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If you bring up UBI, or other reforms, you'll inevitably get someone who brings up: "voting yourself someone else's money".
You could convince me, except that things have gotten to an absurd state.
I look at some graphs of wealth inequality and it is unimaginably shocking. I never dreamed it could be this bad. More than 50% of the US wealth is owned by 5% of the people. [1] 35% is owned by only 1% of the population.
This image from this article also tells the story.
I'm not going to argue how accurate those numbers are. Rather, I will extrapolate the trend.
Let's continue the current trend to its logical absurd conclusion. The entire planet is owned by one single person. You (and everyone else) are one of the wage slaves in the bottom 99.99999999 % of the population (at least 8 decimal places). [7.5 billion people, minus that one person who owns everything, then divided by 7.5 billion people.]
Naturally, we should respect property ownership. Somehow this one person deserves and "earned" the wealth of the entire planet through his hard and diligent efforts and deserves to own everything and everyone. It is absurd on its face.
At this logical endpoint, it clearly seems that the rest of the planet should seize the wealth of the one person.
Wealth transfer has already happened. And is still happening. Republicans are just fine with this as long as it is all trickling upward.
Yes, "voting yourself someone else's money" involves taking away some of the absurd amounts of wealth hoarded up by a few. Amounts of individual wealth that one person couldn't spend in a lifetime; then leaves to others, who themselves can't spend it in their lifetime.
Not as a proposal, but just to make a point, hypothetically, if all of these people who exceed this threshold had their net worth capped at $100 Million, they would still be just fine. Yes, really! They would still live in fabulous homes, drive fabulous cars, and eat whatever they wanted, travel wherever and whenever they wanted -- for the rest of their natural lives.
In case my "one man owns the world" didn't get the idea across, I'll be more blunt. Any time too few people have owned way, way too much, and too many had nothing, there is always an uprising. I'm not proposing an uprising. I'm merely warning it is inevitable. Hopefully not in my lifetime. Maybe it would be better to solve this peacefully where the wealthiest, while heavily taxed, still end up, after taxes, fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of most everyone else. I'm not proposing reducing all the rich people's wealth to some cap. Just that they should pay their fair share. Why are they the ones who get the tax cuts?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2020, @11:36AM (2 children)
The strict control over immigration is a red herring. The real problem is the law of supply and demand. When women entered the workforce it halved wages because it doubled the supply of labor. Now it takes two full time wages to raise a family. This is not a coincidence.
I am not arguing against equal rights, but we need to remove enough people from the labor market to increase the wages of those still in it. People dropping out on a UBI is one way, a stay at home parent is another.
Rent used to be around 20% of a wage, or two to three years gross wage to buy a house. Now it is more than 50% or ten years. We need to reduce the supply of labor until wages return to those levels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @12:51AM (1 child)
> Now it is more than 50% or ten years.
Depends where you are. Here in Buffalo, https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Buffalo_NY/overview [realtor.com]
> Buffalo is a city in New York and consists of 52 neighborhoods. There are 1,476 homes for sale, ranging from $5K to $2.2M.
> $148.5K .. Median Listing Home Price
> $82 ...... Median Listing Home Price/Sq Ft
> $144K .... Median Sold Home Price
If you have a $35K/year job, that average house is only 4 years worth of gross. At the low end, there are livable houses well under $100K, or, as you note, about 3 years worth of gross. If you are at the lower end of the income range, pick a cheaper place to live.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2020, @10:50PM
https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/new-york/buffalo/ [deptofnumbers.com]
The median wage in Buffalo is $60,000. However the family income is only $80,000, indicating that only one third of families have a second median income. That is roughly the same increase from 3 to 4 years gross income that you quote. Quite the coincidence isn't it that the housing price increase cancels out the added income from the second job?