As someone who grew up lower middle class and leapt many, many income deciles, what ideas do you have to decrease income inequality? For example, you say that you are in the top 1% now. Do you favour increasing your own personal tax burden to help offset income equality?
My marginal tax rate is ~48%. I think that's already high enough.
The idea that there is no wealth tax - and that the Fed arguably gives people a negative wealth tax - that seems a little off to me.
The median home owner has about 3:1 leverage on their house - with a home value that's 4x their income. The Fed has been pumping up house prices by a couple percent per year for 13 years.
.02x4x3=.24
The average home owner with a mortgage is getting an ~24% negative income tax. The median tax payer has a ~22% federal tax rate. Effectively, this is a -2% income / wealth tax.
This seems incredibly broken. We've created a society of haves and have nots. People willing to speculate on government handouts on their mortgage are wealthy. People not willing or unable have almost 0 wealth.
I'm in the 1%. Do I deserve to be? I don't know. But by definition, someone does. I make ~4x the median laborer after taxes and transfers. This doesn't seem broken. In my state, I make ~9x minimum wage after taxes and transfers. This also doesn't seem broken. Maybe others think differently?
Before taxes and transfers, the numbers seem much more extreme. That seems irrelevant to me.
The top 1% in wealth have ~100x the wealth of the median person in my state. That seems broken.
My view: If you really believe in reducing income inequality, there is no shortcut. You need to pay. How else can we fix this issue? Beg private corporations to give huge pay rises to medium- and low-skill people? (Don't wait for it!) We need a tax code that forces the 10%/5%/1%/0.1%/0.01%/etc. to pay geometrically increasing effective tax rates. I have never seen an alternative solution that will actually work. Yes, it is painful, but what kind of society and world do we want to create?
Why should it follow that people who break from a culture of poverty should be forced to support those who do not? It smacks of the “black tax” described in the article - a response that undermines the good that could otherwise follow from greater employment and productivity.
What happened to those who didn’t study CS? How are they doing?
We far too frequently look into our bubbles as if they reflected the world around us. They don’t.
The rich kids I knew are all doing way worse than their parents. Not surprising? It's hard and takes a lot of luck to be in the 0.1%.
All of my friends are doing quite well, almost all of them better then their parents.
Is this anecdata helpful? Did I self-select to be friends with successful people? I don't know...
Look, I'm not Joan of Arc - didn't claim to be. There's not a whole lot more else you can do...
~$300k after taxes isn't going to change the world.
I grew up lower middle class - not poor - took on a healthy amount of debt to get a CS degree from a crappy college in West Virginia.
Most of my classmates are doing quite well, and I'm working at Google - with a fellow classmate, literally in the 1% now (both of us, out of a class of only 8).
I know plenty of rich kids who went to Stanford and studied philosophy or underwater basket weaving, and they're killing it.
But that doesn't mean poor people have no opportunity. Sure, it's not equal. But it's far from hopeless.
I think there's a lot of people who look at the world and see how unfair it is and think: why even try?
The world is not fair, never has been, never will be even close to it. You just have to accept where you started from and try your best. And we can try to push for a fairer world, but don't hold your breath. If anything, inequality is skyrocketing and the world is becoming less fair.