You're going to compare working graveyards at 7-Eleven to slavery?
You should read a little bit about slavery and human trafficking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.
> I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.
The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other"
But it's a real stretch of the imagination to say the current United States (especially post income tax and Social Security entitlements) is anywhere even close to post Civil War circumstances.
> Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person.
There is a difference between "slaves" in the popular sense (chains, beatings, whips, rape), and "slaves" in the economic sense, but both are premised upon the unjust abrogation of freedom at the hands of another.
This article describes the latter case quite well:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/the-new-american-sla...
Impossible to know for certain, but I suspect he wouldn't be terribly pleased with a comparison of the current "lower class" to real slaves.
(Though we should recall that the rights of slaves and whether slave-owner could be prosecuted for manslaughter obviously depended on era and jurisdiction).
I find it astonishing that people compare modern-day income equality and the position of the poor in our time, in the Western world, to that of historical slavery (slavery in United States, or slavery in other slave-based economies in the New World prior to 19th century, not to mention slavery in the Old World which continued officially well into later half of 20th century).
In the West, no one is legally killing, whipping or dismembering the poor workers for not being obedient. Even the poor are still free to leave a place if they find life there unsustainable. Modern-day comparisons to "slavery" typically involve something along the lines "you are expected to do something in exchange for money that is given to you and you feel unpleasant about it".
It just doesn't compare with the actual, terrible injustice of real slavery.
No kidding! Believe it or not, even in 2016, there are tens of millions of people around the world living in actual slavery[0]. Most of them would probably still literally give a kidney to trade places with one of these lower-class people in the US.
What does this mean?
Or it can be used in an expressive way, the way that normal people write and talk and communicate, where people say things that are technically inaccurate but express meaning and and allow the listener or reader to understand the position, emotions, facts, thoughts and experiences of the speaker or writer.
For example, "I'm starving, let's get a bite to eat." Do you say "No you aren't, that's technically inaccurate, how dare you minimize the concerns of the starving multitudes across the globe" or do you say "Okay." because you understand what he means? That first response is how the "that's not real slavery!" thread of discussion here looks to the rest of us.
I think what he meant by that was he is communicating in the second, expressive way.
I wrote a blog post recently that somewhat excoriated the technical community for a blunt and mechanistic approach to argumentation along these lines:
http://likewise.am/2015/12/06/nitpicking-is-the-lowest-form-...
I do understand that 711 shift workers don't have their feet cut off if they leave.
When I say things like "we need a bit of Socialism right about now" .. I don't mean hardcore enforced-total-equality Socialism, I mean nice Socialism like the kind Bernie Sanders has been raving about.
It's taboo to point this out, especially on HN, but I'm feeling bold today:
You can't discuss the socialist policies of Western European countries without addressing their wealth. And you can't discuss the current wealth of Western European countries without acknowledging the process by which they acquired that wealth.
The "nice socialism that Sanders has been raving about" is the kind that is practiced in countries with a long history of colonization and slavery[0]. During this timeframe, they "earned" a massive amount of money by extracting resources from people that they literally enslaved. This started before the 17th century and continued into the 20th century.
Those people who were colonized and enslaved (and their countries) are still feeling the effects of that today, and they would not be so quick to describe that kind of socialism as "nice".
[0] Denmark and Sweden are the two that Sanders has called out specifically by name.
This doesn't change the fact that the current economic status of Denmark and Sweden today is directly linked to their status as colonial powers and slaveholders from the 17th-20th century.
> since the 19th century when slavery was practiced.
This entire subthread began with the claim that being "low-class" in the US is tantamount to slavery. If that's the case, there should be no problem with accepting colonialism, as it was practiced by Sweden into the late 19th century and Demark into the early 20th century, as a form of slavery, since it resembles slavery far more closely than being a member of the working poor in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark_in_World_War_II
AFAICT, Denmark (and Germany, Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, and everybody else) have whatever 'economic status' they have due to a lot more to what happened during the post WWII years than to colonial times.
I mean, yes, if you compare Sweden only to the really lucrative colonizers, it'll look "poor" by comparison. But all you're really saying is that Sweden was less effective as a colonial power than its neighbors who were even "better" at it (England, France, etc.). That doesn't change the original point. If you look beyond simply Europe at where Sweden was with respect to the rest of the world, especially the regions that were colonized and enslaved, it's clear where they stood, and clear how much they benefited by being the ones who colonized, as opposed to the ones who were colonized.
The point is, you can't just look at "nice European socialism" in a vacuum and ignore the reasons why that philosophy has succeeded in Western Europe and why that exact same philosophy has been an empirical disaster in countries that were previously colonies of Western European powers and are still impoverished enough that they cannot export the working class down the economic chain any further (the way Western European powers - and the US as well - have).
Over the course of the 20th century, the Ottomon and British empires crumbled. World War II happened. The US and Soviet Union became superpowers, there was a Cold War, and the Soviet Union split apart. The US pursued aggressively open trade. Western Europe unified to a common economic zone. World power structures have been reorganized several times over since colonial times.
For example, how does your theory explain Singapore going from a British colony, occupied by Japan during WWII, to US$56,319 GDP per capita in 2014?
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything of the sort.
I said that one can't understand Western European socialism (the kind which OP appears to advocate) without understanding this aspect of those countries' history. The implication is that calling such socialism "nice" is ignoring and whitewashing the negative side, both historical and contemporary.
In any case, I know better than to seriously engage in a discussion about this on HN; it's really not the forum for these sorts of conversations.
It's my interpretation of your viewpoint.
Of course, I agree wage slavery is better than chattel slavery. Better to have some choice of master than one imposed on you. (Though slaveowners made the interesting argument that they must take care of their workers because they own them, unlike the capitalist who merely rents them.)
In the US, the prison system replaced slavery as the mechanism to control the black population. So the US has not improved much in that regard, with even children killed in broad daylight by the state.
> In the US, the prison system replaced slavery as the mechanism to control the black population. So the US has not improved much in that regard, with even children killed in broad daylight by the state.
It's tangential, but can you please explain this part? It seems to me that "All Lives Matter" really is the more apt phrase, because it shifts the focus from an us-versus-them conflict to actual justice.
Edit: Got it. I'll stop being part of the problem. The only remaining question is this: What's the most effective way to be part of the solution?
So when you say "all lives matter" you're essentially saying "This problem that effects specifically black people doesn't matter. Let's focus on the more general and still important but less urgent problem that effects white people too, and maybe the problems facing black people will go away". It's like if someone comes to you with statistics about how horribly out of proportion police brutality is towards African Americans and your response is an anecdote about this one time the cops beat up a white guy. Or if someone brings up how serious sexual assault and harassment is for women and all you talk about is how men can be sexually harassed too. If you willfully refuse to recognize the problem, you're part of it.
Correct, it isn't a racial issue. Take the two most well-known cases for instance, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
Trayvon Martin assaulted Zimmerman unilaterally (Zimmerman never threw a punch,) had him in a ground-and-pound position and was bashing the back of Zimmerman's head onto the sidewalk while Zimmerman repeatedly screamed for help. If any white seventeen-year-old had done the same thing there would be zero outcry about recognizing the need for self-defense on the part of the neighborhood watchman. If a white kid in a hoodie was walking behind houses in the rain and looking into windows, nobody would label it "profiling" when a neighborhood watch leader called the police, since that's obviously questionable behavior.
Michael Brown had just committed robbery at a convenience store, then he assaulted a cop who asked him to walk on the sidewalk, then tried to wrestle away the cop's gun. Forensics shows Michael Brown didn't have his "hands up" when he was shot, meaning the witnesses all lied about the situation. Again, if a white teenager had committed strongarmed robbery and proceeded to try to grab a cops gun there would be literally zero sympathy or outcry when he was shot in self-defense by the cop. People would basically just call the dead teenager "trailer-trash," or something equally derogatory and move on.
The only factor race plays in any of this is that we would never have even discussed or heard of these absurd cases had the so-called "victims" not been black. If race enters into the narrative at all it's in the form of black privilege / supremacy, in that black communities seem to believe these incredibly violent assaults are fine and don't merit self-defense for some reason, solely due to skin color.
More accurately, it's all hyped up and manufactured by the media to stoke division because nothing sells ad space like impassioned controversy.
Its not that its wrong, its that its perhaps insensitive - a certain amount of empathy and solidarity could be a start in acknowledging the problem.
So while "All Lives Matter" is truer, its less useful at the current moment in time when Black people are experiencing real pain, and we have a huge problem that needs to be addressed urgently.
The easiest thing you can do is donate to the ACLU. You could probably also find part-time volunteer work at any of the many institutions trying to end or mitigate poverty.
No, I understand it to be "police can sometimes use force unjustifiably towards anyone, of any race." If a cop murders someone, s/he should be held responsible (sadly, they are not). The reason that more black people get murdered by police is that they (blacks) get in trouble more often (which is NOT a justification to kill them)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
This would be true if this is what the people saying it demonstrated beliefs that were congruent with their actions. However, the overwhelming majority (to the point where the counterparty is anecdotal and, frankly, possibly mythical) use it to establish a fundamentally conservative defense of the status quo. I mean--"All Lives Matter" sounds good. Except it is used as a direct and intentional response to the institutional prejudice and societal control via police that is applied to black people, and when you look at deeds instead of words, that's super fucked-up.
"All Lives Matter" requires intentionally misunderstanding "Black Lives Matter." What it means, and what they no-sell as hard as they possibly, possibly can, is that it's really "Black Lives Matter, Too". Because right now, to society at large, black lives don't matter.
Deeds, not words, and the deeds are uniformly bad.
> the overwhelming majority (to the point where the
> counterparty is anecdotal and, frankly, possibly
> mythical) use it to establish a fundamentally
> conservative defense of the status quo
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/24/417112... http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/politics/bernie-sanders-netroo...
The phrase is probably the best you can do in a slogan, but it is cryptic.
See...I really don't think they are (or at least were before they got shellacked). I think it's so profoundly pervasive that even at the highest levels it hasn't been An Issue until very recently. So it's pretty tough for me to see that. (While I don't know O'Malley, I don't pay attention to inconsequentials, I think Hillary Clinton is a status-quo-favoring moderate on most things, which probably doesn't make me more sympathetic.)
But I think this is going to be typical of elections going forward, red hot anger being directed at the system. It's not healthy for society and I don't see it ending up anywhere good.
But if you took the money from the 1% and distributed it to everyone, it would probably amount to a few thousand dollars each, at best.
The reason for lack of jobs is the they all went to India, China, etc.
As for immigrants, don;t you think there is something awfully wrong with the fact that Massachusetts for years provided housing and money to the Tsarnaev family (the Boston bombers and their parents), yet war veterans are often homeless, because there is never any money left to take care of them?
This is the instruction that the children of the ruling elite are getting at Ivy Leagues, it permeates the entire culture of the privileged class.
We were assured that it was not illegal as long as these
bonuses and donations to not match in space and time.
That's patently absurd, given that the top 1% own 90%+ of the wealth.
Citation, please? https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi... page 24 claims that globally the top 8.1% own 84.6% of the wealth, while the top 0.7% own 45.2%. So the top 1% owns something between those two numbers.
Within the US, the top 1% owns an even smaller fraction (of a bigger per-capita pie), because there are many fewer poor people.
That said, the top 1% do own quite a bit of wealth. Same report, page 15, figure 2, looks to me like total global wealth is about $260 trillion as of 2015. World population is 7.3 billion. That comes out to $35000 per person or so. So globally this number would in fact come out higher than a few thousand dollars; per our calculations above it's about 0.5 to 0.85 times $35k (but note that this is including the the "1%" quite a large number of US retirees, for example; the threshold for 1% global wealth is not that high).
If you look at the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#We... has numbers for 2007 saying that the top 1% owned 34.6% of the total wealth but that grew to 37.1% after the Great Recession. Total wealth in the US according to the above Credit Suisse report is about $86 trillion; that gives about $100,000 per person if you redistribute the wealth of the top 1%.
> It's not healthy for society and I don't see it ending
> up anywhere good.
From someone who grew up poor and identifies strongly with outlaws, I concur.
But unlike OP I think it needs to happen.
Edit: Talk of revolution makes me think of the song "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who, particularly the closing lines, "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
Britain, for instance, was not irredeemably terrible during the American Revolution, as evidenced by them being basically as reasonable a place as America today and not having had a revolution of their own since then. And they even managed to do some things better (e.g., they banned slavery before America did). But the American Revolution was still worthwhile, and that gave credibility to the American approach instead of the imperial one.
Well yes, but talking about cool, calculated, orderly solutions has a tendency to get you labeled a "dirty socialist" by the Right and a "dirty reformist" by the Left, with the former being overwhelmingly stronger.
That phrase could mean anything in practice that anyone wants it to mean. If we're going to discuss these things, we should be specific. What specific policy is desired, and how is it going to help? "Humanity" and "democracy" are not economic policies, nor are they specific enough goals to design policies around.
I am unsure whether economic equality is a goal that we should strive toward. I wonder if a better measure for our economy would be how well off people are at each place in the distribution. Almost all middle class people in America today still have really nice TVs, mobile phones, Internet, etc., which suggests that their standard of living is quite good in absolute terms. We should be looking at absolute terms, not relative terms.
Taxing the wealthy has undesirable effects. It's not as if wealthy people take their money and put it under their mattress. No, they invest it. That investment money flows to other corporations who then spend it on goods and services, or spend it on their employees. All of the wealth that the rich accumulate makes its way back into the economy, except it's at the direction of the rich according to their investment decisions. The alternative, if you tax the rich, is that the same money flows to the government and the government spends it on programs.
That's certainly valuable, and I believe it makes sense for the government to have tax revenue to spend on its programs, but I don't necessarily think that more revenue for more programs will lead to better results. I'd rather that we spend substantially less on wars, for example, and redirect that money into infrastructure for our own country.
Take the F-35 development program - the government has basically thrown over a trillion dollars down the drain (I'm being hyperbolic, but it's really pretty bad). A trillion dollars!! The government would have plenty of tax revenue to spend on smart infrastructure investments if it stopped throwing money away on programs like that.
I'd hazard a guess that wealthy investors through their investments are more effective at creating wealth and raising the standard of living in the country than the government is (on a marginal basis from where we are today). Investors are far better at examining where their money goes, what effect it has, and doubling down on investments that demonstrate promising results, and pulling the plug on pointless ones. The government by comparison keeps burning more and more money on programs that are clearly ineffective - examine the Healthcare.gov or F-35 boondoggles. Private investors do better. Let them keep their money to invest it smartly.
No they don't. From what I've read (Piketty etc) they do not re-circulate it into the general economy. They use investment vehicles which are increasingly divorced from "real world" economics and more like moving chips around on a poker table. It's wealth in the service of wealth creation. All of that happens in an almost separate level of the economy. No poor or middle class person is even involved.
I'd "hazard a guess" that wealthy investors might be more effective at creating more wealth, but not at raising the standard of living of the countries they are in. In fact, the standard of living in the United States is declining.
Approximately 100% of the money that poor and middle class people spend goes to corporations. If you give them money, they spend it on goods and services. That's pretty efficient.
The alternative, if you tax the rich, is that the same money flows to the government and the government spends it on programs.
Is that the only alternative? At this point, probably. I don't trust the government either, it's a bloated plutocracy. But you could still make a completely economic/utility theory argument that the benefit to 100M+ people outweighs the overall good for the 1K+ people at the top of the current hierarchy.
Which investment vehicles are those?
You cannot in general invest money into vehicles which earn a good return but which are divorced from the real world. Imagine if you invest in a company like Apple. Apple developed products like the iPod and iPhone, and the company's value comes from the fact that 500 million people gave their money to Apple in exchange for an iPhone. Apple's $233 billion dollar revenue, and resulting net income, leads to their valuation, which leads to the return on our hypothetical investment.
The investment profits because Apple developed a useful product that people chose to spend money on - the people who bought the products benefited, and the investor benefited from a return. Everyone is better off, and the standard of living has risen. Technology makes things cheaper over time, so that more people can afford such devices. A vast majority of people living in poverty in America own cell phones.
Can you describe how these investment vehicles work such that they're earning a return while being disconnected from the real world? Where does the money come from for the returns?
Hedge funds and the like.
> leads to their valuation, which leads to the return on our hypothetical investment.
'Return' on an increase in valuation isn't a real return. It's exactly like poker.
The way markets are supposed to work is you invest in an IPO, then you get a dividend sometime in the future, and then maybe the company buys back your shares.
The way it generally works for most people is you buy shares on the open market, then someone else buys those shares from you. This has nothing to do with the 'reality' of the company because both of you are speculators, neither has given money to the company, and neither has received money from the company. You're both just playing with poker chips.
> Can you describe how these investment vehicles work such that they're earning a return while being disconnected from the real world? Where does the money come from for the returns?
You buy into the market (non-IPO). When the value goes up, you sell. You're selling to other investors.
So the answer is, much of the money for the returns comes from other investors (not unlike a Ponzi scheme, however since you're both speculating, it's more akin to a poker table).
On a large scale the way it works is that hedge funds and traders are the ones making money, at the expense of less sophisticated traders, like mutual funds, pension funds, and retail traders.
Of course, this doesn't include the fact the dividends and buybacks actually are real, and do represent a non-trivial portion of the market, but there certainly is a large enough amount of investment vehicles which are divorced from the 'real world'.
Completely false. Let's talk about how investment money is used, and how that impacts valuation.
Say that a friend has started a new farm as a business and he's seeking investment. He'd like a cash investment in order to buy a tractor, harvester, and combine for the farm, which he can't afford himself. So I make the investment and the farm buys the equipment, which enables the farm to grow substantially more crops (vs tilling, planting, and harvesting by hand). By growing more crops with that equipment, the farm has vastly more revenue and earnings.
This farm has actually grown more crops than it could have otherwise - the investment led to the creation of wealth. The crops are net additional wealth, and the farm's ability to grow and sell them for revenue leads directly to the increase in the farm's valuation.
The farm grows and hires more employees; it's also an engine of job creation. All made possible by the investment, without which the farm could not have gotten started.
> Hedge funds and the like.
And what do hedge funds do with the investment money they receive from the wealthy? Do they put that cash under their mattress and somehow generate returns by doing that? No, they invest it in companies which use the cash to create wealth.
I was talking about something different.
It's true that hedge funds and mutual funds also invest in the stock market, which is a secondary market where the money doesn't go to the original issuers. However the existence of a healthy and liquid secondary market is what gives primary investors the confidence to buy stakes (or lend) to start-ups in the first instance. Who would want these assets if they literally had no choice but to hold onto them forever (or until maturity or acquisition or bankruptcy).
Becoming 'increasingly divorced' from economic reality doesn't mean that it's completely separate, only that even in times of low growth, the ultra rich have high yield funds available to them which exacerbates economic inequality. It's just a trend. Or as Piketty states, r > g. Hedge funds used to be entirely defensive against market downturns, today they're increasingly run by speculative traders, many of whom offer outsized returns.
That's really not a good example of what we're talking about here. A single family farm is not a profitable business at all. There was an HN story about it just a couple of days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10823747
He'd like a cash investment in order to buy a tractor, harvester, and combine for the farm, which he can't afford himself. So I make the investment and the farm buys the equipment, which enables the farm to grow substantially more crops.
No you don't. He might get a bank loan, in which case he is actually paying a fee in order to borrow that money. Now, if you were talking about the profitability of people paying you to borrow money, now you're in the right ballpark. I hear it's quite a profitable business.
Look I'm not talking about hypothetical small business hand wavy stuff, I'm talking about the trillions of dollars floating around at the top end. Most of which is currently flowing into real estate, powering various bubbles around the world.
I'll give you an example: from what I understand, Larry Ellison doesn't actually sell his stock in order to buy islands. He uses it as collateral to secure a loan. Those loans (something like 10 billion dollars worth at this point) can be spent/invested/leveraged, but it's not directly taxable because it's a loan. That's the kind of thing that you can do when you have a few billion. You don't even have to spend your own money. The net increase in the value of his real estate holdings is more than enough to pay the interest. Now, try playing that game if you have zero billions.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-25/larry-elli...
No, they invest it in companies which use the cash to create wealth.
Apple isn't a good example either. Companies do get cash from IPO's. After that, having a valuable stock is certainly nice. Apple doesn't fund operations by selling their stock. If the stock doubles, Apple doesn't get that money. Indirectly, of course Apple does issue stock as bonuses to employees, and buys back stock to return cash to investors. If Apple was privately held they'd make just as much money. They don't need the stock at all, it's just a side benefit that they can take advantage of when they make compensation packages.
Right, but if he converts money into land, the land does get taxed. Additionally, he pays a sales tax when he purchases the land.
> That's the kind of thing that you can do when you have a few billion. You don't even have to spend your own money. The net increase in the value of his real estate holdings is more than enough to pay the interest.
False. He is spending his own money, because he still pays back the loan. He borrows money, buys some land, then pays the loan back.
> Which investment vehicles are those?
In contrast, money spent on consumption does not grow at the rate r. Picketty even speculates (providing no real evidence however) that only the rich can achieve growth rate r - investments by others will only achieve r' < r.
Did you even read Picketty? (The math parts, not the mood affiliation.)
But the question still remains of how "rich people invest in the economy". Do they really? Or is it entirely indirect? Not one of them is giving small farmers money to buy tractors. Maybe they're building hotels which eventually employ housekeepers, sure. That's what I think of as the general economy. There's probably a more specific technical term for this. But I think using a billion dollars to give small farmers loans would be the worst possible use for it. You'd probably speculate in oil futures or whatever. While it's technically all the economy, sure, I'd argue that the super-wealthy generally don't add much to the economy, they extract value from the economy using their existing wealth as leverage.
What I'm getting at is that money spent on stuff/food/buildings/etc is different than money used as a tool/leverage/instrument just to make more money. I get the sense that it's an entirely different game (again, mostly an intuition from reading a lot of commentary about economic issues).
Sure, we all earn money and pay rent in dollars. Those dollars and that activity are only tangentially related to what a hedge fund uses dollars for.
Why do you believe lending to farmers is a bad use for resources?
Investing in oil futures is transmitting information to the markets. It encourages current users to avoid unnecessary use of oil and produces to produce more. That's a valuable service.
What exactly do you think a hedge fund does?
Of course, it may have had other, less pleasant, effects.
Absolute terms are meaningless in this context. It's like comparing a poor person living in Appalachia to an indigenous person living on a remote island. Does the Appalachian resident have a better standard of living ? Absolutely. Does it matter in the context of the US ? Absolutely not.
Also, you conveniently leave out some of the largest symptoms of wealth inequality. It's not consumer goods that define our standard of living, it's things like:
- Being able to pay for college without going into significant amounts of debt
- Not living paycheck to paycheck and being able to save money each month
- Eating well and not being forced to live on substandard food products that are extremely unhealthy
- Being able to afford quality health insurance, and being able to afford the deductibles and co-pays associated with it
- Being able to save up for a down-payment on a home, and then being able to afford to both pay the mortgage and keep the home in decent shape (new roof, water heater, furnace, etc.)
- Being able to afford transportation that doesn't constantly break down and result in more unplanned expenses that one cannot afford
- Being able to retire (if one wants to)
- And, most importantly, not having to work 2 or 3 jobs and have quality free time that can be used to explore hobbies and/or better oneself
Thinking about it in terms of supply and demand of goods, increasing wealth of the middle class increases overall demand, and increasing wealth of the wealthy increases supply, but only to the extent that demand will support.
Source from 2013 but still applicable: https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/J...
If you look at income distribution its a hockey stick - you really have to slap yourself on the face and realise there is no middle class - what you thought of as professional-middle-class-contributor is actually college-debt-burdened-lower-class - no matter how many years they work they will never pay off their debt, let alone own their own home.
People aren't asking for "income equality" they are asking for some level of humanity and democracy to be restored to our version of Capitalism, to strengthen that capitalism.
So, just as "All Lives Matter" is not a good response to the "Black Lives Matter" movement, its not useful to discuss "income inequality is not intrinsically a bad thing" when we are in a time when the lower class are basically slaves and the middle class has been in steady decline - your _only_ chance to have security is to win a lottery [ the Startup or the PowerBall variety ]
So, what needs to be talked about is rather : how to take money out of politics, how to get poor people out of the ghetto, how to stop young black people from being shot by police on a weekly basis, how to bring back a reasonable level of tax on the super wealthy, and how to stop large companies from getting subsidies to pollute our environment.
A small amount of Socialism is needed urgently to bring Capitalism back into a survivable form - if not, I really think we are headed for bloody revolution, because most of the populace are angry, and its a rational anger because their survival needs are barely being met, in many cases.