Talk:Wealth condensation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cut from the article:
- A number of people have pointed to American Republican tax policies as supporting this process in the United States, whereby the wealthy are excused from much of the burden of taxes, which are then paid by the middle class.
This sounds like a partisan criticism. So it should be attributed to a partisan. Say rather that Democrats and/or socialists criticize Republicans and this can go right back into the article.
It should, then, be balanced with either:
- an objective statement of how much taxes wealthy and middle class pay; or,
- a partisan defense of Republican tax policy; or,
- both of these
--Uncle Ed 17:37, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This article is incoherent. The intro apparently is referring to people with money investing it to make additional money. But the examples shown are talking about something else:
-
- Two examples of leveraging new wealth are:
- 1. The process by which corporate officers are paid huge salaries and bonuses, the total compensation sometimes being as much as thirty thousand times as much as that of their lower-paid employees. Critics of the corporate system have often charged that these executives are often given raises and increasing bonuses even while their corporate charges are losing money and laying off workers.
- and
- 2. The Republican tax policy which critics claims vastly favors the wealthy over the poor and the middle class, thus allowing the wealthy to retain more of their wealth as disposable income.
In the first case, the corporate officers are allegedly leveraging connections, but this has no direct connection to wealth. One could imagine a poor man with connections becoming wealthy by getting a cozy job with a corporation. In the second, we are talking about wealth being taken away from people, albeit in reduced quantities following a tax cut. How can this be an example of leveraging wealth by its current owners?
This article can certainly have examples, in fact it should definitely have them so as to help me understand what it's supposed to be about, but it would be good to clarify the connection between the above and the intro before returning them to the article. - Nat Krause 16:49, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
- I completely disagree. These are examples of how additional wealth accrues to certain members of the wealthy class; so what if there are rare examples in which poor people become rich? And reduction of taxes is a relative process; a regressive tax structure is one of the predominant processes driving wealth condensation. jaknouse 17:14, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
-
- "So what" is that there is no direct connection between becoming a CEO and being wealthy previously. Therefore, it is not an example of the process the article apparently describes. It might well be true that having money beforehand correlates with becoming a CEO, but correlation is not causation, which is to say that it is not a "process". One could easily imagine an individual from a privileged background who, because of debt, is quite poor on paper, but using his connections, becomes an executive in order to earn money.
-
- Likewise, unless we are talking about a tax on assets, which is rare, there is no direct connection between the amount of money that you have and the taxes that you pay. Furthermore, no amount of taxation, however low, will ever cause anyone to have more money than before they were taxed. Therefore, this cannot be an example of wealth accruing to anyone. Perhaps it could be included as an example in a wealth dissipation article. Regressive taxation can theoertically increase the relative disparity in wealth (while decreasing the absolute disparity), but, again, this does not involve wealth accruing or condensing. - Nat Krause 11:39, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Trickle Down Effect
Is there another way to phrase or qualify the argument against the “trickle down effect”? If you take the first sentence of the first and third, they seem to be in complete, yet angry agreement.
“The thrust of these arguments in support of free markets and the wealth disparity they create is that even if the gap between rich and poor widens, the poor themselves are actually better off than they would have been in the more equal state without free enterprise.”
“Critics of this position also point out that the total wealth of the United States is vastly higher than most other nations, and that the relatively superior standard of living of the American poor is solely due to this single disparity.”
The way I read the first paragraph, the argument for wealth condensation is that restrictions would stifle the economy, or in other words, freedom helps grow the economy. The second paragraph seems to argue that it is unfair to compare the United State’s poor to other nation’s poor, because the United State’s economy is larger. Unless there is an argument that somehow the United State’s economy is larger for reasons external to its free market economy, the two “opposing” arguments are in complete agreement.
In addition, http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/ie4.html is strong evidence against saying that the poor actually get poorer as a result of wealth condensation. I am not familiar with the arguments on wealth condensation, I have come up with some plausible arguments:
- Income for the poor could be increased faster through careful regulation than market forces alone would provide
- The growth in the bottom 10% percentile’s income is due to factors outside of a growing economy, or the growing economy is not the result of free enterprise
- Even though free markets do increase the income of the poor, the increase in income disparity is worse than the benefit of increase income because:
- The disparity reduces class mobility
- It is inherently unjust
I have tried to explore every avenue of attack on the “trickle down effect” and therefore, I will not add them to the article, as I am sure fairly that half of the arguments will turn out to be held only by extremists or are just figments of my imagination. I would encourage those that know better than I to copy in the arguments that make sense.--Techieman 07:09, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Density money map
I am looking for a map like this one, but instead of people... money density http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0303/peopleearth94_usda_big.gif
[edit] Intergenerational inequality
It would be nice to put something here on intergenerational inequality and wealth condensation. Talk about the process through which high amounts of wealth are transferred from one generation to the next. -- Kodemizer, december 2 2005
[edit] Rewrite trickle down
Trying to make certain parts NPOV. The "free market enthsiasts" paragraph was full of verbs like "claiming" and modifiers like "alleged" and "supposedly", while the critics paragraph uses "point out" and "is" with no modifiers. PAR 23:49, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
