think X?" isn't actually a question, it's an accusation. And while there is a time and place where accusations are appropriate, they're never not hostile. That question is more hostile than any goofy turnabout argument.

I'll take this as a tacit admission that you know when you're being hostile and accusatory, you just don't care.

Medicine isn't worth more than the lives it's supposed to be saving. Medicine is sometimes worth more than the finances of the people being saved..

Functionally that is the same thing, but fine. Why should medicine be worth more than the people who need it can afford?

 

[tstorm823]

I'll take this as a tacit admission that you know when you're being hostile and accusatory, you just don't care.

The real question is, do you know when you're being hostile?

Functionally that is the same thing, but fine. Why should medicine be worth more than the people who need it can afford?

Because it is? Because we make treatments that market forces never would. We strive to heal all wounds and cure all diseases, and we compensate the people working on these things for doing so. In circumstances where you have people dedicating their lives to a developing a specific treatment, the people who recieve that treatment could never repay that gift in the abstract sense. The concrete sense is no different. If you have a single payer health system, the cost and value of that treatment didn't change. The value of something that had to be made and administered isn't just determined by the finances of someone who needs it. That's fantasy.

 

[Buyetyen]

Because it is? Because we make treatments that market forces never would. We strive to heal all wounds and cure all diseases, and we compensate the people working on these things for doing so. In circumstances where you have people dedicating their lives to a developing a specific treatment, the people who recieve that treatment could never repay that gift in the abstract sense. The concrete sense is no different. If you have a single payer health system, the cost and value of that treatment didn't change. The value of something that had to be made and administered isn't just determined by the finances of someone who needs it. That's fantasy.

Again, I ask why? Why is the work worth more than the lives it saves? If you make medicine too expensive for someone, you are saying that person is not worth saving. Saying, "Just because," isn't an answer. It's a refusal to answer. You talk about compensation, but in the way Martin Shkreli did to justify price gouging. You say people could never repay the debt of their lives in the abstract sense, then expect them to die for it in the literal sense. But you don't ask why we consider that a debt, why are commodifying existence itself. Why is health not a right?

 

[ralfy]

Pre-1980s regulation of the finance industry and much lower per capita resource consumption.