"They'll just raise prices if thy raise the minimum wage."

[Mister Agenda]

If any moron thinks the pay gap won't hurt us, I am sure Gadaffi who was a billionaire who owned stock in GE who had half of his population unemployed could tell you they did get slightly pissed.

As far as Qadaffi goes, you don't think being a dictator was more of a factor than someone, somewhere in Libya being a billionaire?

Don't you have to show more than correlation to make such a claim? Where's the causality? In the case of bloated compensation packages for CEOs we can see how the market is being circumvented and trace some of the costs, mainly to the stability of their own companies and thus the stability of everyone they employ. But random person X being rich doesn't make random person Y poor. X could be putting 90% of everything they make back into the economy.

I think rising income inequality is a danger signal, but it's not the inequality in itself that's the problem. It's no skin off my nose if you make a thousand times more than I do. Unless you're doing it in a way that undermines my ability to make a living, which is arguably what inflated CEO compensation does.

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The republican message from many of the far right is about hate.

Koch, is just about greed. They couldn't care less about the well being of the country. Only about themselves.

And their oil business. I know they used to be libertarians back in the day, but why are we still getting blamed for them when they only fund republicans?

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If you are rich and want to sit at home and smoke pot all day, you can do that. Automation can make everyone rich, but we need to have something like a negative income tax or guaranteed income to make that happen.

I think I am essentially in agreement on that. Automation tends to make goods cheaper, but it also tends to eliminate jobs. At some point the goods will be cheap enough and the jobs scarce enough that a guaranteed income will be a practical necessity. Barring the unforeseen: the future is tricky. Maybe we can shift to a very different economy where the bottom 50% in skills is needed more, I just can't see what it would look like right now: more work for creative types, that I can see. OTH, far enough out, I can see brain chips for any desired skills and aptitudes...and attitudes. I think having a permanently unemployed, over-entertained class might be preferable to that.