*sigh....passive aggressiveness from someone who keeps changing the argument is tiresome, ask your friends.

Your original statement ....""American wealth inequality is staggering. "
???? Stated as if that is a bad thing......."

Clearly indicating staggering wealth inequality isn't a bad thing.

Now..."I totally agree that EXCESSIVE wealth inequality is a bad thing",
so unless you misspoke, you must be parsing the difference between staggering (acceptable) and excessive (unacceptable)....but staggering >= excessive.

Wealth/income inequality are tied....and now who's being pedantic?

Well, I'm glad you aren't running the economy then, sadly the one most in control thinks the same, that one person making (not earning) >10000 times what another makes for < 1/10000 the work isn't inequitable, and neither is one person owning more than 10,000,000 average fully employed countrymen thanks to an accident of birth and/or criminal/dishonest business practices.

It makes perfect sense when you line it up with all the other issues like god, guns, gays, civil rights and so on. Notice these are all things that have little to do with the economy or massive income inequality, the rich keep the masses distracted with shiny objects and things they don't care about while they continue to take over everything.

Sam B is carefully stepping around a more important issue than geography here---income inequality. Rural areas are more likely to have a lower incomes, and be without proper coverage in a for-profit system.

Years ago I saw 'The Business of Being Born,' and found it pretty shocking how hospitals treated childbirth as an opportunity for profit. It is a well done doc, if you're curious.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995061

That was quite good.

But man, that 4th issue is a doozy. Learning that "hard work pays off" is difficult when it just really doesn't, at least not anymore. Massive income inequality, zero class mobility, and on and on. We feel like relatively easily replaceable cogs in a relatively pointless machine because WE ARE.

We hear lots of stories about people that manage to buy in, feel like they are doing something important and making a real impact, enjoy some period of good job satisfaction...

...and then all too often, they end up looking like saps when the company that they work for gets bought out by some massive faceless corporation that doesn't value their years of loyal service at all, at which point they get replaced by A) a robot, B) an outsourced sweatshop laborer in a 3rd world country that can be payed a fraction of the local rate, C) a younger and more compliant hire that will inevitably have a massive turnover rate, but who cares because there are plenty more where that came from, or D) the cokehead nephew of the new CEO that needs a job to keep him out of trouble, and hey, might as well keep things in the family, right?

Maybe I'm just a bitter, late Gen-X'er.

I take the view of SDGundamX that it's intended to be contextual based on the speaker but trying to force this kind of nuance into public discourse is a losing battle.

I also think the tack of shunning people / getting them fired for use the word hatefully is the wrong tack. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, just publicly and repeatedly call them an asshole.

Language arguments distract from the real driver of racism, income inequality. I suspect outright racial hatred - notions of racial inferiority/subjugation while still obviously present, are in decline.

I would instead guess the rate of police deaths, employment discrimination and many other biases are linked to the assumption that poorer means 'more likely to be a criminal'.

Getting soaked is a crock of BS. They're paying often times 20% effective tax rates.

And when income and wealth inequality is as bad as it is today, what you're pointing out points to how ridiculous the economic system is when almost half of Americans pay no federal income taxes and still see their effective income drop over the last four decades, while the rich have experienced steady income increases during that time.

IE, the inequality is so great, even if you literally don't have people pay taxes, it's still resulting in growing wealth inequality.

And I'm sure you're gonna claim that I'm suggesting pure income/wealth equality is what we want, which I'm not. However, it is absolutely essential to a functioning market economy that wealth and income inequality do not become too great, as that was one of the contributing factors to the Great Depression. If the economic lower class does not have money to purchase goods and services the businesses owned by the rich produce, those businesses will inevitably decline.

Better to blow up few abortion clinics than to murder 50 Million babies.. But hey who's counting. Hitler would be proud.


Bernie stands for unrealistic ideas. Nothing more.

Income inequality-- If you feel bad about that Take every dollar you make over the 15$/hr living wage and give it to someone.-- You can't -- You won't. You , like me are selfish pricks like everyone else. But you wont mind if it is done by force on you employer.

Free tuition? Bull -- nothing is free in life. If you pay for it It will have more value to you.

Getting big $ out of politics-- Agree but will never happen.. Sounds nice though.

Creating decent jobs. 8 Years of Democrat control and zero happened. You think a socialist can make a difference. .What is a decent job? I never had one. One you like or one that pays you more that you are worth? I think the unicorn would be discovered first.

A Living wage 15$/hr -- I feel that he is cheating people should be 35$/hr What is the right number-- Its what the market will bear.


Climate change this is BS but I'll go along-- Tax people and companies, which pass to consumers -- We are poor enough under the Obama economy ... Trying to get blood from a rock.


Humane Immigration-- Bernie is a son of an immigrant who came here legally. IF you want these illegals taking you son and daughters and your job buy all means vote for Bernie If your that stupid I suppose the illegal is smarter than you.


Family values. The best family value is for the family to stay together where there is 1 provider and the other provided love, support, encouragement anytime of day , not just after 7pm when both parents come home.. Progressive democrat policies has its price and destroyed the family unit. Bernie just wants more PTO.

Reforming wall street--Obama was the biggest giver of money to wall street in history---Under he and the democrats they created Quantitative easing -- This dumped trillions directly into big banks and wall street.. ..

Bernie stands for unrealistic ideas. Nothing more.

I remember -hearing- and -reading- about those days. They were before my time, or at least before I was paying attention to politics. Until Watergate, I wasn't really interested...after that, the GOP was pretty much irrational.

Simpson was one of the half-way rational sorts. Big for privacy and equal rights, but was also pushing to privatize Social Security and cut taxes (mainly for the wealthy, surprise!). I'm not sure he's got solid standing to call others hypocritical on the topic of income inequality...he did his share to help reach our current balance.

Edit: I didn't quite trust my memory after writing the above, so I did a bit of verification. And I found I was right not to trust it. Simpson was not trying to privatize SS, he just wanted to slash the benefits and increase the retirement age. Which has much the same effect for those who have paid into it all along; they get less.

The devil is in the details, isn't it?

For instance, what kind of guaranteed minimum income are we talking about?

The context they used (automatisation, labour supply) suggests to me something along the lines of an unconditional basic income. If that's the case, it cannot be compared to a minimum wage at all, since it has effects that go far beyond the labour market and the income situation. It's a massive reshaping of how we organise society. And it becomes a pain in the ass to even conceptualise properly once you talk about how to finance it...

A minimum wage, no matter how decent it is, doesn't even put a dent into the disparity between income from labour and income from capital. It makes life less horrible for those it applies to and it somewhat curtails the welfare queens among corporations who like their wage slaves being paid for by society. Yes, I'm looking at you, Walmart! Still, on its own, it does very little about income inequality, and nothing at all about wealth inequality.

How would I address income inequality?

In German, the words for taxes and steering are the same: "Steuern". If you want to steer the income towards a more equal distribution, taxation might be the easiest way to go about it. Treat all forms of income equally in terms of taxation. Or go one step further and treat wages preferentially to support employment.

However, redistribution will only get you so far. So why not address it at an earlier stage: distribution. Mondragon serves as a successful example of how a cooperative structure puts democratic checks and balances on the wage structure within a corporation. One person, one vote puts the lid on any attempts by higher-ups to rake in 300 times as much as the peasants on the factory floor.

Yet it doesn't do anything about the inequality between wages and capital income. Even a combination of progressive taxation and fixed income-ratios doesn't do much about it. Especially since non-wage income can evade taxation in a million different ways and most politicians in every country in the world seem more than eager to protect what loopholes they created over the decades.

So what's my suggestion? Well, progressive taxation of both income and wealth, living wage plus job guarantee, support of democratic structures at the workplace, international pressure on tax havens (which includes my own fecking country). Realistic? No. But neither was our welfare system until it was implemented.

Your video, The Unbelievably Sweet Alpacas! - Income Inequality, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

There's always going to be inequality on a marginal scale. Employees who are recognized as more productive, more valuable, or perform better in the workplace can and should get a larger compensation for what they put into their jobs.
The point of the income inequality conversation is the fact that taking the average of all male incomes in the US, and pairing it to the average of all female income in the US for like jobs, it comes down to women, on average, for similar jobs, making roughly 25% less than men in similar jobs.
The only argument you could possibly make against that would be that "well, then maybe women aren't worth as much as men in the workplace", which would clearly out you as a bigot and an asshole. Maybe you want that, but I thought I'd lay it out for you so you might actually glean some knowledge from those who understand more about the state of the world than you do.

I'm extremely happy that Videosift has a marginally higher-than average collective of intelligence and discourse than the rest of the internet, and because of that I would kindly, seriously, and humbly suggest that you up your level of knowledge and world-view if you want to actually contribute to the discussion here.

I miss Chingalera's trolling, because at least his stupid fucking rants had a kernel of sense to them.

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This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 41 Badge!

Your video, Wall Street Gets It - Income Inequality Bad for Wall Street, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

GREAT clip!

Wall Street Gets It - Income Inequality Bad for Wall Street

Rich white woman passing out the balls...couldn't be a woman with down syndrome or perhaps a fat woman with boils? Nope, John makes sure to keep the income inequality going...

One fake set of tits at a time...