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It is conventional to blame COVID for this ("billionaires got 40% richer during lockdown") but it really makes more sense to blame deliberate changes in policy
by ncmncm 4y ago
It is conventional to blame COVID for this ("billionaires got 40% richer during lockdown") but it really makes more sense to blame deliberate changes in policy enacted by the government in power over the past few years.
Some of those take a while to manifest fully, and others are not rooted out immediately by the successive government. There can be a lot to clean up. The current administration is anyway not especially motivated to really turn things around.
- specialist 4y agoYes and: bickering over policy choices serves to distract from reform, eg getting lost in the weeds. So I've settled on managing towards a number. I choose the gini coefficient, until a better measure of inequity (wealth distribtion) is apparent. I prescribe restoring the USA to its 1970s era value of 35. It was a reasonable deal working white men. Today, if we could loop in everyone, that'd be huge. Sure, lower is better; Norway's contemporary value of 25 is pretty sweet. By every (non-libertarian) account, Norwegian society is enviable. Any way. I don't care how we get back to 35. Repeated radical cachectomies is straightforward. I also support proposals for UBI, universal insurance, childcare support, pretty much every modern anti-proverty strategy, etc. -- Helpful chart showing wealth distribution across countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Of_income_distributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Of_income_dis...