SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Global wealth inequality widened last year as billionaires increased their fortunes by $2.5 billion per day, anti-poverty campaigner Oxfam said in a new report.
While the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth dwindle by 11%, billionaires' riches increased by 12%. The mega-wealthy have also become a more concentrated bunch. Last year, the top 26 wealthiest people owned $1.4 trillion, or as much as the 3.8 billion poorest people. The year before, it was the top 43 people.
[...] To address many of these ills, Oxfam advocated raising taxes. It estimated that a 1% wealth tax would be enough to educate 262 million out of school children and to save 3.3 million lives. As of 2015 returns, Oxfam says that only four cents in every tax dollar collected globally came from tariffs on wealth, such as inheritance or property. The report also claims that the rich are hiding $7.6 trillion in offshore accounts
Previously: Only 1% of World's Population Grabbed 82% of all 2017 Wealth
(Score: 4, Interesting) by richtopia on Tuesday January 22 2019, @02:30PM (26 children)
If you want to do some generic reading on Economic Inequality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality [wikipedia.org]
My favourite quote:
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Tuesday January 22 2019, @03:40PM (23 children)
Leftist dystopic death cult sees that as a goal, not something to avoid, explaining why they don't seem to care their policies always result in stuff like that. "Crazy alt-right nazis" do not want to see the world burn and get confused why the left always worships death when death is bad; the red pill is understanding the left doesn't see death as bad.
I could never understand historical books as a kid all this "Egyptian death cult" and human sacrifice stuff found in long dead civilizations; couldn't relate to "my" civilization and this surely couldn't happen today; then I discovered leftism and we seem to have the same mental illnesses today that destroyed civilizations millennia ago.
When one dude wants suicide thats a mental illness and we treat it. When a political movement wants suicide for a civilization, especially for the non-believers, that's just called virtuous social justice leftism. And anyone who doesn't want their civilization and race to be genocided is an evil right wing nazi deserving two minutes hate on the telescreen. That's the key insight to understanding modern politics.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday January 22 2019, @07:02PM (22 children)
Yes, wanting the rich to pay more taxes (in order to fund healthcare) is the exact same thing as a death cult. More insight out of VLM, here. Of course, he doesn't realize the insight is about VLM and nobody else.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 22 2019, @07:23PM (21 children)
It does seem a shitty use for the taxes. Immunizations, prenatal health care, and a few other things really do give good bang for the buck. Then there's heroic health care theater in the last year of life. That's the death cult stuff, I imagine.
I'd take your complaint more seriously, if you had a better plan than merely "fund healthcare" without consideration for how useful that health care will be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @07:29PM (13 children)
See any number of the existing universal healthcare systems successfully treating people in a number of 1st world nations. Oh no? You want to move the goal posts and make stupid points because reasons?
Get with it ya dinosaur
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 22 2019, @08:57PM (12 children)
They still would even if the "universal" health care systems were paid for by the patient than by the society.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:19PM (11 children)
It's about wealth redistribution by collectively insuring against the shared risk. The poor benefit by getting treatment they otherwise couldn't afford and the rich get to live in a society where the gutters aren't teaming with sick and dying paupers causing a nuisance. Also, they get a fitter, healthier supply of workers for their money-making ventures.
But you knew that already.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:57PM (10 children)
What shared risk? It's one thing to speak of infectious disease where common interest is obvious. It's another to talk about the end of life theater - no one is bettered by how much society pretends to care during your end of life processing. Sure, having less bodies in the street solves a minor health sanitation issue and generates some feelgoods for the general population, but I think the benefits are greatly exaggerated.
And I also dispute the use of the loathsome term, "universal". From my viewpoint, being allowed to pay for your own health care is just as universal as forcing someone else to pay for it. After all, if your health wasn't important enough for you to pay for it yourself, then why should it be important enough to me to pay for it in your stead?
Not end of life processing, they don't. Those people would be lucky to be healthy enough to be capable of working a bit before they die - not that I'm advocating anyone waste their final weeks as a Seven-Eleven cashier.
And a key problem here is that health care != good health. There is this ongoing peculiar insistence (such as in this very thread) on the providing of health care not on having good health care consequences (though obviously my idea of "good health care consequences" differs greatly from yours). The US is already delving into the difference between these two. I imagine others will follow in a decade or so (the US doesn't have that great a lead on some of the front runners).
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday January 23 2019, @04:20PM
What rot.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 26 2019, @10:53AM (8 children)
There a very good book you can buy from one of the world's favourite utlra-capitalist money hoovers (right up your street) called Confessions of a Sociopath [amazon.com] by M. E. Thomas. You'd thoroughly enjoy it.
In this country (the UK) there was absolutely terrible poverty in the days when the economic models and political policies you so enthusiastically cheer were in use. In the early 20th Century, working people still couldn;t afford shoes in some places. Try going to work in the winter without shoes. People died of hunger. People died in agony of untreated cancer. People didn't get proper emergency treatment after an accident.
People often couldn't work if they were deaf or if they had poor eyesight and couldn't afford spectacles.
People died or were maimed in accidents at work (thus causing severe hardship for their families) because workplaces were often very dangerous and unhealthy places. The rich owners often didn't see why they should spend money on health and safety. They saw it as a waste.
There is another book you should read which will help you to understand why even the most healthy living people often need health care, ie medical treatment from a pharmacists, family doctor or in a hospital. It's called The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution [amazon.com] by Richard Dawkins. When you read it you will understand why no individual organism (in our case, human being) is physically perfect and subject to disease. So you can not possibly, with any sort of straight face, hand-wave away the fact that poor people will need some sort of treatment, no matter how much cucumber and carrot they eat.
We're allowed to pay for our own healthcare too, if we're rich enough. You will be £150 lighter as soon as you walk through the front door, though.
The way the "universal" health care works, and was designed is as follows. You will understand better if you read the Dawkins book referred to above. Let's ignore accidents requiring medical treatment for now and talk about other forms of illness. In the general population, some people will get sick more than others. Some very lucky people might never experience anything worse that the Common Cold. Others may develop asthma, kidney problems, diabetes, mental health problems. all sorts of things. You can work out an average rate for the whole population and given the state of medical science and technology you can work out how much it will cost to treat these diseases and to offer pain relief and so on.
In the first half of the 20th Century, after much poverty and two World Wars the people of the UK chose to implement a Welfare State to help the young, old and sick, so that children would have the best start in life (you can't choose your parents) and the elderly would live in some sort of comfort (food, heat, clothing, shelter) after they were too old to work and so that people who got sick were treated according to their need, not their financial means. Apart from anything else, that provided industry with a healthy and therefore productive workforce.
As for the costs and funding, we know that if you have buying power and you can buy in bulk you get a better deal than buying piecemeal and individually, so people voted by a landslide majority to fund a National Health Service, free at the point of use according to clinical need.
We pay tax and "National Insurance" out of our income (those over 18 and earning over a minimum threshold) which is used to fund things such as the welfare state. I am proud and please to be earning enough nowadays that I pay well over £1000 in tax out of my monthly salary and a very large proportion of it gets spent on the NHS and feeding the poor.
What that means is, in general (but not when the Nasty Party - Conservative - gets in and starts cutting funding so it can cut taxes or privatising services so that shareholders can make a profit out of people's illness and misfortune) when anyone has an accident, when anyone is pregnant, when anyone gives birth, when anyone gets cancer, when anyone gets a nasty, painful infection, they can go and get treated (in priority of seriousness) and not have to worry at all about paying for it.
We've paid for it up front. We're more than happy to. We're happy to help out people less fortunate than ourselves whether they've lost in the genetic lottery (see Dawkins) or been unfortunate in other ways. We have a better society and a better quality of life for it.
Now I expect you will have a learned and eloquent rebuttal to this?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 28 2019, @05:10AM (7 children)
And it's completely irrelevant to this thread.
And now that those economic models and political policies aren't in use, the place is falling apart. Looks like your plan worked perfectly.
And even the most healthy living people often can pay for that health care. Gratuitous reference to Dawkins doesn't make your case.
I'm reading here a lot of irrelevance to "universal" health care. One can do the same for private insurance, for example.
And since, they've been in perpetual decline. What a coincidence.
I guess if we're going to squander wealth, I'd much rather it be your wealth than mine.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:02PM (6 children)
You don't even attempt to understand. Your reply is more telling than you think.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:48PM (5 children)
Bottom line is that you obsess over and over again with "health care" rather than a viable society to provide that health care or even good consequences to that health care. That indicates to me a severe myopia which probably filters your entire world view. That doesn't mean that I believe the Brexit movement is firing on all cylinders. But this didn't happen in a vacuum. There are real problems you are ignoring here.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:47PM (4 children)
How very patronising.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 01 2019, @04:00AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 01 2019, @04:28AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday February 02 2019, @09:54AM (1 child)
You like the false dichotomies, don't you?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 02 2019, @02:11PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22 2019, @09:38PM (6 children)
And I imagine that you are going to feel quite differently about that "health care theater" when it comes down to your last year of life. Just sayin'.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 23 2019, @12:15AM (5 children)
It's still health care theater no matter how many death bed confessions there are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:31AM (4 children)
I'm just saying that you may feel quite differently about it when it is your life on the line.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:28AM (2 children)
Plus, by the time I reach my end of life, I might not be given the choice to avoid health care theater. Because only a mentally incompetent person who wasn't legally capable of making health care decisions would ever want to avoid extremely costly, painful, and ineffective medical care, right?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 23 2019, @07:16AM (1 child)
You are going to die, khallow. Nothing of you will remain. Your "assets", as you so fondly name them, will be the assets of no one, or in other words, not assets at all. Now you can try to prolong your miserable and quotidian existence by establishing an "estate", a legal fiction. But this will soon be torn apart by what ever alleged "heirs" you leave, and if not them, the Mighty Buzzard Lawyers that feed off such carcasses as you yourself will leave.
So get over it, khallow. You will leave nothing. The earth owns you and will reclaim your body, and humanity will, if it does at all, only remember you as a quasi-libertarian troll on TMB's blog. You will leave nothing, having accomplished nothing. And time will go on. You already are not competent to make care decisions. Only market decisions. How much for your liver, then?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:19PM
And yet I described how that wasn't true. I'm not looking for permanence in such things.
Which can have the interesting side effect of helping people I like.
As would be their right.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 23 2019, @04:37AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @04:04PM (1 child)
Really? Then why didn't the French Revolution and Napoleon's wars reset wealth? Or did they? Napoleon only lost an entire army of 440,000 on that disastrous assault on Russia. Wasn't that total enough?
What I'm thinking is that the authoritarian personality is a huge inequality enabler. Those are the sort of people who want someone mighty that they can follow. They'll bust their butts creating wealth for The Man, and won't hardly make a peep when he takes the lion's share, long as they get enough crumbs to get by. They're also the ones most easily inspired to take up arms, most easily persuaded to get in a fight. Wars get a lot of those sorts of people killed off. There's no shortage of greedy wannabe elites either. They're constantly rigging the game to give themselves unfair advantage. Then they display a very convenient amnesia that helps them conclude that they're superior people, and that they merited their successes. If the poor are too stupid to stop them from hogging up everything, well, that's the fault of the poor and they deserve to be poor, don't you know?
All in all, it's a bleak and grim outlook, to think that wars and disasters are some sort of necessary. Since the invention of the nuclear weapon, we can't afford to indulge in total war ever again. We need better answers than that. It is surely possible to keep life more fair without having to have a violent revolution to sweep away all the greedy elites.
(Score: 1) by Gault.Drakkor on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:39AM
There is a huge difference to WW1, WW2 vs Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The scale of the events.
WWs had many cities destroyed(e.g. Dresden), far larger areas directly involved in conflict. Much greater levels of destruction. Large amounts of equity was lost/ used. The intensity of the fighting in the WWs meant large amounts of capital was consumed over many years.
After doing some quick google searches in terms of capital expense it looks to me like WW1 cost 2 maybe 3 orders of magnitude more capital.
Who owns most of the capital? The wealthy. So inequity was decreased.