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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: 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.