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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: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:38PM (9 children)
I guess they better not do that then.
It remains that I not only have experience with the poor, but have been at times a member of said group. What I routinely see is that people who get their act together can save money and find better work. While people who can't just kick around from job to job or struggle with situations that never change (like relatives that are always borrowing money and getting into trouble).
So yes, I see a number of problems that can't be fixed by hard work, mostly illness, but I also see a lot of problems that are fixed or improved every summer by hard work.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @05:39PM (8 children)
So, of course, there's all kinds of poor. How many people are you supporting? What kind of local, and/or extended, family support network do you have / are you providing? Any special needs in this group? Elder care? When I was single, making a tiny fraction of my current salary - I had much more disposable income / financial freedom than I do today. As an income earner, I could ditch all the people who are dependent on me and get myself in fine financial shape in no-time, while leaving a train wreck behind me - that's not a good option for the big picture.
You completely glossed over your low cost of living perspective. Taking that into account, you live in one of the highest purchasing power for minimum wage areas in the country (excepting for places which locally raise it higher). It's not surprising that some of your friends and neighbors can bootstrap up and "make it" on any kind of job at all.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 22 2018, @08:38PM (7 children)
Well, that is the thing about drowning victims. Sometimes they pull the rescuer in with them. Here, it's the difference between leaving the train wreck behind you and becoming part of the train wreck. For example, lottery winners who can't figure out how to separate themselves from their poor brethren, end up joining them [cnbc.com] in a few years:
Some support networks aren't when it comes to wealth.
Cost of living is one of the things you need to learn to control when you are poor. Those bootstrappers learned how to do that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @09:27PM (6 children)
So, for those who start out in higher cost of living areas, where they are integrated into a (functional) family network with at least some level of mutual support... they should abandon that and migrate away to seek lower cost of living? I mean, we did that, once, for a little less than 3 years - it bridged a tough time, but ultimately it wasn't the right answer for us, and in the big economic picture it was very costly. My employer paid roughly 6 months of my salary to relocate me out there with a 2 year agreement - then, thankfully just after the two year mark, they started slashing benefits amounting to a nearly 30% pay cut for me... so I left.
Thinking downmarket to people who can't get potential employers to pick up the cost of their move, footing the bill for the move yourself when you're already down on your luck - with what? Credit? If we all had functional crystal balls that told the future, it would make the decision making process much more reliable, and break the stock market overnight - until that time... mistakes happen.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 22 2018, @09:58PM (5 children)
Notice the cognitive dissonance of demanding social benefits because one needs to support poor peoples' "family networks" in bad locations. The obvious solution is move them out - family networks be damned.
What you miss here is that moving is a key way to address regional differences in wealth and income inequality.
In other words, the economic effects of moving where the jobs are is more useful and important than the "family network" to the extent that it's actually lessened economic differences between the states for the better part of a century with a drop in this economic improvement once people stopped moving so much.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 22 2018, @09:59PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 22 2018, @10:46PM (3 children)
A couple of months after we moved, NPR was running a sound-bite from W that was along the lines of "I know a lot of you have had to relocate, but we are stronger for it... blah blah blah" my family was squarely in the group he was talking about, and, for us at least, he was completely full of shit. The moving companies, and realtors, and all those people were economically enhanced by our move, but my family and the company that moved me still paid a high price for that move, and within 3 years we moved right back, giving another round of cash to the moving company and realtors.
It's not just family networks, its entire social networks, friends who can watch the kids... do things for the house when you're not there, etc. When you've lived in a place for 10 years, you develop a reliable network of those people, when we were new in Houston our older (3 year old) had a fever spike of 107, when we took him to the ER we left our toddler with a "new friend" - nice family, dad's a big mucky muck with a local NASA contractor, but what we didn't know, yet, is that the wife was strung out on anti-depressants, and while our toddler was in her care their yappy little dog barked him over onto an open cabinet door - cut his face, that scar is still visible now 13 years later, but faint - and he's still terrified of little yappy dogs. And, that's a minor bad outcome...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @01:16AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:16PM (1 child)
You are a true sociopath, if you led the country we'd be back to the dark ages by supper time. Who cares about community? I need better efficiency for my Excel bean counting!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:33PM
And if we were still running on feelz like you desire, we would have never left the Dark Ages.
When you're demanding something that society has to pay a lot for, you need to have a better justification than what JoeMerchant presented here. There's a lot of bad lifestyle choices out there presented as economic necessity. For example, most farm subsidies are partially rationalized on the basis that it protects a way of life.
Well, my view is that if your way of life costs so much that you are unwilling to pay for it, then that means you don't want it enough to justify me paying for it either.