How much wealth inequality is OK?

>>139516755
The idea is that if taxes are low the companies don't run away from the contry with their capitals and go in some tax paradise outside the ocean.

If taxes are lower services and products may cost less, then who has the capitals will spend them more for luxuries inside the country, that will create more jobs and their capitals will be distribuited inside the country because the riches (their kids or their bitches) will be more encorauged to spend them, and to boost economy doing it.

Bare in mind that the lowest quintile on that chart is not the same people in 1979 as in 2006.

In 1979 it was white lower class workers, now it's almost all browns who immigrated in the past 20-30 years

>>139517181
Legit debate here. Not trying to be a know it all, but that sounds like trickle down economics. Is it really reasonable to believe that what the ultra-rich spend on "luxuries" will actually drive the economy? If the wealth of the top 1% doubles, are they really going to spend twice as much on goods and services? Isn't it more likely that they will spend maybe 5-10% more and keep the rest generating more wealth for themselves? Wealth that has to come from somewhere btw.

what do you propose be done about it

>>139516755
Any inequality that exists is ok
The ridiculous inequality we have nowdays is cause by governments either directly helping big corporations or regulating the market, indirectly helping them cause no competition

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>>139516755
>wealth inequality

The middle class exists due to the pareto distribution of the top 1% Shoveling money into different economic classes will do nothing, encouraging welfare for the poor is even worse; 1. welfare removes the incentive to provide for your family, 2. raising the minimum wage will cause more unemployment, some people are not worth 15$ an hour, so employers will just hire illegals. Raising taxes on the rich will just make the rich move their money to tax-free banks, which in turn will just make the middle class suffer, and eventually dissipate into a vaguely mishmash of people who you can just barely separate from the poor.

Imo the best thing to do is to break up monopolies into smaller institutions to create more diverse Pareto distributions, this includes government institutions, like the IRS, create tax collecting organizations localized to every state.

>>139518906
Rarely money are kept as deposit, it is spent or invested somewhere.
A "statalist" idea is that the state should take those money and invest itself, a "liberist/libertarian" idea is that privates will allocate the resouce in a better way.

I don't know if it better one system or another, but primarely lower taxation is wanted to avoid the escape of capitals and business in other countries.
Many italian companies (industries and services) have fled in Romania, Poland, UK or Netherlands because they have much lower taxation, and it was a real drama for Italian society and economy.

>>139519120
I'm not exactly sure, which is why I ask the question. I tend to agree with >>139519145 and >>139519971. I think the main problem is that the more money and power you get, the more you can influence the rules in your favor. I think the government's primary role in the economy is to make sure that the rules are fair and enforced equally on everyone. Hopefully that would result in an equilibrium between absolute equality and runaway wealth inequality, but idk. Someone always shows up on 4chan with some new info or way of thinking that I had never considered.

>>139516755

The question depends on your ethics: utilitarian or rights-based. I.e. collectivism vs. individualism. Naturally the financial losers will tend to favour collectivism and the winners minarchism. Yet even the winners will mostly support some government spending to maintain social cohesion, and out of empathy.

Then the next step is how to address it? We want to get rid of unfair inequalities while allowing people to keep what they earn through honesty, productive work.

So lets say you get rid of government cronyism and various corporate loopholes/malpractices. I doubt it will change inequality all that much. Even the top 5% earns way more than the bottom 50% (and pay correspondingly more taxes). The first issue is that there are way more stupid people around who can't into modern economies. They are mostly not victims either; they consume tonnes of welfare and get to fuck and party and watch TV while Edmond and Chang learn differential equations. The second issue is that the modern economy rewards intelligence and initiative way more than ever. Before an IQ 100 and IQ 150 person had pretty much the same capacity to be economically productive. In 2017, as a genius, you can write a python script that uses machine learning libraries and APIs to scan twitter for posts about accidents, scrapes their info, cold calls them and connects them to a contractor in India who takes their details, forwards it to a law company who will represent them, and you take the cut for the referral. All the while Joe Sixpack has trouble taking the =AVERAGE in Excel for two columns at once before lunch-time, and Jamal can't into prepositions and subclauses. The third issue is that scaling an enterprise is super easy once you have good momentum and backers, and its possible to corner the market (Google, Facebook, etc). This last problem can be ameliorated by removing hurdles for small businesses and perhaps scaling corporate tax/regulations to be proportional to company size/age.