Low-income rental housing tends to be quite exploitative.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/housing-rent-landlord...
They don't have wealth arguably because it's taken by those with considerably greater leverage.
Asymmetric parameters like avoiding regulations regarding 'full time employment' (i.e. Uber) is one very common way that employers keep workers down.
It's not always obvious either - just as H1Bs can create a lot of value, in many cases, they are point blank just used to suppress wages.
Consider many wealthy folks pay a lesser net tax rate than others due to income from capital gains - of course there is some rhyme and reason behind the fact capital is taxed at a lower rate than income, but one might argue that on the whole, this isn't really fair at all and is one of the primary drivers of inequality.
I don't think inequality is inherently a bad thing, but too much of it is bad, and we should always be looking for ways to get people 'empowered' into positions wherein they can create real value and grab a fair/share piece of the pie. And we have to remember there are always people who won't be able to do that, and that we have a responsibility towards them as well.
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Plenty of the poor actively destroy value, see the sanitation nightmares that are homeless encampments in the Seattle area. And the rest of the poor don't produce life sustaining value. Wealth transfers in the US are exclusively from the middle class and wealthy to the poor. To say otherwise is simple demagoguery.
Most of the wealth from the poor is stolen through increasing rent seeking behaviors from landlords, insurance companies and lobbying. I could speak at length the ways banks organized things as to punish the poor by organizing deposits to occur after transactions so that they can charge overdraft fees or insurance companies deciding not to cover you because of pre-existing conditions.
You could go on at length about that stuff, but you'd mostly be wrong. Don't write checks unless the money is in the account to cover the check. Pre-existing conditions don't work like that.
Ultimately, if it costs $18000/year for a person to live and they only earn $15000/year then they are short $3000 and that money comes from the middle class and wealthy. When you factor in all government services and transfers this is what happens to over 60% of the country. It is objective reality that the lifestyles of the bottom 60% are subsidized by the top 40% of tax payers.
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
Chase has had to settle class action lawsuits due to the predatory way they handled overdraft fees [1] so don't feed me that bullshit. It was something I personally experienced and saw my parents struggle through due to the way they were paid and Chases scummy behavior.
As for pre-existing conditions that is literally how they worked before and is something that insurance companies constant lobby to go back to. Because when my mother had her stroke her insurance denied her immediately because they determined the stroke was somehow a pre-existing condition.
And ultimately your logic is incredibly flawed because profits and productivity has gone up while pay for the workers has not kept up. This isn't wealth transfer, this is the rich deciding to underpay their workers to the point that they can't survive working for them, which then gets billed to the government. Your logic also offers zero explanation why wealth is concentrating towards the wealthy because wealth transfer would imply that, you know, it's actually going to the poor people.
[1] https://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/chase-agrees-to-s...
I am aware of the complaints about how banks process transactions in and out of customer accounts. It's a moot point for two reasons. First, the complaint boils down to whether a bank making a checking account available is also an agreement to extend small value, short term loans to people. If you don't try to float checks then you will not be hit with overdraft fees. It's as simple as that. Second, it's irrelevant where someone spends their money. If someone doesn't earn more than it costs to maintain their lifestyle their spending habits only impact how much they get from others, not how wealthy they are.
As far as preexisting conditions go, denial of coverage on that basis has been illegal for ten years. The only reason to bring it up is because you want to prompt an emotional response from people who are ignorant.
Profits and productivity are, again, irrelevant. If the question is "Which way does wealth transfer?" The answer is simple to discern and simply requires that we know how much it costs to survive and how much a person earns. We know both of this things on average nationally and wealth is transferred from the top 40% to the bottom 60%. I linked to the government report that demonstrates this.
As far as this unrelated statement goes:
>Your logic also offers zero explanation why wealth is concentrating towards the wealthy because wealth transfer would imply that, you know, it's actually going to the poor people.
Someone can create $1000/year in value, and another person comes up short by $300/year in survival. The first person transfers wealth down to the second person while still becoming wealthier. This is pretty basic stuff.
As for your second point, calling 'profit and productivity irrelevant' is ridiculously flippant because profit and productivity doesn't come from the void. It's generated by people. So let me illustrate:
Person A is 'creating' $1000/year in value.
Person B is 'short' $300/year in order to survive.
Person A employs Person B. The reason why Person B is short of funds is because Person A is earning their value from Person B and not properly distributing that wealth down through labor to Person B. Ergo, the situation isn't some sort of 'wealth transfer', it's the result of someone not being fairly compensated for their work.
What you're calling 'wealth transfer' is the result of money accumulating towards the top, which results in the wealthy having to either pay more to support the bottom percent or let them die. Software engineers generate many more times their income in value to the companies that employ them. Which means money floats to the top as companies try to depress wages to maximize profit margins.
That's not how banks work. You go in and deposit a check they give you a receipt which tells you what day the deposit will post and when the full amount of the funds will be available. You are, again, functionally complaining that a checking account can't be used to force a bank to give you an interest free loan and justifying it by saying "desperately need [...] food or basic amenities."
Your economic model is simplistic. People with no marketable skill or knowledge are not having the value they create stolen from them. The value that comes from the businesses they work at comes from the founders, the investors, the people who had the idea, who developed the product and so on.
Considering I grew up in abject poverty, I'm sorry but I'm not going to let remarks like that fly. That doesn't deserve a pass.
B) The inability to produce enough to sustain yourself is the basis for defining poverty.
And I grew up in poverty too. My first real paid job paid three dollars an hour for farmwork -- in the 90s, and I thought I was living like a king.
You could turn the tables and say that the lower and middle classes subsidize employment terms that are favorable to the wealthy. To tax the top 40% because some subset of the top 40% can't pay the bottom 60% a living wage is just a way for the wealthy to extract further wealth from the middle class.
I'd say that both perspectives are valid ways to look at it, and won't pretend that either of them is "objective reality", but with a growing wealth gap it seems obvious to me who benefits most from this system.
The kind of inequality that is perceived as problematic is something different though. It's the rent collection that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.