Thomas Piketty

OfTwoMinds April 30 2014

There is nothing fancy about these three solutions.

I have covered rising income/wealth inequality for many years in dozens of entries. Since Thomas Piketty’s new book has catapulted the topic into the media spotlight, it’s a good time to list solutions that go deeper than Piketty’s proposed global wealth tax–a proposal he characterizes as utopian.

Every solution is utopian, because the Financial Aristocracy and their central bank cronies have democracy by the throat. There is no legislative way to change the Status Quo when political power is for sale to the highest bidder, and central banks are issuing nearly-free money to the financial oligarchy that owns the political machinery.

But listing solutions is still important, because it reveals just how far from democracy, rule of law and free-market capitalism we have fallen. I have been describing various aspects of widening inequality in recent entries:

I propose three straightforward solutions that will systemically rectify wealth and income inequality.

1. Rather than add taxes to fund more social welfare–in effect, placing a Band-Aid over the tumor–let’s start by removing the source of rising inequality: the Federal Reserve.

Continue reading →

By John Schmitt | Nation Of Change
October 23 2011

Economic inequality has been growing steadily for three decades. According to the most definitive data, assembled by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, the top 1 percent received 10 percent of all U.S. income in 1979. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had risen to 23 percent.

What most Americans don’t know, however, is that before the late 1970s, inequality had been falling for five decades. The Golden Age of capitalism — the 30 years from the end of World War II through the mid-1970s, when gross domestic product, wages and incomes grew faster than at any comparable period in American history — was marked not by financial excesses and widening inequality, but by equalizing growth and broadly shared prosperity.

Of course, not every Occupy Wall Street protester has reviewed the hard data. But the thread running through the range of grievances voiced at occupations around the country is anger over high and rising inequality.

Few measures would help the long-term health of the economy more than reducing the economic and political clout of Wall Street. The financial sector exists to connect savers with investors and to do so at the lowest feasible cost and risk. In a sensible world, we would view the financial sector as nothing more than a transactions cost to be minimized along the way to producing the goods and services that the economy is really about.

For all the counter-culture on display, Occupy Wall Street is pushing us exactly in this sensible direction.

Rick Bookstaber On Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest, And The Roots Of Societal Instability (businessinsider.com)
“Occupy Wall Street” and Inequality (kristof.blogs.nytimes.com)

Shift Frequency

Environment, Finance, Health, Politics, Spirituality

Want To Fix Income/Wealth Inequality? Here’s How

OfTwoMinds April 30 2014

1. Rather than add taxes to fund more social welfare–in effect, placing a Band-Aid over the tumor–let’s start by removing the source of rising inequality: the Federal Reserve.

A Growing Disparity Between The Very Very Rich & Everyone Else

OfTwoMinds April 30 2014

1. Rather than add taxes to fund more social welfare–in effect, placing a Band-Aid over the tumor–let’s start by removing the source of rising inequality: the Federal Reserve.

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