Wealth Inequality in America

What Hacker News said

Strong rec chii · 2017-12 · on “Living in a parking lot in Santa Barbara”

this video tells what the average american thinks of the wealth distribution, vs reality (vs ideal): [this video] it's very enlightening.

Recommends mark_l_watson · 2013-03 · on “Bills seek end to farm animal abuse videos”

+100 for corporations -1 for consumers According to the book "Diet for a Small Planet" the beef industry gets $50 billion a year of free water from the federal government. Doesn't sound like fair market capitalism to me. It does sound like our elected officials can be easily bribed. The super rich have won. Hopefully not too far of topic, but a friend just sent me this video link about income inequality - an eye opener! [this video]

Recommends SapphireSun · 2015-04 · on “College for the masses”

For what it's worth, I agree, I think capitalism + some rule tweaks is fine. The culprit is really the beauty of capitalism: accelerating returns on investment. If you get to the head of the race you tend to start to accrue more and more wealth. The problem is that it's sucking the pond dry as there is a relatively stable money supply and much of it is circulating in the stratosphere (often as corporate stock buybacks). Hence the need for rule tweaks to enhance recirculation. This is a cool video I saw a while back that shows the current issue: [this video] I also agree that movement between countries is a modern problem that probably invalidates the old solution (unless multiple countries coordi

Recommends voidlogic · 2016-03 · on “Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it”

> I think sometimes a picture really does say 1,000 words. This short info-graphic video makes is pretty clear how dramatically top heavy wealth distribution in the U.S. is: [this video] It also does a nice job of comparing the "ideal", to the "perception" to the actual.

Recommends bigtrakzapzap · 2019-08 · on “It's Gotten Too Hard to Strike It Rich in America”

Yeap. And for average people, that leaves a hollowed-out middle-class and not-yet-automated/underpaid tasks like caregiving, teaching, nursing, police, retail sales, retail foodservice, Amazon warehouse stocking, TaskRabbit and Uber driving. People are rightly freaking-out because their existences are threatened while simultaneously others are discussing who's going to be the first trillionaire (much more of the wealth created is only going to the very rich). It seems rational to argue that incel and domestic terrorists, rising homelessness and opioid epidemics are indirectly influenced by the socioeconomic fall-out of rust-belt decay. Infographic video of how bad it really is: [this video]

Recommends anonsivalley652 · 2020-02 · on “In just 23 days, Bill Gates will earn back $747M Spent on Superyacht”

Outrage is clickbait gold. So, that is production in for-profit blogging or pseudo-journalism, and also in the business of social media. That said, Bill Gates is both a public figure and a billionaire, so is fair-game for a lot of criticism. He does set a good example, in general, with immense contributions to global public health and policy. Also, there's no U-haul's behind Hearses, so I would buy 50 Singer Porsches and a 747-400ER and crash them into each other with a trebuchet. If someone has more money than they could ever spend, invest or give-away in a scalable manner, then why the hell not buy an aircraft-carrier or a hydrogen yacht? Furthermore, balance sheet inequality is beyond sev

Recommends errcorrectcode · 2022-01 · on “Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs”

Yep. Nearly everyone but equity owners is either hurting or not going anywhere while delivering more for the same or less. Graph after graph Robert Reich has put out there shows the dismalness of the situation. Another infographic video about the distribution of wealth in reality vs. perceived reality vs. desired: [this video] Somehow there is also a systematic economic double-standard that works for some but not others: "free markets" of dog-eat-dog inputs (i.e., suppliers), but less free markets on outputs (i.e., monopolies, mega corporations, patents, proprietary-ness, closed-source). Unregulated greed fixes all problems by the "invisible hand", right?

Recommends sangnoir · 2023-04 · on “‘America does so much more to subsidise affluence than alleviate poverty’”

> The real meaningful wealth gap in our society is between the HN poster income bracket and the poor, not the one between HN poster income bracket and the billionaires. This is billionaire propaganda[1] to get the middle class to fight thier class war - it is a class war against the poor and middle class . The tax rate of the ultra-rich are at an all time low 1. [this video] shows the gap between people (like you) think the wealth distribution is vs the reality. It was made 10 years ago and has gotten further skewed since then. Start from to 2:40 if you're in a hurry.