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Donald Trump and Angela Merkel will join 2,500 world leaders, business executives and charity bosses at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland which kicks off on 23 January. High on the agenda once again will be the topic of inequality, and how to reduce the widening gap between the rich and the rest around the world.
The WEF recently warned that the global economy is at risk of another crisis, and that automation and digitalisation are likely to suppress employment and wages for most while boosting wealth at the very top.
But what ideas should the great and good gathered in the Swiss Alps be putting into action? We'd like to know what single step you think governments should prioritise in order to best address the problem of rising inequality. Below we've outlined seven proposals that are most often championed as necessary to tackle the issue – but which of them is most important to you?
- Provide free and high quality education
- Raise the minimum wage
- Raise taxes on the rich
- Fight corruption
- Provide more social protection for the poor
- Stop the influence of the rich on politicians
- Provide jobs for the unemployed
Do you think these ideas are enough, or are there any better ideas to close this wealth gap ? You too can participate and vote for the idea that, you think, works best.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by splodus on Saturday January 20 2018, @11:01PM (16 children)
It's a no-brainer, really, for me!
I don't think anyone would object to efforts to combat corruption, tax avoidance, influencing politicians through wealth and power (surely)?
The issues like minimum wage and higher taxes for the most wealthy? That's what splits people ideologically.
The idea that those who are the wealthiest should pay more tax, proportionately, than those who are poorest? I wonder who objects to that, and why? I heard a chap on the news back along who said something along the lines 'If I've got to pay more tax than the people I employ - why should I bother? I might just as well not provide any jobs!' And I thought, well, maybe cos you're getting 30 times more money than them each month? Would you really swap places with any one of them?
And sure, minimum wage will hit the cost of providing the service or product of your company; sure, the cost of the product or service will have to increase! But then, you won't be 'uncompetitive', cos every company will also have to pass on that cost...
Employees who are paid enough to live on, and maybe have some left over - they are customers! If customers have more money to spend, they will be able to buy the goods and services that companies are offering!
A handful of super-rich people won't buy much - there's only so much one person can buy.
But millions of people with a few extra quid in their pocket each month? Isn't that what every business hopes for?
As for 'free' education; that's something that can only help in the longer term. I can see why industry might be cautious about allowing their profits to be siphoned off now via taxes, for something that only 'might' help them some time in the future!
But that's why we need Governments to make that call. I don't expect businesses to behave like charities - businesses should be amoral, in my view. Surely, though, we can see that a well-educated population is good for us all?
I find the 'Libertarian' style of politics very seductive. But from what I've seen in my tiny life, the 'Socialist' approach of everyone paying a little bit extra to help society as a whole? It seems to make a lot more sense to me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @11:15PM (2 children)
...to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken [wikiquote.org]
(Score: 2) by splodus on Saturday January 20 2018, @11:36PM
Not a quote I was aware of, thank you!
I think it applies everywhere, though, doesn't it? We can only do our best!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 21 2018, @02:59AM
Nice try, but the simple solution in this case is the "libertarian" approach. Social democracy is the opposite of simple, because it needs to take in all the edge cases and at least try to mitigate unknown-unknowns when they inevitably happen; libertatianism is a simple "fuck you, got mine, you can die."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday January 21 2018, @12:35AM (2 children)
That journalist erected a strawman. Of course a businessman will not become a worker - as if that is his only choice. The businessman will move his business elsewhere! Or he would never open a business, as he can live well with his capitals in the bank or invested overseas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:48AM
If his business was profitable, then there was a demand for whatever that business supplied. That demand can then be filled by another businessman, who values making money more than throwing idealogical hissy-fits about taxes.
(Score: 2) by splodus on Monday January 22 2018, @06:14PM
This particular guy - he is a 'self-made man' - it was himself, not a journalist, making the comment. I think he has a fleet of plumbers working in London (could be Pimlico Plumbers? can't remember...). He's something of a 'colourful character'; a dandy in a rolls-royce...
So it wasn't a straw-man, on this occasion. He was supporting a cut in taxation for those taking £250k+ (the tax-cut was passed, actually)
He can't 'move his business' cos it's based in London, on the ground, where his customers are. He could probably move his 'company' overseas, for tax reasons - that's part of the issue!
And yeah, he can live off his capital, but you can be sure he would sell his company before doing so; cash-in. In which case the question just moves on to the new owner of the business. It's not really an argument is it?
His argument seemed to be 'I create jobs! Why should I pay more tax? I won't create jobs if I have to pay more tax than my workers!'
And my argument is 'If you take take home £900k per year, when your employees take home £30k per year - is it really the case that you'll put them all out of work if you'd only get £800k per year after an increase in tax on the wealthy?'
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Sunday January 21 2018, @12:38AM
Lots of wealthy people choose to live in high-tax jurisdictions. Usually because those places are much better places to live.
People with money are usually prepared to spend it to improve their lives. There are , of course, exceptions, but there is a great scope to increase taxes on the wealthy with no downside, in the USA.
Tax rates on the wealthy are low in the USA. What percentage of tax does Mitt Romney pay on his income? You want to find someone not paying their dues: look at Mitt. He is the one of the people who are really sponging off society, not the millions of poor people.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 21 2018, @01:21AM (8 children)
Socialism makes great sense on paper. Unfortunately, in practice it has been even easier to subvert and corrupt than capitalism.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:20AM (3 children)
Can you give a concrete example with some specifics?
easier to subvert
USA and a dozen other Capitalist countries invaded USSR immediately upon its birth. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [criticalenquiry.org]
USSR had to divert resources that would otherwise have gone into food, housing, and consumer goods and put that into defensive armaments.
While you're giving an example, try supplying one that didn't have that going against it from Day 1.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @04:24PM (2 children)
Try to stop apologising for mass murder [wikipedia.org] by projecting the blame.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @07:36PM (1 child)
AKA Stalinism.
Stalinism wasn't Socialism.
Stalinism was Authoritarianism.
...and if you look at "Democracy" in Capitalist USA for the last 4 decades, you notice how what exists doesn't represent the vast majority (who agree with each other on a great deal). [google.com]
Hell, if you go back to 1947, you find Taft-Hartley, which was an absolute abomination in the eyes of every wage earner in the country (again, the vast majority).
Go back farther and you see The Workers (once again, the vast majority) being murdered by gov't in USA. [google.com]
All of that is Capitalist Authoritarianism.
The comparison was being made between Capitalism and Socialism.
If you're going to point to things, at least pick things that fit the model.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:30PM
Facts are just so obnoxious. Reality would be so much better if it conformed to our preconceptions amirite?
(Score: 2) by splodus on Monday January 22 2018, @06:32PM (3 children)
You might be correct, but I think you have to offer a compelling example or two to make the point stand?
I don't think Socialism is without problems, and of course there are always extreme examples from any political approach.
For me, it's not so much that any system is perfect, or that any system is totally a 'bad thing'!!
However, when I've looked at the way things pan out over the years - it seems to me that unfettered capitalism leads to a greater inequality than efforts of socialism? I don't know!
Also - the politics of 'socialism' get conflated with 'communism' - in reality, they are not the same!
In the UK, not so long ago, we had a political party called the 'Liberal Democrats' (we still have them, but they're all but finished after the last couple of elections...)
Their politics seemed to me to be 'Capitalism is 'Good'! It just needs to be constrained for the 'Good of Society', rather than the 'Good of Capitalism'...
So they made no friends - the 'Socialists' hated them for supporting capitalism. The Capitalists hated them for supporting socialist ideals. They have been decimated by subsequent elections...
It's too bad - people like one thing or another. They do not like an ideology that calls for 'lets take the best of both systems, and find a compromise that works for everyone!'....
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @07:05PM (2 children)
I am not a great academic scholar of socialism, I know the basic stuff that filtered in osmotically in college and even high school (talk about an obviously biased presentation!), plus I also spent a week touring East Germany by bicycle in 1990.
My first night in East Germany I spent drinking with a man who had had a stroke after a car accident, his wife left him and took the kids - thus he had a spare room to rent, though after a night of drinking his brandy with him, in the morning after making me breakfast he refused to take my money. He spoke no English, and my German was quite weak - just what I had picked up from a few months travelling in West Germany, but we managed to talk about quite a few things: by the time I met him, he appeared to be in his late 50s, he had had two cars in his lifetime, it took years of waiting to get each one - without political connection it was just impossible to get one faster - the East Marks (money) was not the currency that you needed to obtain things like cars, or an apartment. His disability had resulted in him having quite a lot of money in the bank, perhaps 200K DM(e), but the big event of the night I came to town was celebration of declaration that "alle ist egal" 1 east mark = 1 west mark, though about a week later I tried to spend east marks at a store in Berlin and the cashier refused to take them, apparently the exchange worked at banks.
Anyway, as I traveled the countryside there were several things that stood out: B5, the equivalent of a major US highway connecting Hamburg to Berlin, was a single lane of cobblestone with dirt on the side where oncoming traffic passed - clearly there wasn't much traffic in the previous years. The buildings were mostly pre-world war I construction, several of them had cornerstones engraved with years in the early 1900s. Here and there were hand concrete mixers standing by abandoned construction sites, apparently stalled due to lack of materials, and in speaking with some locals also stalled due to lack of enthusiasm for the project. Maybe 1% of the visible buildings were of newer construction, typically solid concrete rectangular things. And the stores, such as they were, almost never had signage at all. You could spot a grocery store by the rack of limonade bottles outside for recycling, inside the shelves were 98% empty, typically just a few bad sausages and if you were lucky some bread. Again, money was not the currency with which things like food were obtained, though, nominally, if there was any for sale, the bread was $0.05 per kg, and the sausage, such as it was, was similarly cheap. There was the occasional pay-phone, but none of them worked - and several were stuffed with east-mark coins, I think I collected about $7 worth from just one phone, that $7 would pay for a night's stay at a youth hostel, or a room I rented for the night in a private home in a town that had no hostel or hotel.
The recurring theme, for me, was that the real economy of East Germany in 1989/90 seemed to be in a black market. There were cars, food, clothing, and houses, etc. but there wasn't much way to buy anything other than scant essentials, and there weren't visible official distribution channels for anything. Things like clothes, electronics, etc. came from far away, in a land where people were not very mobile.
The man on the first night wasn't the only injury case I met, I bumped into at least two others who had been overnight given 500K+ west marks, and were convinced that they were kings of the earth, never need to work, always have everything they need. I tried to explain that bread wasn't going to be 10 phennig per kilo for very long, but they just weren't wrapping their heads around the concept that using west marks means that their economy is going to ramp up to west mark prices very soon...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by splodus on Monday January 22 2018, @09:17PM (1 child)
Crikey! That's a real interesting story - you should write your experiences somewhere; first-hand of what it was really like!
I think the collapse of the East/West under Gorbachev; the fall of the Berlin Wall and what happened afterwards - it's something that's mostly been forgotten in our generation?
What was happening under the 'USSR' - that was not 'Socialism'. Sure, they called it 'Socialism', but it was totally corrupt, and in any case we called it 'Communism' at the time. It was a different era in politics. But, in that respect - your point stands!
For us, in the UK, 'Socialism' means something quite different. For example, we have the 'National Health Service'. Paid for in part through a tax called 'National Insurance', which everyone pays. Mostly, though, paid for through central taxation. In the UK, no one ever gets a bill for health-care. We've already paid for it! It bears no relation to the 'Socialism' of the Cold War...
When politicians campaign they are seeking to couch words like 'Socialism' in a manner that will suit their efforts to paint the other guys as bad. So the fact that the Communists called themselves Socialists plays into the hands of those who oppose 'Modern Socialism', if there is such a thing?
There should be another word! Something that describes the politics, without the baggage of previous innuendo - but I don't see how it could be made to gain traction, even if someone came up with a new label?
Anyway - I loved your story! Thank you so much for posting it!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @10:10PM
Fun to remember, fun to tell...
In 1989 I did spend a week on trains in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, the Norwegians were all drunk at the time (fresh influx of oil money, heavily taxed $9/bottle beer on their corn flakes in the morning), the Swedes generally wouldn't talk to me, but the Danes were all about bitching about their tax structure, how the working people were taxed so heavily to take care of the children and elderly. I think every single Dane I spoke with, except maybe the high school girl on her way to counsel at a summer camp in California, but the other 4 or 5 all brought up that complaint at some point or another, a couple of them didn't talk about anything else.
🌻🌻 [google.com]