8 ms·

I would rather focus on reducing absolute poverty than reducing inequality (gini-coefficient).

tsimionescu 7y ago
Unfortunately, you can't have a real democracy with too high income inequality, and it is hard to reduce absolute poverty if the poor don't have a political voice.
- bhupy 7y ago
  This is an often used argument, but can you elaborate how exactly that's the case? In most western democracies (the US included), the only way to elect a politician is for a human being to go to the polls and check the box next to the candidate's name. This opportunity is present regardless of whether one is a billionaire, a millionaire, a member of the upper-middle class, or a blue collar worker. A real world example of this is Sweden, which has the highest per capita population of billionaires. The country doesn't seem to care because the minimum standard of living is high enough. It's not even paid for by taxing the billionaires, it's paid for by high taxes on the middle class and a VAT.
  - leto_ii 7y ago
    Well, in the US, as possibly in other places, elections are usually won by the candidate who receives the most corporate support. On top of this, a bipartite political system can quite easily keep out candidates with views that are unpalatable to the rich and powerful (e.g. see how Bernie Sanders was treated by the Democratic establishment in 2016). Individuals mostly rubber-stamp one of the two mainstream candidates.
    - bhupy 7y ago
      > Well, in the US, as possibly in other places, elections are usually won by the candidate who receives the most corporate support Again, this is orthogonal to the point about inequality. Insofar as corporations or money are involved in politics in America, it's for campaigning — buying TV ads, flyers, etc. While it's true that this makes it easier for richer people to get their message out there, the fact of the matter is that the message still needs to resonate with a broad enough polity capturing working class, college educated, non-college educated, urban, rural voters etc (see: the Electoral College). Just to give you some numbers, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump $132M vs $92M. In the ongoing Democratic Primary for the upcoming 2020 election, the TV ad spending through 12/3/2019 is as follows. The candidate's polling percentage at the same time is included in parenthesis. Steyer: $63.4 million (1%) Bloomberg: $37 million (<1%) Sanders: $6.7 million (15%) Buttigieg: $5.1 million (13%) Yang: $2.9 million (4%) Biden: $1.7 million (25%) Klobuchar: $1.3 million (3%) Bennet: $1 million (<1%) Gabbard: $1 million (1%) Warren: $926k (18%) Delaney: $662k (<1%) > On top of this, a bipartite political system can quite easily keep out candidates with views that are unpalatable to the rich and powerful (e.g. see how Bernie Sanders was treated by the Democratic establishment in 2016) You're right about this, but the Democratic Primaries are not a good example of a democratic institution (ironically) — it's a private club and they can make their own rules, for better or for worse. During the general election, the opposite happened; the rich and powerful overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, and yet she still lost. > Individuals mostly rubber-stamp one of the two mainstream candidates. This is true, but has nothing to do with economic inequality. The two-party system is an artifact of the first-past-the-post voting system. Since ~1860, there have only been two mainstream candidates, and inequality has varied wildly in that time period: i.e. no correlation.
      - leto_ii 7y ago
        In a society there are may levers (official or not, transparent or not) that the powerful can pull to get politics to lean their preferred way. This is true of all places and all times. The more power is concentrated, the easier it is for a very small group of individuals to have a very large impact on decision making. All the billions poured in campaign funding, lobbying etc. do actually buy a lot of influence albeit not in a direct, transparent way. The same billions can also sway public opinion through deliberate and persistent propaganda in support of certain view points and against others. Nowadays (and probably throughout most of modern history) you have to be highly committed and quite fanatical if you want to develop well grounded opinions that are not very much affected by propaganda. Most people don't have the time and resources for this -> most people are easily swayed by corporate propaganda.
        bhupy 7y ago
        Unless you provide data or empirical evidence, it's just a vague intuition. There's more than enough evidence to the contrary (as I've provided). At the end of the day, people act as individuals, and they have their beliefs and biases. For example, a small group of wealthy individuals can pour as much money as they want into pro-abortion propaganda, but it's unlikely that it will sway pro-lifers' opinions (especially evangelical Christians). Money doesn't influence opinions directly, it just affords you a platform to try and change someone's mind. The only way to change one's mind is if the message is compelling, and because the US requires broad buy-in for any democratic action, the message needs to be compelling to a broad audience, not just a small group of wealthy people.
        leto_ii 7y ago
        You hardly provided more than enough evidence on the contrary. I can however point you to the work of Thomas Ferguson for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_com...
        bhupy 7y ago
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    There were some good arguments from another user on this topic, but I wanted to also raise another direction. To have a true democracy, free elections are not the only necessity. You also need wide representation of popular ideas among the candidates of the election; and you need the winning candidate to at least take steps towards enacting the policies that they were elected for. Income inequality works very strongly at these two steps - gating access to candidates which hold certain political opinions to the election itself; and ensuring that certain campaign promises never get delivered on, regardless of election results. For an example of the former, compare Gallup poll results on public healthcare to the positions of candidates in any election so far - tough at least 48% if the population has been in favor of a public option for a decade, there has been no candidate for presidential elections that had even offered that. For the latter, again Healthcare can prove a useful example, comparing Obama's campaign promises of drug price negotiation to the final resulting law proposal, which essentially had no change that could affect the insurance companies' bottom lines.
    - bhupy 7y ago
      > To have a true democracy, free elections are not the only necessity. You also need wide representation of popular ideas among the candidates of the election; and you need the winning candidate to at least take steps towards enacting the policies that they were elected for. Not sure that this is ever a prerequisite of a "true democracy". Campaign promises can only be successfully delivered if the legislature allows it, and the members of the legislature are also democratically elected. We do have a wide representation of popular ideas in Congress (see: members in Congress ranging all the way from AOC to Rand Paul), it's just that some ideas have not quite found broad bipartisan support across the large heterogenous polity that is the United States. The bar to pass law at the Federal level is extremely high: it needs to pass 2 houses + signed by the President, all separately, yet (in varying forms) democratically elected. > For an example of the former, compare Gallup poll results on public healthcare to the positions of candidates in any election so far - tough at least 48% if the population has been in favor of a public option for a decade, there has been no candidate for presidential elections that had even offered that. Support plunges when the polled respondents are asked if they would support the funding strategy (higher taxes) [1] > For the latter, again Healthcare can prove a useful example, comparing Obama's campaign promises of drug price negotiation to the final resulting law proposal, which essentially had no change that could affect the insurance companies' bottom lines. You'd have to reconcile why the same voters are voting for members of the House of Representatives and Senate that have opposed Obama's agenda. Both political branches of government (Executive and Legislative) are democratically elected. All this being said, there is a public option that has passed in the state of Washington. [2] San Francisco also has a public option [3], and the state of California is currently reckoning with lukewarm popularity for a statewide single payer system [4]. [1] https://apnews.com/4516833e7fb644c9aa8bcc11048b2169 https://apnews.com/4516833e7fb644c9aa8bcc11048b2169 [2] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2019/05/14/washington-state-tries-a-public-option-health-plan https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta... [3] https://healthysanfrancisco.org/ https://healthysanfrancisco.org/ [4] https://newrepublic.com/article/143650/killed-single-payer-california https://newrepublic.com/article/143650/killed-single-payer-c...
- marcusverus 7y ago
  This seems disingenuous to me. If your concern is the influence of money in politics, address that issue directly. Get rid of PACs, or give a total annual cap in per-person political donations, or move to publicly funded elections, or quadruple the number of House seats so that canvasing for votes is a legitimate strategy for poor candidates. Redistributing wealth to enhance the relative political voice of the poor is an absurdly tangential 'solution' to the stated issue.
frockington1 7y ago
It's sad that we live in a world where reducing poverty is somehow a hot take on society. I do not understand why some people believe it is impossible to rise out of poverty without seizing someone else's property. Capitalism is not a zero sum game
- take_a_breath 7y ago
  One the whole capitalism is not zero-sum, as we can observe by continued GDP growth. I think a lot of the frustration comes from the feeling that within certain classes, it is zero-sum. Imagine an economy that grows by $1 trillion. Suppose all that wealth goes to a select group (Top 5%). Everyone in the other 95% is essentially in a zero-sum game. If the paths to that Top 5% diminish (low capital gains tax, increasing education/housing costs), it becomes worse. At the same time, the rich are running for political office and supporting things like Citizens United that re-enforce their power.

Unfortunately, you can't have a real democracy with too high income inequality, and it is hard to reduce absolute poverty if the poor don't have a political voice.

bhupy 7y ago
This is an often used argument, but can you elaborate how exactly that's the case? In most western democracies (the US included), the only way to elect a politician is for a human being to go to the polls and check the box next to the candidate's name. This opportunity is present regardless of whether one is a billionaire, a millionaire, a member of the upper-middle class, or a blue collar worker. A real world example of this is Sweden, which has the highest per capita population of billionaires. The country doesn't seem to care because the minimum standard of living is high enough. It's not even paid for by taxing the billionaires, it's paid for by high taxes on the middle class and a VAT.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  Well, in the US, as possibly in other places, elections are usually won by the candidate who receives the most corporate support. On top of this, a bipartite political system can quite easily keep out candidates with views that are unpalatable to the rich and powerful (e.g. see how Bernie Sanders was treated by the Democratic establishment in 2016). Individuals mostly rubber-stamp one of the two mainstream candidates.
  - bhupy 7y ago
    > Well, in the US, as possibly in other places, elections are usually won by the candidate who receives the most corporate support Again, this is orthogonal to the point about inequality. Insofar as corporations or money are involved in politics in America, it's for campaigning — buying TV ads, flyers, etc. While it's true that this makes it easier for richer people to get their message out there, the fact of the matter is that the message still needs to resonate with a broad enough polity capturing working class, college educated, non-college educated, urban, rural voters etc (see: the Electoral College). Just to give you some numbers, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump $132M vs $92M. In the ongoing Democratic Primary for the upcoming 2020 election, the TV ad spending through 12/3/2019 is as follows. The candidate's polling percentage at the same time is included in parenthesis. Steyer: $63.4 million (1%) Bloomberg: $37 million (<1%) Sanders: $6.7 million (15%) Buttigieg: $5.1 million (13%) Yang: $2.9 million (4%) Biden: $1.7 million (25%) Klobuchar: $1.3 million (3%) Bennet: $1 million (<1%) Gabbard: $1 million (1%) Warren: $926k (18%) Delaney: $662k (<1%) > On top of this, a bipartite political system can quite easily keep out candidates with views that are unpalatable to the rich and powerful (e.g. see how Bernie Sanders was treated by the Democratic establishment in 2016) You're right about this, but the Democratic Primaries are not a good example of a democratic institution (ironically) — it's a private club and they can make their own rules, for better or for worse. During the general election, the opposite happened; the rich and powerful overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, and yet she still lost. > Individuals mostly rubber-stamp one of the two mainstream candidates. This is true, but has nothing to do with economic inequality. The two-party system is an artifact of the first-past-the-post voting system. Since ~1860, there have only been two mainstream candidates, and inequality has varied wildly in that time period: i.e. no correlation.
    - leto_ii 7y ago
      In a society there are may levers (official or not, transparent or not) that the powerful can pull to get politics to lean their preferred way. This is true of all places and all times. The more power is concentrated, the easier it is for a very small group of individuals to have a very large impact on decision making. All the billions poured in campaign funding, lobbying etc. do actually buy a lot of influence albeit not in a direct, transparent way. The same billions can also sway public opinion through deliberate and persistent propaganda in support of certain view points and against others. Nowadays (and probably throughout most of modern history) you have to be highly committed and quite fanatical if you want to develop well grounded opinions that are not very much affected by propaganda. Most people don't have the time and resources for this -> most people are easily swayed by corporate propaganda.
      - bhupy 7y ago
        Unless you provide data or empirical evidence, it's just a vague intuition. There's more than enough evidence to the contrary (as I've provided). At the end of the day, people act as individuals, and they have their beliefs and biases. For example, a small group of wealthy individuals can pour as much money as they want into pro-abortion propaganda, but it's unlikely that it will sway pro-lifers' opinions (especially evangelical Christians). Money doesn't influence opinions directly, it just affords you a platform to try and change someone's mind. The only way to change one's mind is if the message is compelling, and because the US requires broad buy-in for any democratic action, the message needs to be compelling to a broad audience, not just a small group of wealthy people.
        leto_ii 7y ago
        You hardly provided more than enough evidence on the contrary. I can however point you to the work of Thomas Ferguson for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_com...
        bhupy 7y ago
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  There were some good arguments from another user on this topic, but I wanted to also raise another direction. To have a true democracy, free elections are not the only necessity. You also need wide representation of popular ideas among the candidates of the election; and you need the winning candidate to at least take steps towards enacting the policies that they were elected for. Income inequality works very strongly at these two steps - gating access to candidates which hold certain political opinions to the election itself; and ensuring that certain campaign promises never get delivered on, regardless of election results. For an example of the former, compare Gallup poll results on public healthcare to the positions of candidates in any election so far - tough at least 48% if the population has been in favor of a public option for a decade, there has been no candidate for presidential elections that had even offered that. For the latter, again Healthcare can prove a useful example, comparing Obama's campaign promises of drug price negotiation to the final resulting law proposal, which essentially had no change that could affect the insurance companies' bottom lines.
  - bhupy 7y ago
    > To have a true democracy, free elections are not the only necessity. You also need wide representation of popular ideas among the candidates of the election; and you need the winning candidate to at least take steps towards enacting the policies that they were elected for. Not sure that this is ever a prerequisite of a "true democracy". Campaign promises can only be successfully delivered if the legislature allows it, and the members of the legislature are also democratically elected. We do have a wide representation of popular ideas in Congress (see: members in Congress ranging all the way from AOC to Rand Paul), it's just that some ideas have not quite found broad bipartisan support across the large heterogenous polity that is the United States. The bar to pass law at the Federal level is extremely high: it needs to pass 2 houses + signed by the President, all separately, yet (in varying forms) democratically elected. > For an example of the former, compare Gallup poll results on public healthcare to the positions of candidates in any election so far - tough at least 48% if the population has been in favor of a public option for a decade, there has been no candidate for presidential elections that had even offered that. Support plunges when the polled respondents are asked if they would support the funding strategy (higher taxes) [1] > For the latter, again Healthcare can prove a useful example, comparing Obama's campaign promises of drug price negotiation to the final resulting law proposal, which essentially had no change that could affect the insurance companies' bottom lines. You'd have to reconcile why the same voters are voting for members of the House of Representatives and Senate that have opposed Obama's agenda. Both political branches of government (Executive and Legislative) are democratically elected. All this being said, there is a public option that has passed in the state of Washington. [2] San Francisco also has a public option [3], and the state of California is currently reckoning with lukewarm popularity for a statewide single payer system [4]. [1] https://apnews.com/4516833e7fb644c9aa8bcc11048b2169 https://apnews.com/4516833e7fb644c9aa8bcc11048b2169 [2] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2019/05/14/washington-state-tries-a-public-option-health-plan https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta... [3] https://healthysanfrancisco.org/ https://healthysanfrancisco.org/ [4] https://newrepublic.com/article/143650/killed-single-payer-california https://newrepublic.com/article/143650/killed-single-payer-c...
marcusverus 7y ago
This seems disingenuous to me. If your concern is the influence of money in politics, address that issue directly. Get rid of PACs, or give a total annual cap in per-person political donations, or move to publicly funded elections, or quadruple the number of House seats so that canvasing for votes is a legitimate strategy for poor candidates. Redistributing wealth to enhance the relative political voice of the poor is an absurdly tangential 'solution' to the stated issue.

frockington1 7y ago

It's sad that we live in a world where reducing poverty is somehow a hot take on society. I do not understand why some people believe it is impossible to rise out of poverty without seizing someone else's property. Capitalism is not a zero sum game

take_a_breath 7y ago
One the whole capitalism is not zero-sum, as we can observe by continued GDP growth. I think a lot of the frustration comes from the feeling that within certain classes, it is zero-sum. Imagine an economy that grows by $1 trillion. Suppose all that wealth goes to a select group (Top 5%). Everyone in the other 95% is essentially in a zero-sum game. If the paths to that Top 5% diminish (low capital gains tax, increasing education/housing costs), it becomes worse. At the same time, the rich are running for political office and supporting things like Citizens United that re-enforce their power.