11 ms·

Revised estimates of the share of national income going to top earners

77 points by clumsysmurf 10y ago

blisterpeanuts 10y ago
I'd like Prof. Gordon to break down the skyrocketing 1% incomes by profession. Wasn't most of it due to high tech? His chart shows the disparity dramatically widening starting in the mid-80s, which is precisely when the microcomputer revolution was accelerating. The 1990s saw a booming stock market and the minting of thousands of new millionaires and dozens of billionaires as well. These stock-rich technology entrepreneurs should be seen not as an exploitative class to be feared and countered, but rather as a sign of successful capitalism at its finest, brilliant new ideas that have changed the world and vastly expanded the major Western economies with new modalities for doing our work, communicating, and nearly everything else.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  Not really. Globalism allowed management to get rich without having to share much or any of the pie with anyone else by outsourcing and shipping manufacturing to low-cost no-regulation jurisdictions. Massively lower taxes reduced the redistribution effect, accelerating the accumulation of capital to the top. A global capitalist economy can't survive 90% crushed labor, 9% upper-middle, and 1% who own almost everything. Those conditions eventually lead to revolution. Or rather it would be more accurate to say those conditions have historically led to unrest, collapse, and/or revolution. Why would future generations feel any loyalty to their nation or this system if they're barely making ends meet while they watch billionaires cut their own taxes to make themselves richer and shift more of the burden of maintaining society on the poor and shrinking middle class? None of this is good for the startup ecosystem. Fewer consumers with money to spend means less customers and less advertising targets. That's the problem with capital accumulating at the top: without customers there are fewer and fewer legitimate investments that have any yield so capital is forced to make increasingly reckless investments or do the equivalent of stuffing the money under a mattress. None of that is putting capital to useful work.
  - nine_k 10y ago
    Globalization did bring visible growth of wealth to the bottom-of-the-ladder guys like factory workers. Only it did so in places like China, Vietnam, and other manufacture outsourcing destinations.
  - blisterpeanuts 10y ago
    But I'm talking about software and high tech hardware that only migrated to Asian factories late in the cycle.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Yeah but it's not like that's been the only growth sector in the economy, now is it?
- adwhit 10y ago
  One of the points Piketty makes in his book is that the rich generally aren't the heroic creative geniuses of Ayn Rand's imagination. Most wealth is inherited. Wealth grows faster than the economy at large. The rich get richer. They spend their money lobbying for lower tax rates, and they get them. They lobby for privatization, and they get them. They lobby for monopolies and patents and bailouts, and they get them. Interesting to note that half the population are no richer than they were almost 50 years ago.
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    'course Ayn Rand's imagination is mostly horribly vindictive genocidal assholes...
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Going from $0 to $1M? Nearly impossible. Going from $1M to $2M? Nearly inevitable.
  - blisterpeanuts 10y ago
    Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Zuck et al didn't inherit their wealth.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      One of the points Piketty makes in his book is that the rich generally aren't the heroic creative geniuses of Ayn Rand's imagination. 1. There are always going to be outliers, but most people are going to be closer to the middle of a normal distribution. 2. The examples you mention were all excellent entrepreneurs, but they were also a bit lucky with timing and social position; Jobs' adoptive parents were blue-collar workers but none of these future industrialists grew up in poverty. If we could reduce the latter a bit we might have even more of the former.
    - Namrog84 10y ago
      They also didn't start at the absolute bottom. Most of them had an above average hand to start with.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
For the paper: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2016.pdf http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2016.pdf I'd like to see coverage of it from a more neutral source.
yetanotheracc 10y ago
So the share of income going to the top 1% has increased to new heights during the Obama presidency, yet the election of Trump - as opposed to his rival who was expected to continue Obama's policies - is seen as irrational?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Trump planned to cut taxes bigly for the wealthy. Clinton planned to raise taxes moderately for the wealthy, but supported globalization policies which created that wealth in the first place.
- JDiculous 10y ago
  Trump's tax plan is more favorable to the wealthy than Hillary's
  - jeffdavis 10y ago
    What makes you believe that? If you look below the surface, that's far from clear.
    - JDiculous 10y ago
      Income tax rates under Trump's tax plan are clearly more favorable to the wealthy than what we have now or what they would've been under Hillary. http://www.clark.com/tax-calculator-clinton-trump http://www.clark.com/tax-calculator-clinton-trump
    - gjm11 10y ago
      Would you care to be more specific?
- Glyptodon 10y ago
  From that perspective neither mainstream candidate made any sense.
readams 10y ago
People continue to focus on income inequality and ignore wealth inequality. Income is a terrible way understand inequality and also not a good way to compare how inequality is changing, since the really rich people increase their wealth in ways other than income. The bizarre focus on income means that we set our sights on a weird slice of upper middle class professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc.) while ignoring totally the real rich people.
- Retric 10y ago
  Capital without income is not particularly useful. The problem is we use the IRS definition of income ignoring unrealized gains which distorts the income perspective for the top 1% / 0.01%.
  - readams 10y ago
    Yes, exactly. Rich people increase their wealth primarily through unrealized capital gains. It's very safe for Warren Buffet to proclaim he wants tax rates increased because this barely affects him at all.
    - tormeh 10y ago
      I think Warren Buffet actually was talking about capital gains tax. Warren Buffet is old, famous and rich. He's basically won the material game. He doesn't care about taxes, I would guess.
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        Indeed, he's generally talking about the basket of federal taxes when he makes those comparisons: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-...
    - loeg 10y ago
      Buffet realizes millions of dollars in income each year and gives much of it to charity. He gives billions more to charity not in the form of income.[0] > “My 2015 return shows adjusted gross income of $11,563,931,” he revealed. “My deductions totaled $5,477,694.” About two-thirds of those represented charitable contributions, he said. Most of the rest were related to Mr. Buffett’s state income tax payments. > As it turns out, the charitable contributions that Mr. Buffett did deduct from his income make up just a tiny portion of the more than $2.85 billion he donated to charity last year, he said. [0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/business/buffett-calls-trumps-bluff-and-releases-his-tax-return.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/business/buffett-calls-tru...
dlo 10y ago
I wish they'd just put the data online for us to look at.
- nod 10y ago
  Well, the three visualizations in the article all use Tableau Public, and you can download them yourself and play with the data.
- mooreds 10y ago
  Have you checked here? http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 Not sure if that gets you what you are looking for.
  - dlo 10y ago
    Good call. Thanks!
- return0 10y ago
  Piketty's data for all countries is available here (does not include this latest batch yet): http://www.wid.world/ http://www.wid.world/
- pesenti 10y ago
  There is a link to it in the article: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/ http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/
logicallee 10y ago
How can we keep people from creating an online business and reaching 2 billion Internet-connected people - if you make it legal to pay for a Google adwords campaign, dirty capitalists can start with just $100 - even if you take all of their money and jail them for being capitalists, when they're out if prison they can save up that much money working at a McDonald's - and roll it up from there. They can keep reinvesting it and growing wealth. Then they can raise VC money at a valuation of $10 million. Even if you tax it at 90% to try to put an end to it, you will only slow it down. Should people engaged in capitalism be murdered by the state? I don't see any other solution to inequality. (obviously this is not a serious comment, but please respond as though it were - or address my point. It is literally possible to spin up online businesses from $100 and consistent reinvestment. This creates inequality between the people doing it and the people not doing it. solution?)
- scarecrowbob 10y ago
  You may be overoptimistic about the outcomes of folks saving up from working at McDonalds, but maybe you're not 'srs' about that thought. Being entrepreneurial in itself is not Capitalism, which relies on arranging a system so that private ownership production of production leads to the private ownership of profits generated by laborers. On the face of it, though, making it difficult for private groups to have enough cash to make $10M bets on small enterprises is not impossible for a state. I'm not advocating it, but to take your statment 'srsly' you're overlooking that aspect of the situation.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    Yes I'm serious. (*EDIT: obviously I'm not serious that we should jail people for engaging in capitalism, or take away everyone's money, that is sarcasm.) If we were to take away people's money and put them in prison to teach them a lesson about "engaging in capitalism", they can serve their term; then they can go on Hacker News, open a blog, announce a new project, raise funds for it, and become rich. This is almost literally the process by which huge, vast swathes of inequity are created. Mark Cuban's parents immigrated from Russia with the name Chabenisky. Sergei Brin is literally a Soviet-born engineer. How do you stop him from accumulating his current net worth of $39.2 billion -- which literally means he has $5.00 for every man, woman, and child on Earth, of any age, anywhere. That is inequality in action. It's dynastic inequality. How do you stop it? Shut down the Internet?
fisherjeff 10y ago
Am I the only one a little frustrated by the groupings here? I'd prefer that it was in raw percentiles rather than something like average of percentiles. Seems like the very lowest incomes drag the bottom 50% down and the highest incomes inflate the averages of the upper percentiles. Not to say that I don't think the current state of income and wealth inequality aren't troublesome, it's just that in this case when they say, e.g., "top 10%", what they really mean is something closer to "95th percentile".
- pesenti 10y ago
  It makes the results much more striking, even more at the top than the bottom, but not necessarily in a bad way. Raw percentiles aren't representative (e.g, knowing that the bottom 50% makes $50K and lower doesn't tell the full picture). I do think that using "median" rather than "average" would be better (though a bit trivial, median of "top 10%" is the raw 95th percentile). Also, by using "average" it is possible to match them directly to the "share of total wealth" numbers.
- breischl 10y ago
  I also thought that "average of the bottom 50%" was a weird metric. Seems like using the 25th percentile would make more sense. And there could be a significant difference between that and the mean-of-the-lower-half.
jknoepfler 10y ago
Please stop using means when describing percentile data. I understand the desire to demonize a catchy sounding demographic, but the vast majority of the "top 1%" don't have an annual income anywhere approaching 1m/yr.
curiousgal 10y ago
>top earners Kinda ironic.
bluetwo 10y ago
The question articles like this never get around to asking is: What would "fair" look like? The data is never going to be flat. That would mean the top earners and the lowest earners had identical incomes. Call that what you want but that's not a free economy.
- devilsavocado 10y ago
  Picketty's book does at least attempt to address this. He proposes a switch from income tax to wealth tax. He shows that most inequality is a result of the growth of existing wealth (most of which was inherited). Taxing wealth instead of income can help reverse, or at least stop the increasing levels of inequality. A very small percentage of wealth would need to be taxed to accomplish this.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    Such a wealth tax existed in Nordic countries in the late 20th century, at least. Wealth taxes in Sweden and Finland were eliminated around 2005 because capital gains tax was considered more equitable to various wealth classes and more easily administrated. The wealth tax laws had become a nest of loopholes that brought in relatively little income in the end. It would be interesting to see a new wealth tax designed for the digital era.
    - devilsavocado 10y ago
      There are still a few countries with wealth taxes[0]. I'm not sure if they work well or not for these countries. Picketty doesn't spend to much time on the subject of existing wealth taxes. He is more focused on a global wealth tax, which is much more ambitious. Something that would need to be designed for the digital era indeed. Amusing find from the linked article: Back in 1999 Trump proposed a one time wealth tax of 14.25% for individuals worth more than 10 million. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
  - trendia 10y ago
    Woudln't this reduce incentives to save among low income individuals?
pasbesoin 10y ago
Heard for the first time in a while, the other day: "Health is wealth." The U.S. economy has far more wealth than needed to provide everyone in the country (at least, everyone who elects to participate) basic, quality healthcare. Not necessarily advanced-age end-of-life spendorama experiences, but far enhanced opportunity to remain or regain health and related quality of life during the majority of living years. There could still be plenty of economic inequality. But we could vastly diminish an unnecessary suffering as well as the economic stress of health burdens. If we can't go that far. If we can't, in action, live up to the basic morals most of us claim to have... These people do not need nor, in my opinion, deserve to get any richer, until we've solved this. We don't all have to be billionaires, to have quality of life. But we do need health. And THAT is something we can fix, right now. If we have the will.

77 points by clumsysmurf 10y ago

I'd like Prof. Gordon to break down the skyrocketing 1% incomes by profession. Wasn't most of it due to high tech? His chart shows the disparity dramatically widening starting in the mid-80s, which is precisely when the microcomputer revolution was accelerating. The 1990s saw a booming stock market and the minting of thousands of new millionaires and dozens of billionaires as well. These stock-rich technology entrepreneurs should be seen not as an exploitative class to be feared and countered, but rather as a sign of successful capitalism at its finest, brilliant new ideas that have changed the world and vastly expanded the major Western economies with new modalities for doing our work, communicating, and nearly everything else.

xenadu02 10y ago
Not really. Globalism allowed management to get rich without having to share much or any of the pie with anyone else by outsourcing and shipping manufacturing to low-cost no-regulation jurisdictions. Massively lower taxes reduced the redistribution effect, accelerating the accumulation of capital to the top. A global capitalist economy can't survive 90% crushed labor, 9% upper-middle, and 1% who own almost everything. Those conditions eventually lead to revolution. Or rather it would be more accurate to say those conditions have historically led to unrest, collapse, and/or revolution. Why would future generations feel any loyalty to their nation or this system if they're barely making ends meet while they watch billionaires cut their own taxes to make themselves richer and shift more of the burden of maintaining society on the poor and shrinking middle class? None of this is good for the startup ecosystem. Fewer consumers with money to spend means less customers and less advertising targets. That's the problem with capital accumulating at the top: without customers there are fewer and fewer legitimate investments that have any yield so capital is forced to make increasingly reckless investments or do the equivalent of stuffing the money under a mattress. None of that is putting capital to useful work.
- nine_k 10y ago
  Globalization did bring visible growth of wealth to the bottom-of-the-ladder guys like factory workers. Only it did so in places like China, Vietnam, and other manufacture outsourcing destinations.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  But I'm talking about software and high tech hardware that only migrated to Asian factories late in the cycle.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Yeah but it's not like that's been the only growth sector in the economy, now is it?
adwhit 10y ago
One of the points Piketty makes in his book is that the rich generally aren't the heroic creative geniuses of Ayn Rand's imagination. Most wealth is inherited. Wealth grows faster than the economy at large. The rich get richer. They spend their money lobbying for lower tax rates, and they get them. They lobby for privatization, and they get them. They lobby for monopolies and patents and bailouts, and they get them. Interesting to note that half the population are no richer than they were almost 50 years ago.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  'course Ayn Rand's imagination is mostly horribly vindictive genocidal assholes...
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Going from $0 to $1M? Nearly impossible. Going from $1M to $2M? Nearly inevitable.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Zuck et al didn't inherit their wealth.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    One of the points Piketty makes in his book is that the rich generally aren't the heroic creative geniuses of Ayn Rand's imagination. 1. There are always going to be outliers, but most people are going to be closer to the middle of a normal distribution. 2. The examples you mention were all excellent entrepreneurs, but they were also a bit lucky with timing and social position; Jobs' adoptive parents were blue-collar workers but none of these future industrialists grew up in poverty. If we could reduce the latter a bit we might have even more of the former.
  - Namrog84 10y ago
    They also didn't start at the absolute bottom. Most of them had an above average hand to start with.

aaron-lebo 10y ago

For the paper: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2016.pdf http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2016.pdf I'd like to see coverage of it from a more neutral source.

yetanotheracc 10y ago

So the share of income going to the top 1% has increased to new heights during the Obama presidency, yet the election of Trump - as opposed to his rival who was expected to continue Obama's policies - is seen as irrational?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Trump planned to cut taxes bigly for the wealthy. Clinton planned to raise taxes moderately for the wealthy, but supported globalization policies which created that wealth in the first place.
JDiculous 10y ago
Trump's tax plan is more favorable to the wealthy than Hillary's
- jeffdavis 10y ago
  What makes you believe that? If you look below the surface, that's far from clear.
  - JDiculous 10y ago
    Income tax rates under Trump's tax plan are clearly more favorable to the wealthy than what we have now or what they would've been under Hillary. http://www.clark.com/tax-calculator-clinton-trump http://www.clark.com/tax-calculator-clinton-trump
  - gjm11 10y ago
    Would you care to be more specific?
Glyptodon 10y ago
From that perspective neither mainstream candidate made any sense.

readams 10y ago

People continue to focus on income inequality and ignore wealth inequality. Income is a terrible way understand inequality and also not a good way to compare how inequality is changing, since the really rich people increase their wealth in ways other than income. The bizarre focus on income means that we set our sights on a weird slice of upper middle class professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc.) while ignoring totally the real rich people.

Retric 10y ago
Capital without income is not particularly useful. The problem is we use the IRS definition of income ignoring unrealized gains which distorts the income perspective for the top 1% / 0.01%.
- readams 10y ago
  Yes, exactly. Rich people increase their wealth primarily through unrealized capital gains. It's very safe for Warren Buffet to proclaim he wants tax rates increased because this barely affects him at all.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    I think Warren Buffet actually was talking about capital gains tax. Warren Buffet is old, famous and rich. He's basically won the material game. He doesn't care about taxes, I would guess.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Indeed, he's generally talking about the basket of federal taxes when he makes those comparisons: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-...
  - loeg 10y ago
    Buffet realizes millions of dollars in income each year and gives much of it to charity. He gives billions more to charity not in the form of income.[0] > “My 2015 return shows adjusted gross income of $11,563,931,” he revealed. “My deductions totaled $5,477,694.” About two-thirds of those represented charitable contributions, he said. Most of the rest were related to Mr. Buffett’s state income tax payments. > As it turns out, the charitable contributions that Mr. Buffett did deduct from his income make up just a tiny portion of the more than $2.85 billion he donated to charity last year, he said. [0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/business/buffett-calls-trumps-bluff-and-releases-his-tax-return.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/business/buffett-calls-tru...

dlo 10y ago

I wish they'd just put the data online for us to look at.

nod 10y ago
Well, the three visualizations in the article all use Tableau Public, and you can download them yourself and play with the data.
mooreds 10y ago
Have you checked here? http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 Not sure if that gets you what you are looking for.
- dlo 10y ago
  Good call. Thanks!
return0 10y ago
Piketty's data for all countries is available here (does not include this latest batch yet): http://www.wid.world/ http://www.wid.world/
pesenti 10y ago
There is a link to it in the article: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/ http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/

logicallee 10y ago

How can we keep people from creating an online business and reaching 2 billion Internet-connected people - if you make it legal to pay for a Google adwords campaign, dirty capitalists can start with just $100 - even if you take all of their money and jail them for being capitalists, when they're out if prison they can save up that much money working at a McDonald's - and roll it up from there. They can keep reinvesting it and growing wealth. Then they can raise VC money at a valuation of $10 million. Even if you tax it at 90% to try to put an end to it, you will only slow it down. Should people engaged in capitalism be murdered by the state? I don't see any other solution to inequality. (obviously this is not a serious comment, but please respond as though it were - or address my point. It is literally possible to spin up online businesses from $100 and consistent reinvestment. This creates inequality between the people doing it and the people not doing it. solution?)

scarecrowbob 10y ago
You may be overoptimistic about the outcomes of folks saving up from working at McDonalds, but maybe you're not 'srs' about that thought. Being entrepreneurial in itself is not Capitalism, which relies on arranging a system so that private ownership production of production leads to the private ownership of profits generated by laborers. On the face of it, though, making it difficult for private groups to have enough cash to make $10M bets on small enterprises is not impossible for a state. I'm not advocating it, but to take your statment 'srsly' you're overlooking that aspect of the situation.
- logicallee 10y ago
  Yes I'm serious. (*EDIT: obviously I'm not serious that we should jail people for engaging in capitalism, or take away everyone's money, that is sarcasm.) If we were to take away people's money and put them in prison to teach them a lesson about "engaging in capitalism", they can serve their term; then they can go on Hacker News, open a blog, announce a new project, raise funds for it, and become rich. This is almost literally the process by which huge, vast swathes of inequity are created. Mark Cuban's parents immigrated from Russia with the name Chabenisky. Sergei Brin is literally a Soviet-born engineer. How do you stop him from accumulating his current net worth of $39.2 billion -- which literally means he has $5.00 for every man, woman, and child on Earth, of any age, anywhere. That is inequality in action. It's dynastic inequality. How do you stop it? Shut down the Internet?

fisherjeff 10y ago

Am I the only one a little frustrated by the groupings here? I'd prefer that it was in raw percentiles rather than something like average of percentiles. Seems like the very lowest incomes drag the bottom 50% down and the highest incomes inflate the averages of the upper percentiles. Not to say that I don't think the current state of income and wealth inequality aren't troublesome, it's just that in this case when they say, e.g., "top 10%", what they really mean is something closer to "95th percentile".

pesenti 10y ago
It makes the results much more striking, even more at the top than the bottom, but not necessarily in a bad way. Raw percentiles aren't representative (e.g, knowing that the bottom 50% makes $50K and lower doesn't tell the full picture). I do think that using "median" rather than "average" would be better (though a bit trivial, median of "top 10%" is the raw 95th percentile). Also, by using "average" it is possible to match them directly to the "share of total wealth" numbers.
breischl 10y ago
I also thought that "average of the bottom 50%" was a weird metric. Seems like using the 25th percentile would make more sense. And there could be a significant difference between that and the mean-of-the-lower-half.

jknoepfler 10y ago

Please stop using means when describing percentile data. I understand the desire to demonize a catchy sounding demographic, but the vast majority of the "top 1%" don't have an annual income anywhere approaching 1m/yr.

curiousgal 10y ago

>top earners Kinda ironic.

bluetwo 10y ago

The question articles like this never get around to asking is: What would "fair" look like? The data is never going to be flat. That would mean the top earners and the lowest earners had identical incomes. Call that what you want but that's not a free economy.

devilsavocado 10y ago
Picketty's book does at least attempt to address this. He proposes a switch from income tax to wealth tax. He shows that most inequality is a result of the growth of existing wealth (most of which was inherited). Taxing wealth instead of income can help reverse, or at least stop the increasing levels of inequality. A very small percentage of wealth would need to be taxed to accomplish this.
- pavlov 10y ago
  Such a wealth tax existed in Nordic countries in the late 20th century, at least. Wealth taxes in Sweden and Finland were eliminated around 2005 because capital gains tax was considered more equitable to various wealth classes and more easily administrated. The wealth tax laws had become a nest of loopholes that brought in relatively little income in the end. It would be interesting to see a new wealth tax designed for the digital era.
  - devilsavocado 10y ago
    There are still a few countries with wealth taxes[0]. I'm not sure if they work well or not for these countries. Picketty doesn't spend to much time on the subject of existing wealth taxes. He is more focused on a global wealth tax, which is much more ambitious. Something that would need to be designed for the digital era indeed. Amusing find from the linked article: Back in 1999 Trump proposed a one time wealth tax of 14.25% for individuals worth more than 10 million. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
- trendia 10y ago
  Woudln't this reduce incentives to save among low income individuals?

pasbesoin 10y ago

Heard for the first time in a while, the other day: "Health is wealth." The U.S. economy has far more wealth than needed to provide everyone in the country (at least, everyone who elects to participate) basic, quality healthcare. Not necessarily advanced-age end-of-life spendorama experiences, but far enhanced opportunity to remain or regain health and related quality of life during the majority of living years. There could still be plenty of economic inequality. But we could vastly diminish an unnecessary suffering as well as the economic stress of health burdens. If we can't go that far. If we can't, in action, live up to the basic morals most of us claim to have... These people do not need nor, in my opinion, deserve to get any richer, until we've solved this. We don't all have to be billionaires, to have quality of life. But we do need health. And THAT is something we can fix, right now. If we have the will.