US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
But yeah.. hard work is not rewarded. The funny thing is. The kids see it. They are not dumb ( as much as TikTok trends would suggest otherwise ). The ronin-like approach to working relationship is very visible now and, as a corporate drone, I can't help but be impressed given the near constant propaganda onslaught.
In fact, if we were to look at the abandoned as an economy of its own, minus the upper income levels, it actually still has a lot of members, and money is a part but does not have to be all of it.
The quiet group to which I refer is a group of people who believe in working together to support each other, and not making a big noise about it. We are finding ways to live working around the current system, and I do think it is gaining support. It takes a mix of support, room/space to experiment and a spirit of partnership first over domination.
FWIW, I'm not anti-capitalist. But I am pro-good life for everyone, and I think the extremes, market failures and inequalities of our current system - well - we can do better.
You cannot morally impose the wealthy to support the rest. It has to come through legislation and organization of labor.
Also cutting tax rates and encouraging 'pass-through' S-Corps, the latter of which really helped many people skirt taxes:
* https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/0...
* https://phys.org/news/2026-10-private-business-fortunes-reve...
* https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250378507/theeverywheremi...
In the late 1990s, under Clinton, the US was in a fiscal position such that people were worried about US Treasuries (bonds) not being available anymore because of surpluses. Then there was Bush (wars, tax cuts), the GFC, Trump 1.0 tax cuts, Trump 2.0 tax cuts: and people are wondering how the US can solve its fiscal mess? How about you go back to 1997 (tax rates), the last time this was a non-issue.
When it comes to wealth, the ceiling should be unlimited AND the floor should be high.
Technically, thanks to thermodynamics, the pie is constantly shrinking. We haven’t dug up or exploited all the useful stuff yet, so from our limited perspective there is still room to grow the pie. But we’re probably getting close to the limit, as the rate of consuming useful stuff is beginning to exceed the rate of digging it up or otherwise capturing it.
Yes, there's been a fixed amount of money since the beginning of time!
You’ve then got efficiencies. If you have 5 slaves like the new feudal lords (and wannabe sycophants) want and the them to dig a ditch, if you provide a jcb you will get more ditches done more quickly. Work done per person you control increases which is good for you as you own the output.
what do you mean?
So the idea that the wealth is going to workers (and using Mark Zuckerberg as an example) is extremely contrary to the facts on the ground and the cited reality.
Unlike central bank printing or even loan creation, this method of wealth creation is not zero-sum and not inflationary.
have you thought through how you would even operationalize a ceiling on the amount of wealth that someone might control or have?
even a rough heuristic from you would be interesting to consider.
There are only two operational challenges, but if the political will is there, they really aren't rocket science. One is having enough auditors to enforce the tax. The second is liquidity, which can be solved by allowing the tax to be paid in kind, i.e. by allowing it to be paid by transferring ownership to a social wealth fund instead of cash.
So you would take that wealth away from productive application?
Building high speed rail, hospitals and schools. Paying teachers more, universal healthcare, better roads and airports and less free pipes.
Those are all fantastic things that benefit everyone while also creating jobs and spreading the wealth around.
Even Bill Gates has said his taxes should be higher [1]
https://www.investopedia.com/news/bill-gates-says-he-should-...
If you have above a certain amount of wealth, it is usually tied up in investments, sometimes money you have lent to the government (bonds, treasuries) and other times equity. Those are productive applications.
More generally, I'd say the burden is on you to demonstrate the exact mechanism by which productivity would be affected.
Closing up loopholes on realizing wealth like by taking loans continuously using your unsold stocks as collateral.
We don't even have to immediately jump to more extreme ideas like a straight wealth tax. We could try doing _anything_ instead of just shrugging our shoulders as we watch people like Musk and other oligarchs take us down the path Russia went in the 90s.
I mean, we can put you in the matrix and you can have that be true if you care zero about the rest of reality. Cypher.
also, social economics has demonstrated what most people care about is their wealth relative to their neighbors so you're going to create poverty whether you like it or not if there's no ceiling.
That's just not accurate. What people care most about is not losing what they already have. That will cause extreme reactions.
Sounds a bit like taxation.
The problem with inequality isn't just that extremely wealthy people exist or that they live really comfortable lives. It's that they use their power to try to control us all. If Elon Musk was just a trillionaire who messed around with cars and rockets and women, there wouldn't be a problem. But he got into politics, and his wealth means his political opinions count for far more than yours or mine, and that is a serious problem. You or I can't destroy a federal agency we don't like or make major foreign policy decisions as a private citizen, but he can.
If you have a gap of over 10,000x, then the most likely cause is that the system is broken rather than some humans make the world way better than other ones.
I don't follow what point you're trying to make here.
> If anything it should be deflationary because the rich mostly don't spend their money, else they wouldn't be rich.
The exact opposite is the case. "The rich", like all people who are able to put money aside for retirement/savings, seek to secure their wealth by diversifying their portfolio. In other words, they buy assets.
The other part is that ultra wealthy people will pay far above market value for basically everything, which creates inflationary pressure.
To make it concrete, hHow do you think SpaceX should spend its resources differently than it does?
That's silly.
You are advocating for either:
a) SpaceX should not have been started in the first place
OR
b) Now that it has made so much possible and is so large, it should be disbanded and the assets distributed to these hundreds of thousands of small businesses? You do realize that if you disband it, the shares would not be worth much, right? They only have value because they represent future profits from the SpaceX business.
Wouldn't be bad.
Also, without SpaceX we would now be entirely dependent on that disgusting despot Putin for all space launches, but maybe that doesn’t matter to some people, the “we don’t deserve to go to space” set who feel that all the money spent on any space program is better used on welfare programs? I suspect those people would still be pissed when their GPS stops working because the satellites failed, or were destroyed by an even more emboldened Russia that doesn’t share their values or their pacifism.
At least get your facts straight. A quick search will reveal that SPCX P/E ratio is no where close to the absurd number of 5,000 that you're throwing around.
I was being generous remembering the not so distance past.. its earnings are actually negative this quarter EPS = -0.68 did you notice the negative number that means negative P/E way worse than that 5000
Of course, that statement sounds reasonable. However, to make it concrete, who do you think bought which election?
I'd be very curious to see your example demonstrate what you mean by "buy".
The funniest part is that Musk is a Democrat who was driven out of that party with pitchforks due to not swerving hard with the party elites at the time of Woke 1.0. (Personally, it took me a few more years to realize the bandwagon I was on was no longer doing anything for people like me who work and play by the rules. But I left too.)
Owned in the end by the very same dentists, no?
But sure, keep imagining PE is pumping money into the industry to buy nothing.
"The percentage of dentists affiliated with private equity has nearly doubled over the course of six years"
I'm asking seriously. I've done this exercise for myself on what I want for my life, and the answer is that I can already afford it, and if we weren't so wasteful with our surplus of food, weren't so corrupted by regulatory capture as to allow companies to charge whatever for essentials, then most people would probably be able to achieve that same level of comfort.
What is it that you or anyone else needs an infinite amount of wealth for?
You allocate it to productive means, you don't consume it.
Do you see billionaires doing that right now? Are they the most efficient resource allocators? Is the $250 million that Elon is spending to influence the election the best use of that $250 million that he could've achieved?
I would like some more serious answers from you, otherwise don't bother allocating your effort to responding. I'm sure you, as an excellent allocator, will come to the same conclusion.
The person, our group of people, who have built the specific heap of wealth (e.g. a company) are the best stewards in my opinion. It does not mean that they WILL increase the wealth even more, they might run it into the ground, but they are the only ones who have the moral right and probably the experience.
Then consumption isn't the dispute, and the yachts are a distraction. So the question is what unbounded accumulation buys that bounded accumulation can't. Not welfare, since you've just said it's all reinvested.
What's left is control: over which projects get capital, which technologies get built, which politicians get funded. $250M toward an election is the same capital, doing the same "allocation." Is concentrated control over allocation a good we should maximize? And is "they built this heap" a sufficient moral title to it, including when the heap was inherited rather than built (which is the majority of the time)?
Without that you will always run into these sort of issues. The problem isn't wealth inequality, the problem is that wealth buys political power.
Many people spend a portion of their wealth in elections. Even middle class voters.
According to the data I could find, on average the middle class donate <$100. At least 55% donate <$100, with most being small donations.
Let's be generous and use $100. That means one person exerted the equivalent pressure of 5 million people.
What the fuck are you on about at this point. What is this stupid technically correct "but many people spend on elections" nonsense? Are you being purposefully obtuse?
Yes, I am.
It is a policy failure to allow ANYONE to spend money to influence / support elected officials. Your only influence should be voting.
It feels odd that you would point out the little guy when there is kind of this elephant in the room.
You could have just said we need to get money out of politics.
It’s funny because a decade ago nobody cared that the Silicon Valley and Hollywood rich sets consistently poured money into the Democratic Party.
Then when they took the party far to the left in the 2016-2020 era, and Silicon Valley noped out and started supporting the GOP just to block them, then suddenly it became a big problem where their donations were going.
The zillionaires buy thinktanks to push their agenda by claiming this nonsense. Infinite wealth = erosion of democracy when few people try to change the world to their liking.
Who do you think got that $100m spend? Didn't it go to all the service providers? The caterers, the people who worked the function, hotels, food distributors, the musicians, the travel agencies, cab drivers, coffee shops, etc.?
Or do you think it was just thrown into the water?
Heck, I know middle class people who spend $50k on a wedding and I think that's obscene, but their right.
Monies from infinite wealth can not be spent on services in totality. It is mostly accumulated slowing down the velocity of money. In fact there don't use their own money to grow their business. The wedding was expensive because it was for a VIP and they charged more. All those guests would have eaten dinner if they didn't eat the food in the wedding.
If you want to ensure you have maximum power and control over others, there is likely no limit to the wealth you will be satisfied with.
Imagine for instance if you were a massive deca-billionaire, you could just pick a random person off the street and make them a multi-millionaire with the same ease that someone fills up their gas tank. In a society where money runs through everything, this is a god like power.
As your post implies, upper middle class Americans have already hit the point of marginal returns for most aspects of life. You don't get much better than an iPhone, a PS5, a standard dishwasher, standard fridge, a reliable car, et cetera.
But there are a few out of reach. The most expensive significant upgrade is a private jet. That's available to centi-millionaires. Nothing available to billionaires is a significant improvement, just a marginal one.
Except for power.
Is this a global cap? If so, can we just have a global world peace treaty first, just to prove you can get 200+ states to all agree on something easy, before trying one where it’s in their extreme economic interest to not agree? If not global, it’s just a game where the wealthy will hire lawyers to move money around and structure it in ways that escape the trap.
And the level at which it triggers will be subject to constant fuckery by politicians, depending on their budgetary needs. Once it’s low enough, and it will be eventually, it’ll hit normal people who just own a couple of McDonalds franchises. And they won’t be able to do the fancy maneuvers that Bezos, Musk, Zuck will do. In the end you’ve solved nothing and driven a ton of tax revenue out of your country.
If we're going to tax wealth, then we should probably tax it to just below the level of growth, so that it doesn't spiral towards a singularity.
Unlimited wealth means political power and means to further it.
The floor should also be comfortably high but not to the detriment of the environment for example.
The rich have greedily and selfishly opted out, and left a massive moral vacuum.
They must be held accountable. And the only way to hold the rich and powerful accountable is to stop them from corrupting the political process. Ban lobbying, undisclosed political donations and concentrations of private media ownership, and society will recover.
The number four story also has 46 votes and is 3 hours old.
By the way, I think it's more than "interesting theory". I've seen dang comment more than once to the effect that comments > upvotes = off the front page.
The plural of anecdote is not data. I believe you. Also, I'm not going to set my priors on 0% chance it's not something else 100% of the time.
> Let's say that an article has 50 upvotes and 20 comments. Posting 31 comments
You're coming from an intentional actor angle. I was more thinking: people who are riled up and don't like something are more likely to post multiple comments (rage bait). So whether or not they intend to have that outcome, their emergent behavior has that effect. And if they're starting flame wars they only need N/2 number of comments if every comment draws a response. Fewer if multiple respond (which is usually true for the most horrible takes). I think it's cheaper and easier to do than you make out. If they can draw 5 responses per comment, they only need 7 comments total (round up).
The book "Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design" by MIT press for where my head is at.
How did you stumble on this comment thread in a nuked (for whatever reason) post anyway?
"People who are riled up" is exactly what this is supposed to detect. It's a flamewar detector. HN doesn't want to promote such a thing on the front page, because it's not an interesting discussion.
HN has other mechanisms for detecting and shadow banning bad actors, punishing everybody else by keeping derailed conversations on the front page is not productive.
On the other side, literally all the emails I receive, all my social network connections are spam. Like completely irrelevant, generic spam sent by a bot, but not even tailored to me; just generic template 'Dear sir'; my name is not even mentioned.
If none of the communication mechanisms work for you, how can you set up a meeting with an investor to raise money, for example? These people don't like cold intros and security risks means that they are harder to meet in person than ever before. It's also harder to network your way to a warm introduction because most of the people who know investors are themselves wealthy and also don't want to talk to you for safety risks reasons.
For me, things look completely different now than they did 5 years ago; it's like I have been shadow-banned from the entire internet and society.
I can't do anything in this society. My skills are mis-allocated, my time wasted. I'm just waiting for retirement. It's horrible. And I'm extremely ambitious; worked nights and weekends for 15 years straight.
The people who hoard ALL the opportunities are incapable of allocating them efficiently due to complete saturation of their bandwidth. Literally, if you are someone who are in a position to provide opportunities, you are saturated and unreachable.
These people turn down more life-changing opportunities in an hour than I get in a lifetime. And when I say 'turn down', I mean 'ignore'; because these people don't even have the time to say 'No' to an opportunity I would kill for! They don't even have the time to click on the email or perhaps even read the subject line!
This is coupled with their self-centered politics which seem obsessed with them capturing as much wealth as possible and avoiding taxes at the clear expense of younger generations.
Interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots:
> In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh7A2VyveUw
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theres-a-mind-boggling...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/theres-a-mind-boggling-number...
* https://open.spotify.com/episode/3wFRjaeUQOiNmlYYTwhwRf
(Lots of other interviews as well as the book just came out a few months ago, so the authors did a book tour.)
Some take aways from the books:
> According to Zidar and Zwick, Main Street Millionaires hold over 13x more wealth than the Forbes 400. And where do they hold it? In pass-through entities (like LLCs and S-corps) in various industries. Which industries in particular? Zidar and Zwick note that the top five are:
> 1. Legal services. This is mostly law firm partnerships.*
> 2. Financial investment activities. This includes venture capital, private equity, and hedge fund managers.
> 3. Auto dealers. These are the local, independently owned dealerships that sell new and used cars.
> 4. Professional and technical services and management consulting. This includes independent consulting firms and other specialized professional practices.
> 5. Oil and gas extraction. This includes fracking companies in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and other states.
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/who-is-really-rich-in-america/
An interesting observation: a radiologist working at a hospital may make much less if they're an employee of the hospital, versus something like a 'consultant' who use an pass-through S-Corp at the same hospital doing the same work.
Trump, Trump, Trump. Vote him out and we'll make sure that ACA continues, the Iran "conflict" is fought responsibly, and free trade will never be questioned again. This will somehow help income inequality in ways that I'm not going to tell you.
edit: and I'll add a reminder here that no one ever projected that ACA would lower healthcare costs - only that it would slow the growth in healthcare costs, which it managed to do for maybe three years. The purpose of ACA was to get single-payer people to shut up, and to institutionalize a bunch of insurance companies by promising them a consistent income.
Another reminder that "The Conversation" is a website of completely shady origins and financing that was pushed into the conversation out of nowhere. It licenses all of its articles creative commons so they can be mirrored on multiple websites, and relies on being pushed by social media. They're written by no one with any reputation to protect. It's Radio Free Europe level propaganda, but without honestly announcing itself and with no loyalty to any particular country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation_(website)
Last reminder, Sunday is when political propaganda articles get pushed on HN, because it is a low-traffic day. There is not a single interesting thing in this article; there is nothing "you might not expect" except the brazenness in trying to assign 50 years of neoliberalism to Trump in the end.
Partisan divide on the causes of inequality masks the true reason for widening inequality, and it's a simple matter of math. It's so goddamn simple, but fixing it is REALLY overturning the economy, so the socialists don't want it, and the rich people don't want it either.
The way I see it: Health insurance is actually getting more expensive. Tariffs are making imports more expensive. (Which also makes domestic production more expensive.) The Iran "conflict" was retarded. TFA wasn't really wrong about that stuff. It's obvious.
Edited to add: You edited your post after I published my response. My original comment, which is that you weren't making much sense, is rescinded. Only now what you've written amounts to: "it's not Trump's fault and the outlet is crooked!" which is really just lol. lmao even.
> people will simply buy less cheap 差不多 shit from china that goes straight to landfills because it doesn't work or doesn't last.
This take is out of date by about 15 years, I think.
Go to five below and take a peek at the crap that's on the shelves