Fat Bloater That is so far from the truth it is disturbing.
High incomes have surged since the early 80's. These people never paid their fair contribution to government coffers. And each year, as they accumulate more wealth, they complain even more. Gina complaining about welfare is a total joke. If she walked off the street and applied for any job in middle management, she would be immediately be rejected on the basis of appearance. Yes she looks like she is on welfare. LOL Chubby Packer looked a bit the same way, until he had an operation. At least he could hide behind a dark suit.
The distortion in the economy caused by the property boom, and the relegation of the younger demographic, to watching from the window, as "economic spectators" is a FACT.
That is the scariest part of all. One part of the 3 part series Masters of Money. This series was produced on the pretext of examining why the effects of the GFC were so long lasting.
The World According To Marx Marx believed there were laws of motion running through human history and that Capitalism was inherently unstable. The world was divided into bosses and workers and for him they would always be at odds. To make profit, bosses squeeze what they pay their workers. The crisis comes when the workers don’t have enough money to buy what the bosses are trying to sell them. Capitalism would produce bigger and bigger crises and then it would collapse. The force driving us to this final collapse is the same one that built our world in the first place: the power of money.
Thought provoking stuff. Very relevant to the situation in Europe and America about the imbalance between what a worker earns and the spending power.
5. Inequality
By almost every measure, the U.S. tops out OECD countries in terms of income inequality, largely because America has the stingiest welfare state of any developed country. This inequality has deep and profound effects on American society. For instance, although the U.S. justifies its rampant inequality on the premise of upward mobility, many parts of the United States have abysmal levels of social mobility, where children born in the poorest quintile have a less than 3 percent chance of reaching the top quintile. Inequality harms our democracy, because the wealthy exert an outsized political influence. Sheldon Adelson, for instance, spent more to influence the 2012 election than the residents of 12 states combined. Inequality also tears at the social fabric, with a large body of research showing that inequality correlates with low levels of social trust. In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Pickett and Kate Wilkinson show that a wide variety of social indicators, including health and well-being are intimately tied to inequality.
Had the minimum wage tracked productivity gains since 1968, it would now stand above $20 an hour. More telling: Had workers on the lowest rung kept pace with the gains that have accrued to the one percent, it would have vaulted past $30 in 2007.
