Economic inequality

If you include pension contributions then that’s what I currently do.

If you don’t include pension contributions, then that’s what I could do, if I wanted to (I don’t want to because I like going out).

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Do you consider yourself to be rich?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Well my name is literally “Rich”, so

0 voters

Not currently but I reckon in about 3 years, definitely.

Living the American Dream!

you see, even this is hard

relative to the city/country/society I live in - absolutely not

relative to global wealth - totally in an upper percentile

but my relative wealth globally is entirely because of the GDP of the country/society I live in - in which I make around about the national average income but less than the average income for my city & the only piece of capital I own is still over 50% owned by the bank to which I’m paying hefty interest every quarter

Zlatan is rich, it takes him about 1 match + training to earn what I earn in a year & fuck me his capital & investments must be earning some serious money too

money eh

No one is really answering the OP though - it’s like you all can’t even imagine a classless society

Anyone here think that regulating economic equality is ‘an enemy of progress’ or anti-aspirational?

cant think of anything it could “depend” on for £70k+ not to be rich

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capitalist society doesn’t have a heart

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Obscene, economic inequality perpetuating, wealth is mainly drive by capital, not income. Even over a full career of earning £70k you wouldn’t be building up huge amounts of capital to pass on to the next generation.

They could be heavily in debt. They could have children and be a single-earning household with a spouse who has a long-term degenerative disability. Obviously these scenarios are rare - point I was making is that whilst almost everyone earning £70k+ could, and perhaps should, be considered rich, it doesn’t necessarily mean that gross income as a SOLE measure is useful in all cases. Might be just be about useful enough to build policy around though.

Outside of food and clothes, what are you doing with that £70K if you’re not buying up things like property?

it mainly depends on your definition of rich

Mostly people earning £70k a year over their entire career will have an estate eligible for Inheritance Tax upon their death. So… yes you would.

dunno what this means but it sounds like you’re pretty rich and pretty uncomfortable with it

Buying a home, which I don’t really consider to be “buying up property” in a negative way. The main point I was making is that, whilst by any measure a person earning income of £70k a year is “rich”, they’re not really the big problem when it comes to wealth inequality.

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nah

guys …

this ‘rich or not’ thing…it’s a really reductive argument. Even major NGOs grade poverty as relative …if you follow the argument here you’re going down the route of enabling your average Joe to not give a fuck about eg free schools meals because starving in Africa

This thread was supposed to be about actual actionable (and saleable to the electorate) ideas for how to regulate extreme economic inequality

anyone got any ideas/thoughts about that?

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I wouldn’t say evenly distributed wealth in and of itself results in a classless society there’s still equality of status to consider.

That said one thing I liked the idea of was something Corbyn raised regarding a cap in executive pay which would mean that the highest paid member of a company can only earn a certain amount more than the lowest person so for example the ratio would have have to be along the lines of 20:1 or lower.

I don’t know about a classless society because class is based on more than just economic status but a gorvernment that abandons moneterism and starts targeting full employment rather than abitrary fiscal ratios would be a start.

As thewarn says, it needs to be a global approach, as one of the big facilitators of the wealth hoarding is people and companies moving it overseas where it is removed from the liquid economy and also can’t be taxed, but can be used as leverage.

It would need a huge step-change in openness and transparency.

But it has to happen though. The alternative is to continue with wealth being removed from the economy until demand is finally choked off and it all collapses.