Watched an episode of Jeopardy yesterday...one of the questions...Video daily double... Announcer:This curve depicts the relationship between the % of households and the % of income. The steeper the curve, the greater the income inequality. (It started out with a straight line but then deeply bent/curved in an animated fashion as they finished reading the answer/question) Response: What is the Lorenz curve? Thought it was interesting that even some of the game shows seem to have a liberal bias these days.
Yep. Any acknowledgement of the vast and growing disparity of income and wealth in this country is "class warfare."
If I make 10 million, and Crockett makes 1 million, would Crockett still be complaining? There is just not any data that shows there is some kind of prejudice causing income or wealth differences. There are other reasons, but we can't fix those with social engineering.
If Crockett made $1 million, Mrs. Crockett would be off his *** and he'd be happy as a lark ... unless you brought up how you make 10 times as much. I'm not so much worried about me though. It's the ones working two jobs that still draw food stamps and either get Medicaid or take their kids to the emergency room because they have no means to pay usual and customary health care costs. Wasn't it social engineering that gave us the standard 40 hour work week, kept little kids out of coal mines and provided industrial workers with a living wage? What you got against that stuff?
The same thing that the founders of America had against "that stuff". Social engineering gave us the 29.5 hour workweek so firms could avoid having fifty or more full-time employees and be subjected to the crap that is known as Obamacare. It also gave us the "black" problem we face today (crime, unwed mothers), more crime than would exist without judges that believe in your ideology, lack of affordable residences due to "rent controls", a 20 trillion debt (plus a couple hundred trillion more with social security, Medicaid, medicare), and a thousand other failed government-imposed ideas. Think of the problem like this: The government rules by force and takes by force. Central planning by a government is only undertaken, for the vast majority of actions, because individuals don't feel the need to do what the government is forcing upon them. Freedom is endangered domestically by ideology. You exhibit this problem with most of your well meaning, "I'm a soft hearted liberal willing to help everyone" posts, and "it is okay to force my moral certainty on everyone else regardless of the negative consequences to those my ideas harm". You truly believe your social justice ideas are the right thing to do, which is unfortunate because the logic you follow regarding "transcendant values" leads to rather large problems. When others disagree or get angry toward the social justice, moral superiority you espouse, it could very well lead to more force being applied by a government to enforce those imposed values. Dictating imposed values (transgendered bathrooms, who you must bake a cake for, paying for someone else's healthcare without requiring anything from those that benefit) instead of allowing freedom (preferred values) is the problem. The Constitution is just an obstacle for social justice warriors (9th circuit). Your party's goal-oriented imperatives (school integration, income equality, quotas, environmental regulations, etc.) clash with process-oriented constitutionalism.
I wouldn't call it class "warfare" but I would suggest that this is not some innocuous topic randomly chosen amongst all the possible knowledge bits available to jeopardy. I would suggest that this show sees this as their opportunity to "educate" the public to their view of "right". And while I do agree to a degree that there are problems associated with income inequality, not only for the individual experiencing it but also for the country as a whole, my lamentation was that even our past times like college basketball, the NFL and Jeopardy that could be equally shared and experienced whether left or right are now gravitating to one party or the other. In my mind, the greater sin here is not that they picked the left and the issue of inequality but that they chose a side at all. It may be subtle but it's definitely intended. While I completely understand that DT has the type of mordant approach to the presidency that compels the other side to pile on, I think it is a profound shift (and difficult to return from) when institutions that don't typically wade into politics start doing so.
I can only imagine a topic/questions writer for Jeopardy. Have they repeated any questions since they aired in 1978?
Compounded interest and investment income goes up exponentially. What's interesting is how ignorant you have to be to not understand this and call it class warfare.
Honestly, ROI and executive compensation used to be smaller and rank and file earners took home a much bigger slice of the corporate pie. Compound interest hasn't changed much, except small time risk-averse savers don't get much these days.
Household income is a terrible measure to use for comparing income. It does not take into consideration the number of people in the household. Married, two income earning households will typically have a much higher household income that a single person in a household. Retired people live of savings, pensions, and or social security, so their household income is typically lower than those still working. Single people just starting their careers will have a lower income, but that income will transition to a higher level as they gain experience over time. The "household income disparity" measure is inaccurate and useless. We don't need to acknowledge a difference in household income and use it to justify another government intervention under the label of "income disparity". We do need to throw that measurement out the window and never use it again.
But I make only $500K so don't I get to be mad at Crockett for making $1MM? The problem here is human nature, we always compare UP to those above us and say why don't I make that much? totally failing to acknowledge there is someone below us looking at us and saying the same thing about us. Everyone who votes for socialism in any form thinks it is going to the the OTHER guy who pays, not them.
A CEO of a large company who makes $10 million a year with 10000 employees is only "taking" $1000 per year from each employee. Mind you, that the company is likely paying an average of $100k per employee if you include salary, healthcare, and retirement benefits. Further, most of the $10 million salary is in the form of stock grants or options, which takes wealth away from investors, not the employees.
Plus liberals just assume that anybody making that kind of money had it just handed to him or her. That is pure BS, those people that reach those heights much more often make sacrifices in their personal and family life that I am not interested in.
well, I wouldn't call it useless. It may not tell the whole story, but nothing will. It is one, and probably the most useful one, of several measures that should be included in the conversation. After all we've had dual income houses for a while, we've had young earners for ever and we've had retired people earning SSI for a long time. Every decade has had those same elements in the measurement, so citing them as a logic for why it isn't a valid measure is not logical. And whether something has happened in the past and is "the way it has always been" is not a strong reason to keep it that way. I'm certainly not for dolling out money to the lazy and irresponsible, but as we are seeing right now with unemployment incredibly low and corporate profits largely up and stock market up....yet wages are largely STILL stagnant, perhaps there is something here to consider that is a little deeper than brushing off any talk of income disparity as "Sosh-lism".
The measure becomes more valid if the income is adjusted based on the number of people in the household, but using the measure as a tool for policy making remains invalid. Here is the measure for a 32 year period: The reason the measure is invalid as a policy making tool is because it is a static measure, and because it substitutes "status" for "behavior". As you can see from the transitive nature of income above, people move constantly from one income level to another. Except for extreme cases, the ability to change economic positioning is based on behavior. Therefore, government intervention is only "needed" for those at the lower end that have no hope of moving up in income level (but even the figures above only count "money" income. They do not include benefits and existing government transfer payments that reduce poverty to close to zero).
