danivon wrote:Archduke, I never said he was making nothing out of it. But he's far from living the high life. [snip] I'd appreciate it if you read that again, as it seems you didn't understand me the first time.

Yeah, I was a little snarky in my whole series of posts on this thread. Mea Culpas. Bad day at work.

danivon wrote: I can't find whether TBL does get a salary as a director, or not. He was in 1999 (some years after W3C was set up) employed by MIT and said that was where he got his money from.

Well, the W3C website says it operates with a full time Director and staff. He is the Director. Therefore, I am going to assume he gets paid.

danivon wrote:Please, Archduke, not every innovator does it for the Benjamins...

Yeah they do. They may have an altruistic reason as well but nobody does anything without expecting payback of some sort. Have you seen Berners-Lee CV? Just the quick 5 minute glance I saw has him involved with, i.e. on the Board of Directors, of at least 4 different companies/foundations all pertaining to the Internet.

rickyp wrote:OK. But what does that have to do with your claim that it is "income disparity" that creates innovation?

I never made that claim. Your reading comprehension is simply subpar.

PCHiway wrote:they showed that income inequalities can be the result of unusual leaps in some sectors and stagnation in others but that fact shouldn't deter countries from innovation.

See? "can be the result of". One follows the other. The innovation leads to the boom to adopt the innovation; the boom creates income inequality.

The inverse formula does not hold.

Or, for you stat monkeys out there, corellation does not imply causation. Can I get a witness?

Anyhow, I promised you a county-by-county breakdown of income inequality. Here you go. This uses the less well-known but more scientifically rigorous Theil coefficient to determine disparities in income.

The more red a county, the more poor people share it with the uber-wealthy. Black represents counties with lots of low income types with few rich to balance them.

Archduke Russell John wrote:

danivon wrote:Please, Archduke, not every innovator does it for the Benjamins...

Yeah they do. They may have an altruistic reason as well but nobody does anything without expecting payback of some sort. Have you seen Berners-Lee CV? Just the quick 5 minute glance I saw has him involved with, i.e. on the Board of Directors, of at least 4 different companies/foundations all pertaining to the Internet.

Not all directorships are actually paid, and many are not paid well. But it's not clear that he intended 'payback' when he was developing http and html. Afterwards, hey, he gets some nice work out of it. But he's not raking in the millions, and that was my point.

PCH - when I first looked at the post that map didn't load. I would have guessed that the most disparate places were the big cities - NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, Houston, Boston, DC, maybe Philly. And Seattle of course, with Microsoft billionaires a stones throw away from the stoners.

But is there a point there? Cities are like that - they tend to be concentrations of wealth and of poverty, all over the world. Towns and rural areas tend to be more homogeneous. Some rural areas can be real hotspots for poverty, and cities that lose their industrial mojo can become sinks too. Now, would a map of the USA 100 years ago looked much different?

pc

The more red a county, the more poor people share it with the uber-wealthy. Black represents counties with lots of low income types with few rich to balance them.

Try as I might PC, I don't see how this explains anything. There have been places where the wealthy resided in greater numbers in the US since the beginning of the nation. Something to do with where they work or play...
Income inequality has been increasing in the US since 1979. Essentially the middle class hasn't gained a thing relative to 1979. If it were only about unequal rewards for innovation then other nations in the west would see similar income disparity occurring. They don't.

Inequality, the Middle Class & the Fading American Dream
by Perry L. Weed on February 12, 2011 - 9:52am
Bio: Attorney
and Economist

As inequality increases and the economic lives of middle and working class Americans become less secure, we witness in Washington the spectacle of renewed tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and, perhaps not coincidentally, the unprecedented flood of new political contributions from the wealthy and agents of financial institutions and transnational corporations. In the mid-term elections, secret donors spent more than $138 million. Any doubts about who controls Washington for the foreseeable future are settled. Prospects for fundamental change and improvement under the Democrats have been all but abandoned. The monied interests reign supreme.

The So-Called Recovery

This recovery is the most painful and least promising our nation has seen since that that followed the Great Depression. Unemployment and foreclosures are increasing. Neither the decline in housing prices –of 30 percent – nor in new construction has bottomed out. Pensions are being reduced. Our industrial base is vanishing. Cities and states are flat broke. Our infrastructure is crumbling. This recovery is not self-sustaining. And yet, in so far as there is a national economic plan for jobs, recovery and growth – Congress and President Obama have outsourced it to the Federal Reserve. The plight of a squeezed middle class has been outsourced by the President to the Vice President. And so it goes. No action required now until the Democratic Party elites crank it up again for the next election and again champion the beleaguered middle class as they did in the 2010 election. Washington is abandoning the middle class and betraying the American dream – the latter at risk of descending into the American nightmare. The United States of America is in danger of becoming a third world nation.

The rhetoric of “the two Americas” is all too real if you examine the U.S. economy over the last 35 years. The high tide of prosperity for the middle class began receding in the mid-1970s and their economic security is now in full retreat. Although the economy is larger by one-half than it was then, the lion’s share of the increase in income and wealth has flowed to a relatively small fraction of Americans. The U.S. has become the most unequal of rich nations. As the social contract continues to unravel, we need only to consider the angry citizens of Europe who have taken to the streets as a foretaste of what could happen here.

Astonishing Facts

In their new book, Winner-Take-All Politics, respected Professors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, present astonishing statistics on how Washington has made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class. Here are some of the figures:

· The top one percent of Americans received 36 percent of all gains in household income from 1979 until 2006, as their average after-tax annual incomes rose from $337,100 in 1979 to more than $1.2 million in 2006 – and increase of nearly 260 percent; during the same period, household incomes at the bottom rose the least – 11 percent.

· The top one percent received 53 percent of total income gains from 2001 to 2006.

· The top 0.1 percent, or roughly 300,000 households, received over 20 percent of all after-tax income gains between 1979 and 2005, compared with the 13.5 percent realized by the bottom 60 percent or roughly 180 million households. For this period, the average after-tax income of one household in every one thousand increased from over $4 million to nearly $24.3 million.

· In 2009 executives at the nation’s 38 largest companies earned a stunning total of $140 billion; Goldman Sachs paid its employees nearly $600,000 per person.

· In 2004 the wealthiest one percent of households had an average net worth of nearly $15 million while the bottom 80 percent had an average net worth of around $82,000; these wealthiest households own 35 percent of the nation’s $55 trillion in total wealth.

The steep and steady rise of the national income captured by the richest Americans is a trend that began around 1980. Few of the benefits of economic growth between 1979 and 2007 have trickled down. Thirty percent of the Bush tax cuts went to the top one percent of Americans. Over the entire period between 1983 and 2004, only 10 percent of all wealth gains went to the bottom 80 percent of Americans. The top five percent own 62 percent of the total wealth of the country.

Being middle class once meant working hard, getting ahead, achieving financial and retirement security and expecting one’s children to do as well or even better. Now, after three decades of flat or falling real wages for most Americans, more than 60 percent of us think things will be worse for our children and future generations. Eighty-seven percent are worried about the direction of the nation’s economy in the next year.

Average hourly wages and salaries of production and non-supervisory workers have steadily fallen since the 1970s. Adjusted for inflation, the earnings of most Americans – assuming they have a job – are lower than they were in 1973. At the same time, the top fifth of American households received more than half the nation’s income last year, with the lion’s share now concentrated in the top five percent.

Since the 1970s, the cavernous gap between wealthy Americans and those further down the economic ladder has continued to widen. The gap in wealth is wider than in any other advanced country. All the hoopla over the democratization of the stock market is simply empty rhetoric. Workers have been thrust into the market through the 401K plans that replaced pensions and the median holding for those households that do own stock is less than $30,000. Two-thirds of total stock market wealth is held by only five percent of American stockholders. So much for the “ownership society”!

The Middle Class – Its Rise & Decline

After World War II, American became the world’s first truly middle class nation. In the 30 years following the war, the real income of all American families, including the poor and near poor, doubled. The nation, by every economic measure, was becoming more equal. All that has changed.

For the past 30 years, the trend toward economic inequality has rolled back the post-World War II progress which had moved the nation toward a more equitable distribution of income and wealth. In the past ten years, the inflation-adjusted income of the median household fell 4.8 percent, the worst drop in at least half a century. And for many there is no income – more than 70 percent of Americans know someone who has lost a job. College graduates can’t find jobs. Americans are losing purchasing power and their net worth is falling. The value of their homes is shrinking. Their retirement security has eroded. Medical and educational costs are rising faster than the cost of living index. In 2009, 16.7 percent of the American population – 50.7 million people – was without health insurance, the highest since this record has been kept. One in four homes is now under water and over 4.2 million home loans are in or near foreclosure. Last year, there was an 11.6 percent increase in families consolidating and moving in together.

In contrast, the wealthiest ten percent of countrymen hold over 60 percent of total family assets. America’s richest one percent now hold more wealth than America’s entire bottom 90 percent. The last 20 years have witnessed the most colossal amassing of huge fortunes in U.S. history. The nation now boasts more than 400 of billionaires.

Washington Rigged the Economy

Since 1946, the effective federal tax for the richest Americans has fallen by 60 percent. Those benefiting the most from our economy in income and wealth are simply not paying in, in proportion to what they are taking out. Nevertheless, the top priority of Republicans in Washington has been tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporate and financial entities. Their Herculean efforts to restore the Bush income tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and to repeal an estate tax affecting only the wealthiest two percent underscore the intensity of the ongoing class warfare and linkage between political polarization and economic inequality.

We seem to have degenerated into a form of social Darwinism. The prevailing national economic strategy of Washington has been to make business more profitable and less accountable and to reward the owners, investors and other wealthier Americans, at the expense of the great majority of workers and U.S. households. Workers have fewer countervailing protections. Their representation in Washington has been sold out. Organized labor’s economic clout to win higher wages and benefits is withering away. Businesses and wealthy individuals contribute billions to influence elections, outspending labor unions many times over.

The soaring compensation of senior corporate executives, the increasing number of American millionaires and billionaires, the material excesses of our public and private elites – taken together – have very few precedents in American history. It is reminiscent of the last stages of other great empires. Many of the nation’s elites, including its elected leaders, are unwilling to broach the subjects of inequality and class warfare – the very real struggle for a piece of the American pie. They appear to be asleep to – or purposely ignoring – these realities.

The absence of effective social and economic countervailing forces to address the ominous rise in inequality is increasingly a cause for alarm. Washington can no longer ignore the challenge to spread more equitably the benefits of economic growth – now enjoyed by those at the top – without undermining the economy that supports it. But where is the national debate? How do we hammer out new policies to alleviate the growing economic imbalances in our republic and thereby stem the social unrest that threatens the public landscape? The need is grave and immediate that we re-establish the economic opportunity and prospects for upward mobility that have for 200 years sustained the American dream and served as the bedrock for a stable democratic nation.

Better watch out ricky. The copyright police are gonna come after you.

I just like maps...plus it always helps me understand a phenomenon when I can visualize it.

We kicked off this thread with the genaralized lament from ricky that income inequality was spreading far and wide. Well, from the looks of the map income inequality looks like a primarily urban (and single-industry counties, and indian reservation) phenomenon. Most of the U.S. looks pretty balanced.

But let's stipulate that you're talking about gross population rather than an effect across the entirety of our republic. Fair enough. This still looks like a problem that's affecting a few, primarily Democratic, bastions. If wealth redistribution schemes are the new cri de couer...I see little that could stop their implementation on a local level. There are plenty of county and city income taxes already, the precedent has been set for that.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but my impression is that those of you who are concerned about the distribution of wealth within the U.S. would like nothing better than a directed federal tax against the top wealth-holders; the proceeds of which could be retrenched into federal programs that could benefit the poor and/or stimulate the economy as a whole.

Well, based on the above map, I submit that this is a regional problem that is better addressed at the city/county/state level. Objections?

archduke

Better watch out ricky. The copyright police are gonna come after you

The police would look at this attribution first wouldn't they?

Inequality, the Middle Class & the Fading American Dream
by Perry L. Weed on February 12, 2011 - 9:52am

(The link wouldn't paste...)

pc

Well, based on the above map, I submit that this is a regional problem

Give yourself a shake.
All your map does is tell you where the rich folk live.

Joining this discussion late, and scanning the forum to get a sense of what is being discussed, one of the issues raised was the relationship between innovation and income disparity, more precisely: the correlation between the two.

Let’s test this to see. We have at our disposal a widely used measure of income inequality – the GINI coefficient. Should we apply this measure, we must then turn to the topic of defining what we mean by innovation? If we can codify this variable into something that can be quantified, we can track its fluctuation alongside the GINI coefficient.

As for the comments made regarding the so-called Dark Ages as periods lacking innovation, I would disagree. However, this may be getting off topic.

PCHiway wrote:But let's stipulate that you're talking about gross population rather than an effect across the entirety of our republic. Fair enough. This still looks like a problem that's affecting a few, primarily Democratic, bastions. If wealth redistribution schemes are the new cri de couer...I see little that could stop their implementation on a local level. There are plenty of county and city income taxes already, the precedent has been set for that.

Perhaps this is you not getting my point. Cities tend to be centres of inequality. Places with a lot of poor people tend to vote more left. You seem to be making a causal connection that's not evidenced by anything other than correlation. It doesn't tell us which came first (the Democrats or the inequality). It doesn't tell us what the trends are.

It also doesn't account for mobility. People relocate within the USA all the time. If they never moved across county lines, then perhaps you could say that the pockets of inequality are just local problems (although there may still be a flaw there). But they do move around, and a look at the entire nation shows that there is general inequality.

If anything, the map highlights it. There are some places where very rich people live. The vast bulk of the country does not have many rich people. Some large areas seem to be poorer than others.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but my impression is that those of you who are concerned about the distribution of wealth within the U.S. would like nothing better than a directed federal tax against the top wealth-holders; the proceeds of which could be retrenched into federal programs that could benefit the poor and/or stimulate the economy as a whole.

Perhaps we are not thinking of a simple solution like a federal tax? Perhaps you are indeed misunderstanding things by putting a cart in front of the horse. You object to our assumed solution, therefore our diagnosis of the problem must be wrong?

Or perhaps I am reading you wrongly...

Well, based on the above map, I submit that this is a regional problem that is better addressed at the city/county/state level. Objections?

The interconnectedness of the USA (or any other nation) belies such localist assumptions. Why look at counties alone, and not States? Why not look at the national level?

And why not look at patterns around the world. You'd find that in most nations, it is the large urban areas that are more 'unequal' than the rest, even if the nations themselves have less inequality, and they compare well to the US conurbations.

@ Magister - Gini coefficients don't take regional attributes into account whereas the Theil coefficients I posted do. I find the Theil model more robust. (If ricky had read up on what the Theil numbers on the map I posted actually mean...he wouldn't have beclowned himself with his interpretation of the map.)

As far as there being a correlation between innovation and income inequality...I suppose a good test would be to see if the areas that have the higher values are considered hotbeds of innovation...that seems to hold up at first blush.

@danivon. <sigh> You can't see me but I'm pinching my nose trying to stave off a headache. Is this going to be another thread where you are 'just saying'? Are you just reposting others' positions here without taking one of your own? Well...I'm not so keen to keep guessing what it is you are driving at here. So rather than me making my best guesses and having you say 'nuh-UH that's not what I meant at all. How DARE you put words in my mouth?' How about you just spell it out? What should the U.S. do to overcome this problem?

I don't agree with your assertion that inequality is a nationwide problem. The map and its attendant data belie that statement. Are you basing the "general inequality" of America on your own observations or something meatier?

And I don't understand what you're getting at with the mobility angle you bring up twice. Is your contention that people will move away from higher taxes and just shift the problem elsewhere? Perhaps. Please enumerate.

It matters little who came first, the Democrats or the inequality. What does matter is that Dems now preside over the municipalities with the most egregious excesses. Are you arguing that this is a problem that can only be addressed at the national level? Why? Based on what? Mobility?

Who are the bad guys here? Is it people with over $x million in the bank? People who inherited rather than worked for their money? People who won the lottery? As usual...I just can't see your best case scenario...if there is one. Just sayin'.

PC.

Well, from the looks of the map income inequality looks like a primarily urban (and single-industry counties, and indian reservation) phenomenon. Most of the U.S. looks pretty balanced.

You want to know how simplistic this is? Where is the financial centre of the US? Wall Street. And in New York you find the most billionares working at hedge funds and trading centres. And surprise surpise there's an area of income inequality...
Is New York City an area of innovation or simply one where high stakes financial deals have been made? (Or do you think credit default swaps are innovative?).
And lets look at West Virginia...no inequlaity. Just poverty every where.

The arguement about income inequality is a national one PC. Its between the top 2, 3 or 5% of the nation versus the rest.
Its an arguement about whether or not concentrating so much wealth with such a small elite is healthy. Seeing as the current deficit problem in the US is 2/3 a revenue problem and 1/3 a spending problem... Then the question is what caused the revenue problem.
1) A financial crisis caused when financial markets collapsed - but were bailed out with tax money.
When the financial crisis hit, the economy tanked and tax revenues declined sharply
2) A tax break at year 2000 when the economy and the debt curve were headed in the right direction. A tax break that created no jobs, but which put the budget in the deficit and a tax break that went primarily to the top 5%. (Add to that unfunded wars.)

What happens when the top earners don't pay what has been their historical share?(You do know that wealthy Americans are paying a historically low tax rate...?) Deficits, reduction in services and a decline in the general living standard. (But not the living standard of the wealthy). The anger of the Tea Party is essentially this anger (Well, the ones who are screaming about the gays getting married) but tye only see the part of the equation where government is suppossedly wasting all their tax money. But they sure do like their medicare....

PCHiway wrote:@ Magister - Gini coefficients don't take regional attributes into account whereas the Theil coefficients I posted do. I find the Theil model more robust. (If ricky had read up on what the Theil numbers on the map I posted actually mean...he wouldn't have beclowned himself with his interpretation of the map.)

As far as there being a correlation between innovation and income inequality...I suppose a good test would be to see if the areas that have the higher values are considered hotbeds of innovation...that seems to hold up at first blush.

The University of Texas Inequality Project link you posted provides a fine overview of the process of measuring inequality in their first slide-show. Hopefully this evening I will have the chance to go through the guide to computing the Theil Index.

Yes, the GINI coefficient is generally applied on a national comparative level so it may not be the measure we’re looking for if we are examining the level of income inequality amongst states (that is, provinces of the United States of America.

However, a study conducted by Lynch in 2003 – Estimates of income and Income Inequality in the United states and in Each of the Fifty States: 1988 – 1998 -- does use the GINI coefficient to compare income inequality amongst states.

The study is a dated not only because it was compiled eight years ago, but also because its data set is even older and only accounts for a decade. I haven’t read the article complete – which, by the way, is published in the Journal of Regional Science (Vol. 43 Issue 3, p571-588) in case anyone wants to track it down – so I’m not entirely sure of the methodology.

Nevertheless, here is a summary of the findings:
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9803/giniusa.png

I will try and process them into some sort of line graph later this week.

PCHiway wrote:@danivon. <sigh> You can't see me but I'm pinching my nose trying to stave off a headache. Is this going to be another thread where you are 'just saying'? Are you just reposting others' positions here without taking one of your own? Well...I'm not so keen to keep guessing what it is you are driving at here. So rather than me making my best guesses and having you say 'nuh-UH that's not what I meant at all. How DARE you put words in my mouth?' How about you just spell it out? What should the U.S. do to overcome this problem?

It's not a simple thing to deal with. I suppose the first issue to deal with is acceptance.

The main thing really is to look at what the causes of the poverty are. Why does a country like the USA, one of the richest per head, have slums, have homelessness, have high crime rates (and high incarceration rates) etc? It may well be that the solutions mean asking the rich to pay a bit more tax in order to deal with the causes. I'm not going to prescribe a simple solution, because there isn't one.

I don't agree with your assertion that inequality is a nationwide problem. The map and its attendant data belie that statement. Are you basing the "general inequality" of America on your own observations or something meatier?

I have been there, you know. And data on the USA is readily available. As is data on a load of other countries. The USA is not (as many may wish) a collection of separate economies all rubbing along, it's a large conglomerate with one large economy. And similarly it is one society, not hundreds divided by county.

And I don't understand what you're getting at with the mobility angle you bring up twice. Is your contention that people will move away from higher taxes and just shift the problem elsewhere? Perhaps. Please enumerate.

Well, there is that aspect, but people move for other reasons that to avoid high taxes (if that's your biggest problem in life, then you must be doing ok). People move to find work, for example. And always have. We saw with industrialisation a move from the small towns and rural areas into big cities. Those cities are not divorced from the countryside though - they serve and are served by each other. And people move between them for all kinds of reasons. They are, as I said, interconnected

I agree though that if you try just local solutions it is likely to shift the problem. The rich are more mobile than the poor, as well.

It matters little who came first, the Democrats or the inequality. What does matter is that Dems now preside over the municipalities with the most egregious excesses. Are you arguing that this is a problem that can only be addressed at the national level? Why? Based on what? Mobility?

So, are you blaming Dems for the excesses? Or the excesses for the success of the Dems? Or 'just sayin'? :roll:

What I'm saying is that the apparent 'local' nature of the inequality is simply a manifestation of where centres of population and activity are. I don't think that's hard to understand. You may disagree, but I'm not coming from total leftfield here, surely?

I am mindful that it's not even simply a 'national' problem, It's an international one, a human one. We have a massively unequal world, and that inequality leads to a lot of problems all over the place. Very poor people in China can do work for half the wages of poor people in the USA. So rich people in the USA know they can make more money by offshoring production. Sure, they lose some consumers (but they can export to the new rich in China!)

Who are the bad guys here? Is it people with over $x million in the bank? People who inherited rather than worked for their money? People who won the lottery? As usual...I just can't see your best case scenario...if there is one. Just sayin'.

It's not about people in black hats and white hats, it's about the whole system and the direction in which it goes. Looking for people to blame is not what this ought to be about.

Dan, I agree that looking at these phenomena requires some agile thinking. Solutions and problems and effects are all interconnected in a multiple Venn-diagram-esque way. But I think we're up to the challenge here at Redscape.

danivon wrote: It's not a simple thing to deal with. I suppose the first issue to deal with is acceptance.

You mean like, "admit you have a problem?"

danivon wrote:The main thing really is to look at what the causes of the poverty are. Why does a country like the USA, one of the richest per head, have slums, have homelessness, have high crime rates (and high incarceration rates) etc?

Let's not forget that this thread began as an examination of income inequality. As the thread has gone on we've pointed to wealth inequality and poverty as well. Related issues to be sure but distinct. So if we're going to admit we have a problem as you prescribe above then let's be clear about what problem(s) we're talking about. Is the problem that some people make more than others, some people have more than others, or that there is an underclass in poverty that doesn't have wealth now and has little hope of earning it?

If, as you assert, addressing the root causes of poverty is the primary step, I'm happy to start there. Poverty flourishes when education is poor, rule of law is weak, credit is unavailable, and unemployment is high. The US does indeed have people living in poverty (though..and I'll admit this is splitting hairs...we don't have slums. We have ghettos and barrios...but they simply cannot compare to the favelas of Brazil, the morass of Cairo, the squalor of Mumbai, or the living entity that squats outside of Manila. Those are slums. Anything else cheapens the name). I think the rule of law and availability of credit are pretty robust in the US so, if you accept my outline, the answer is better education and more jobs.

Hear hear! Gung ho! I think we should be throwing everything and the kitchen sink at these two issues. More money for school districts? Yes! Vouchers? Also yes. As many breaks as possible for businesses? Hoo-rah.

But even if everything implemented superbly, I can't see a society emerging where there wouldn't be income or wealth disparities. Some people would still have higher-paying jobs than others. Others would be luckier or more adroit at investing and build their wealth higher than their peers'.

danivon wrote: It may well be that the solutions mean asking the rich to pay a bit more tax in order to deal with the causes. I'm not going to prescribe a simple solution, because there isn't one.

On the contrary. Taxes and confiscations are the only solutions to trimming down income and, especially, accrued wealth. The implemetation may not be simple...but there is but one treatment. Please correct me if I'm wrong....but I don't see any other way you're going to get a redistribution of wealth and income.

danivon wrote: The USA is not (as many may wish) a collection of separate economies all rubbing along, it's a large conglomerate with one large economy. And similarly it is one society, not hundreds divided by county.

You are right and wrong here. The US is a gestalt where the sum of its parts is greater than its individual pieces. But there are individual pieces. There are many "Americas" that combine to make up the USA. By tinkering with one piece we can cause profound effects on other components. To claim that societal problems can only be addressed by a nationwide effort is incorrect.

danivon wrote: So, are you blaming Dems for the excesses? Or the excesses for the success of the Dems? Or 'just sayin'? :roll:

Almost 'just sayin'' but not quite. My point is that the most egregioius examples of American poverty and the most stunning hoards of accumlated wealth have, by and large, co-existed in areas of Democratic control for decades. That Dems have not raided their higher-end constituents to benefit those less fortunate tells me they are, very specifically, not taking action on this issue. I'm "just sayin'" because I figure Democrats are, at their core, smart and understand that killing the golden goose is contraindicated...I don't really expect them to do anything but what they've done for years; warn darkly about class warfare while happily going along with whatever the wealthy want.

danivon wrote: What I'm saying is that the apparent 'local' nature of the inequality is simply a manifestation of where centres of population and activity are. I don't think that's hard to understand. You may disagree, but I'm not coming from total leftfield here, surely?

Not at all. Cities are where innovation happens. That means you'll have highly educated innovators (and yes ricky...Wall Street is indeed innovative) living close by low-heeled burger flippers. This is not to say that some millionaires don't live out on the prairies...just that the most telliing examples of the haves and have-nots will always be in the urban areas. What I've seen bruited about is that the USA is a steaming hotbed of Egypt-like downtrodden masses from coast to coast. This is not the case.

danivon wrote: I am mindful that it's not even simply a 'national' problem, It's an international one, a human one. We have a massively unequal world, and that inequality leads to a lot of problems all over the place.

Let's talk about these problems. I can think of several. There's the threat to stability that we've seen in the MidEast. And there's the implication that it is morally wrong for someone to have much when others have little. Those are both certainly worth exploring though the latter is more an intellectual exercise than anything else. I have traveled the world and I can tell you that the combined financial might of all G-20 countries could not fix the health, infrastucture, corruption, and societal problems that plague the third world. I think this is a common misconception...that if you stripped the wealth from everyone and divided it equally amongst humanity that there would be enough to guarantee a common level of prosperity. There wouldn't be...not even close. Does that mean we shouldn't try to alleviate suffering and stamp out poverty? Absolutely not. But there are limits to any country's power. To pretend otherwise is foolish.

danivon wrote: It's not about people in black hats and white hats, it's about the whole system and the direction in which it goes. Looking for people to blame is not what this ought to be about.

It's not what it should be all about...but that doesn't mean the rhetoric isn't going in that direction. If progressives are serious about this they are going to have to draw a line somewhere...and somebody's going to have to be on the other side of it.