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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @05:40PM (1 child)
Starting with some stats that are from various years 2011 to 2017...
There are 126 million households in the USA. There are 51 million students in public schools. There are about 3,377,900 teachers. Student to teacher ratio is 15 to 25.
We thus need to support a teacher with tax funds raised from about 37 households.
It used to be that women were excluded from many jobs. They were either single or they had husbands to help support them. This meant that the cost of their labor was pushed down. Intelligent women were cheaply available to serve as teachers. This is no longer the case; we'll need to offer decent pay.
We're asking a well-educated person to tolerate a nasty work environment without flex-time. Decent pay for a person with the education we are demanding (often a master's degree) is something like $120,000 per year. It might dip to $100,000 in a really low-cost area, or rise to $180,000 in San Francisco or New York City.
So right there, picking the middle value for income, we need to raise $3,243 per family via taxes. But wait...
That is just salary. The employer pays extra social security taxes. The employer pays for a pension (ought to be a 401K), for health insurance, for life insurance, and for many minor benefits. Teachers need to be managed, so we need to hire management. Teachers need IT support, so we'll need to hire that. Teachers need security forces, so we'll need to hire that.
Granted, we're already paying much of that, so we can sort of subtract out what we already pay. Still, considering the increased taxes and all, we're looking at an additional $3000 on top of what is already paid.
The poor greatly outnumber the rest of us. If you are posting on soylentnews, you are probably pretty well off. Maybe an extra $250 per month is nothing to you. Maybe an extra $70 per week is nothing to you. Well... that doesn't work so well for the poor.
The total pay for teachers really can't go up like that. The only way to pay teachers more is to have fewer of them. We could get pay to be reasonable with about 45 kids per class, but that degrades the working conditions. We'd also have to change all the buildings.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:19PM
Nice stats, and appropriate - since education is financed mostly on property taxes.
Also, the better school districts I have lived in do raise about $5000 per household in annual property taxes. One neighborhood in Miami actually voted in a bond issue, raising their taxes for the next 15 years, to better fund education.
I don't buy the "additional $3000" - assume that the only thing that needs to happen is we take teacher salaries from where they are today up an average of $10K per teacher, that's an additional $270 per household, and I think education is well worth that. Unfortunately, most school boards are elected full of people who vow to "spend the absolute minimum required by law" and thus we get what we've got.
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