7 ms·

Wow that chart is astonishing, and in the context makes the headline a little misleading. Having a such a small percent pay such a huge share is toxic. I've he

• kspaans 11y ago
  Remember that the chart only deals with income, not the net wealth of tax filers. It's probably harder to get reliable statistics on call Californians' net wealth, but I bet that would be a much more interesting graph. (I am not suggesting a California wealth tax.)
  • oldmanjay 11y ago
    Would it be interesting mainly for how much rationalization of envy it would provoke? I can't imagine what else could be drawn from it.
    • JauntTrooper 11y ago
      There'd be a lot of overlap, but it would also highlight the very wealthy that pay low taxes (likely landowners and retirees) and high earners with few assets that pay high taxes - the top 5% to 0.5% - that are often politically vocal and frustrated at their relative tax burden and the difficulty they face to accumulate wealth despite high income.
• solipsism 11y ago
  There's no magic bullet. Runaway disequilibrium takes concerted and relentless effort across a wide array of arenas. This goes for income inequality as much as it does for climate greenhouse effects. In both cases the alternative is that it goes until we hit a breaking point. The millionaires and billionaires of today are betting that this breaking point won't happen in their lifetimes. They're probably right.
  • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    But how can they do that? Effort is one thing, but this? If we use the story of the greatest such behavior in history - that of Marcus Licinus Crassus of Rome, who would not allow certain ships to land to manipulate commodity prices - I'd defy anyone to say that's even possible in the modern economy. Compared to the world now, Rome en toto was one small town. We have thousands of years of improvement on the mechanisms of Rome. The first step may be realizing that there may not be any disequilibrium per se. I'm still thinking about it, but I watched "All Watched Over For By Machines Of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis and it totally appealed to my skepticism fetish about these things. If our models are wrong ( and to some limit, all models are wrong ) , the it's (solopsistic) Hubris to complain that the world is incorrect. (ObDisclosure: I have a child who did graduate work in ecology and left it in disgust, so I'm extremely biased. I also believe firmly in Adam Smith's "Man of System" to keep myself from thinking I can solve certain problems, as a self-defense mechanism ). So here's my solopsism on the subject: - this state of affairs represents our collective revealed preferences to some fraction of 0...1. - If it is much less than half, then what makes up the rest? - we have significant policy, legal and outright cultural boilerplate to protect us from this. Why doesn't it work? - Saying "it's because people cheat" seems to me to abdicate the field. "Double down on the rule-making." But based on what? - Given the Pareto distribution, what can actually be done? This one scares me but it reeks of mathiniess. But what if it's true? At the core of it, does emergent phenomena exist or is that yet another "I give up" thing? Maybe we need a rich and operational model of rents, and base all taxation on that. Doesn't seem to even begin to address finance and financialization at all, though.
• colechristensen 11y ago
  >Having a such a small percent pay such a huge share is toxic. Having such a small percent _earn_ such a huge share is toxic.
  • simonh 11y ago
    Whining about all of societies ills being 'their' fault not 'ours' is toxic.
  • kabdib 11y ago
    ... and the solution is what? Punitive tax rates? Wage caps? Re-education camps? I don't see anything broken, other than a state government that taxes people too much for too little value in return. (Either add value, or tax lower).
    • colechristensen 11y ago
      Corporate tax structures which encourage middle class employment and things like R&D and discourage minimum wage and overpaid executives. Inequality is getting bigger and again reaching historic highs, if you don't see anything broken then your eyes are shut. The only thing that stopped the inequality which occurred around the great depression was WWII and entering into a pseudo-planned economy. So it's a problem that can correct itself, but the outcomes aren't always welcome... or peaceful.
  • pink_dinner 11y ago
    Why? Because earning and hard work is wrong? These studies also leave out all of the good jobs created by the 1% and the massive amount of taxes going back into the state from these employees. If you counted this, they are responsible for nearly all of the taxes.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • cmdrfred 11y ago
      Jobs are not created by the person hiring, they are created by the market paying for the good or service.
• jiiam 11y ago
  "Reduce inequality in income distribution" is the easiest solution that comes to mind with this respect, however I think that is is not the real problem. In truth, we are getting to the time where there will be too many people for the amount of work required by the whole humankind to possibly satisfy its needs. We should all embrace this new reality and think of a way in which people can live without working, or in other word, we should solve the economic problem [0]. [0](http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf)
  • djsumdog 11y ago
    I highly agree. We depend so much on consumerism and planned obsolescence. We cannot have infinite expansion/growth. Sooner or later we need to make things that last forever, lower the number of factories (a good thing). It needs to be a huge paradime shift. It also involves some huge technological barriers to be overcome: solving the energy problem, dealing with resource scarcity, etc. But I think if humanity is going to survive another 10,000 years -- we need to see an end to money in general. In the short term, more automation and guaranteed minimum income are a start. Not everyone needs to work. We should be able to focus more on art and culture rather than polluting the world with more plastic shit.
  • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    If the Pareto distribution is true, then "reducing income inequality" devolves to "reducing income."
  • acscott 11y ago
    Cool essay written 1930. If you get a standard income for being a citizen that gives you shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, education. You then will be working for improving the quality of those items. And there will be some people who reproduce without an economic disincentive not to. Citizenship will now be even in more demand. Workers will be motivated not out of fear of losing shelter, healthcare or food. Firing a worker will not have the responsibility of having taken food out their mouth. We already have a population that does not work. As of Mar 2016 there are 16.6 million men age 16 to 65 not disabled not in labor force, and 28.2 million women. (44.8 m total) (from: http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab6.htm http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab6.htm) A lot of those are probably those who gave up though. Many though are retired or in school. In 2014 ages 55 to 64, 13.8% were retired. (http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-4/people-who-are-not-in-the-labor-force-why-arent-they-working.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-4/people-who-are-not-in-t...) (Note I consider home responsibilities as working as you would probably have to hire someone to do those if you didn't do them yourself). In 2014, both genders age 25 to 54, 1,479,000 were retired!
• dwaltrip 11y ago
  Or we can work to help people appreciate how they would have nothing without the work of billions of humans toiling over the past 10,000 years to bring us to the modern day where they can live comfortably in a society that provides high paying jobs enjoyed by the more gifted or fortunate citizens. I say this is as someone who was in the upper 10% of CA income last year.
• hyperliner 11y ago
  One idea is to reduce the budget. There is no reason government needs to be "this big." If we did that, we would all pay less taxes (both low income and high income earners).
  • wstrange 11y ago
    Is there objective evidence that government is "too big" in all cases? When you look at health care as an example - the US seems to have a rather inefficient system when compared to single payer (government) in other western countries. I think we need to give up our dogma (capitalism == good, government == bad) - and look at the objective evidence.
• ryandrake 11y ago
  Income disequilibrium is the expected and natural result of capitalism. You're not going to solve it with band-aids.
  • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    I expect that's far from the truth. It's the expected result from something-other-than-capitalism. Mercantilism is one such. Rent-seekey K-Street lobbying is another.
    • ryandrake 11y ago
      Capitalism is essentially a system where wealth is deployed to generate income, which in turn, increases wealth, which again generates more income. Without checks and limits, the end result of this is, almost by definition, wealth concentration.
      • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
        None of that is actually true. In capitalism, market capitalism, selling someone something produces what's called "consumer surplus". The buyer receives more in utility than they spent. It's one of the few un-controversial principles of economics. There is no one story for the present apparent concentration fo wealth. We've had capitalism before such that there wasn't a lot of concentration of wealth - and the tax system wasn't always the reason. I think the reason is economic rents, and rents are specifically not capitalist.
        • mercer 11y ago
          Interesting. Would you mind elaborating a bit more?
          • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
            Russ Roberts has some ... mash note podcasts, peans to Adam Smith on EconTalk. He's much better situated to speak on it than I am. Shortly, Smith wrote "Theory of Moral Sentiments" before "Wealth". "Wealth" was a critique of Meracntilist (royal) patent systems. The short version is that capitalism has a moral founding. What we now call capitalism can be pretty amoral, but that's our doing. I'm hoping that a better understanding of rents can enable us to have a better capitalism. Principally, because I don't much think collectivism can be demonstrated to work, and collectivism is frequently seen as the answer to the excesses of what we call capitalism. If we see income from rents as less morally defensible than income from work then that's possibly a method for getting closer to what we want. As it is now, they're simply "profit". Rather than taking two binary positions - pro and anti capitalism - perhaps the work that needs to be done is a better critique of it , and a refinement of terminology. Finally, the ways in which we are unequal are much less ... physical than in the past. Capital itself has become more and more ephemeral, and it may be that returns to what I'd consider "real" capital - think a building full of lathes - is just as low as that to labor. So much inequality is due to the abstraction of control of capital.