US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect

andsoitis

> affordability, but growing anger over inequality When it comes to wealth, the ceiling should be unlimited AND the floor should be high.

elmer2

The wealthy pay the vast majority of taxes in the US by almost every metric. We should have plenty of money to pay for services, but government officials are never held accountable when they piss it away on inefficient programs and sevices. Healthcare.gov cost a billion dollars. I've managed projects much bigger and more complex for a fraction of this. Nobody in the tech community talks about this for some reason.... The blame is always shifted to the wealthy by these politicians. It still won't fix the problem, if we don't have a better way to spend it.

megamike

Middle class culture, any culture, can only stand if it is rewarded. In prior times middle class culture was fundamentally supported by the upper classes, who invested in America, creating vast wealth. They modeled sobriety, hard-work, risk and reward. The working classes modeled the behavior through church and labor guilds, standing together for each other and the nation. The wealthy have abandoned America, and the working classes have abandoned faith, guilds, and each other. Into that void steps cultural anarchy. Society requires hard-work, and discipline. It requires accountability, primarily of the wealthy. I tire of prose that lament the loss of culture without holding those accountable who have abandoned their responsibilities.

jongjong

The worst part about inequality is that it creates communication barriers which create total deprivation of opportunities. These days, I can't communicate with anyone who might have any opportunities for me. If a person is a good match for my skills and might be a source of opportunities for me, I simply cannot email them, cannot call them, cannot connect to them on any platform. It feels like there are AI bots working behind the scenes maintaining filter bubbles air-tight. On the other side, literally all the emails I receive, all my social network connections are spam. Like completely irrelevant, generic spam sent by a bot, but not even tailored to me; just generic template 'Dear sir'; my name is not even mentioned.

pessimizer

This outlet is so transparent. The reasons for the rise in inequality since 1980, and the insane corporate profits that are going to the people who own equity and capital are not ACA subsidies, the Iran war and fucking tariffs. Trump, Trump, Trump. Vote him out and we'll make sure that ACA continues, the Iran "conflict" is fought responsibly, and free trade will never be questioned again. This will somehow help income inequality in ways that I'm not going to tell you. edit: and I'll add a reminder here that no one ever projected that ACA would lower healthcare costs - only that it would slow the growth in healthcare costs, which it managed to do for maybe three years. The purpose of ACA was to get single-payer people to shut up, and to institutionalize a bunch of insurance companies by promising them a consistent income. Another reminder that "The Conversation" is a website of completely shady origins and financing that was pushed into the conversation out of nowhere. It licenses all of its articles creative commons so they can be mirrored on multiple websites, and relies on being pushed by social media. They're written by no one with any reputation to protect. It's Radio Free Europe level propaganda, but without honestly announcing itself and with no loyalty to any particular country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation_(website) Last reminder, Sunday is when political propaganda articles get pushed on HN, because it is a low-traffic day. There is not a single interesting thing in this article; there is nothing "you might not expect" except the brazenness in trying to assign 50 years of neoliberalism to Trump in the end.

throw0101a

While tech bros and Wall Street may get a lot of press of getting lots of money, the recent book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There seems to show (using IRS data, etc ) a large portion of the wealth being held in private hands. Interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots : > In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh7A2VyveUw * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theres-a-mind-boggling... * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/theres-a-mind-boggling-number... * https://open.spotify.com/episode/3wFRjaeUQOiNmlYYTwhwRf (Lots of other interviews as well as the book just came out a few months ago, so the authors did a book tour.) Some take aways from the books: > According to Zidar and Zwick, Main Street Millionaires hold over 13x more wealth than the Forbes 400. And where do they hold it? In pass-through entities (like LLCs and S-corps) in various industries. Which industries in particular? Zidar and Zwick note that the top five are: > 1. Legal services. This is mostly law firm partnerships.* > 2. Financial investment activities. This includes venture capital, private equity, and hedge fund managers. > 3. Auto dealers. These are the local, independently owned dealerships that sell new and used cars. > 4. Professional and technical services and management consulting. This includes independent consulting firms and other specialized professional practices. > 5. Oil and gas extraction. This includes fracking companies in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and other states. * https://ofdollarsanddata.com/who-is-really-rich-in-america/ An interesting observation: a radiologist working at a hospital may make much less if they're an employee of the hospital, versus something like a 'consultant' who use an pass-through S-Corp at the same hospital doing the same work.

somelamer567

The fish rots from the head. The rich have greedily and selfishly opted out, and left a massive moral vacuum. They must be held accountable. And the only way to hold the rich and powerful accountable is to stop them from corrupting the political process. Ban lobbying, undisclosed political donations and concentrations of private media ownership, and society will recover.

bequanna

Many people I speak with in my generation (millennials) have a growing frustration with sending a large percentage of our paycheck to the already rich Boomers. This is coupled with their self-centered politics which seem obsessed with them capturing as much wealth as possible and avoiding taxes at the clear expense of younger generations.

schneems

I think this got killed by the mods. It has 46 points over 2 hours and isn’t on the front page anymore. The number four story also has 46 votes and is 3 hours old.