RE: I Wish This Was A Joke
January 20, 2015 at 6:31 pm
(This post was last modified: January 20, 2015 at 6:34 pm by Mister Agenda.)
It's true that merely redistributing wealth is problematic. $241 trillion is about $50,000 for each of us, and you'd have to liquidate all assets to get the cash, but this is a thought experiment, so I won't worry about that. The average American's net worth averages about $45,000; so the average American would be roughly $5,000 ahead in this deal. The median (I couldn't quickly find an average) net worth of a human being is about $4,000; but the average is probably much lower than than that because of millions of millionaires and billionaires propping up the median. It's probably pretty safe to say that the average person in the bottom 50% would be getting over $45,000.
I think more people would be better off with that even distribution, but I can see issues with arriving at it, problems maintaining it, and problems growing it; not to mention likely economic instability from poor regions having ten times as much wealth. It's a lot easier for most people to lose tens of thousands of dollars than grow it, but I think a lot of it would be spent wisely to improve their lives in the long run. We shouldn't underestimate people's ability to understand their own interests. Still, I suspect much of the money would be effectively lost or find its way back into the hands of pretty much the same people ten years later. It's much easier to make everyone poor than to make everyone wealthy.
And the figure of 1% owning half the world's wealth is pretty massaged to begin with since that total is based on aggregate wealth, so an American with a net worth of minus $10,000 because of debt is considered poorer than a subsistence farmer in Mali who is not in debt. By that standard, the net worth of the bottom 30% is minus a trillion or so. The money in my pocket would make me wealthier than the poorest 3 billion people in the world by this measure. But it's not a good measure, because someone who is a milllion dollars in debt is very rarely materially worse off than someone who is trying to dig a living out of the dirt with hand tools. Wealth and net worth work fine for figuring out the top 50%, not so good for figuring out the bottom 10%, as exemplified by the same statistics showing Chinese (low debt, high savings) to be wealthier on average than Americans (high debt, low savings) despite China having a much higher (though improving) poverty rate than the USA.
And after all that, I still can't figure out how much of the world's wealth the top 1% REALLY own, because it's too complex for my meager ability to analyze economics. But I would place the world's wealth much higher than $241 trillion, so the top 1%'s 111-or-so trillion is probably significantly less than half of the total wealth of the world. But it's pretty much a given that the top 1% has a lot more than it really needs even if it 'only' owns a quarter of the world's wealth, so the exact number may not be important, just pointing out the 1% owning half the world's wealth is more a sound bite than a fact.
That said, improving the quality of primary education and reducing the cost of basic healthcare and housing and advanced education is a way of reducing the gap that's much less problematic. I don't think of it as charity, but as a wise investment. It's a net benefit to society to have more healthy, productive, and educated people. I don't like to rob Peter to pay Paul, but there are probably small changes in taxes on income and capital gains and reductions in certain areas of government spending where there's a lot of waste that wouldn't be a terrible or unfair cost to anyone that would be a great benefit to the USA's bottom 50%. And we should take a good look at what we can spare to help the world's bottom 50%. For some reason most USAians think the USA spends about 28% of its budget on foriegn aid when it's actually more like 1%. Sounds like we could double it and most USAians would still be surprised at how little it is.
I think more people would be better off with that even distribution, but I can see issues with arriving at it, problems maintaining it, and problems growing it; not to mention likely economic instability from poor regions having ten times as much wealth. It's a lot easier for most people to lose tens of thousands of dollars than grow it, but I think a lot of it would be spent wisely to improve their lives in the long run. We shouldn't underestimate people's ability to understand their own interests. Still, I suspect much of the money would be effectively lost or find its way back into the hands of pretty much the same people ten years later. It's much easier to make everyone poor than to make everyone wealthy.
And the figure of 1% owning half the world's wealth is pretty massaged to begin with since that total is based on aggregate wealth, so an American with a net worth of minus $10,000 because of debt is considered poorer than a subsistence farmer in Mali who is not in debt. By that standard, the net worth of the bottom 30% is minus a trillion or so. The money in my pocket would make me wealthier than the poorest 3 billion people in the world by this measure. But it's not a good measure, because someone who is a milllion dollars in debt is very rarely materially worse off than someone who is trying to dig a living out of the dirt with hand tools. Wealth and net worth work fine for figuring out the top 50%, not so good for figuring out the bottom 10%, as exemplified by the same statistics showing Chinese (low debt, high savings) to be wealthier on average than Americans (high debt, low savings) despite China having a much higher (though improving) poverty rate than the USA.
And after all that, I still can't figure out how much of the world's wealth the top 1% REALLY own, because it's too complex for my meager ability to analyze economics. But I would place the world's wealth much higher than $241 trillion, so the top 1%'s 111-or-so trillion is probably significantly less than half of the total wealth of the world. But it's pretty much a given that the top 1% has a lot more than it really needs even if it 'only' owns a quarter of the world's wealth, so the exact number may not be important, just pointing out the 1% owning half the world's wealth is more a sound bite than a fact.
That said, improving the quality of primary education and reducing the cost of basic healthcare and housing and advanced education is a way of reducing the gap that's much less problematic. I don't think of it as charity, but as a wise investment. It's a net benefit to society to have more healthy, productive, and educated people. I don't like to rob Peter to pay Paul, but there are probably small changes in taxes on income and capital gains and reductions in certain areas of government spending where there's a lot of waste that wouldn't be a terrible or unfair cost to anyone that would be a great benefit to the USA's bottom 50%. And we should take a good look at what we can spare to help the world's bottom 50%. For some reason most USAians think the USA spends about 28% of its budget on foriegn aid when it's actually more like 1%. Sounds like we could double it and most USAians would still be surprised at how little it is.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
