John F. Kerry

with all the recent class warfare stuff being championed by msnbc and the liberals in congress (and in the white house). I found this chart hella interesting. It breaks down income inequality by country.



now , with the talk of how 70% or even 90% tax rates are a "Great idea"... one might think that income inequality in america is just off the charts. I mean every "the top 1/5 own 89% of the wealth" statistic you hear must show this to be true....right?


well.... actually according to this, based on empirical data.... we are pretty well square in the middle of the world.... income distribution similar to china, and a little bit less equal than russia.... so the former communist countries the take-from-everyone-to-make-all-equal societies....they actually have similar income inequality to us.... or , another way, we have a similar spread of wealth to them, despite the fact that they were bastions of communism for decades....

the chart really speaks for itself. To hear some of the libs in congress talk about it things are just really unfair and unequal and the common man is just getting trodden upon by the fatcats.... to look at the empirical data, as you might expect, paints a much more subtle and nuanced perspective- where we actually are not towards either extreme, but in the vast middle , as far as the world is concerned, vis a vis income equality.

__________________
Nasa under Obama

John F. Kerry

essentially reading that chart, a few countries in europe are teh only places on earth with more equal distribution than the US. we have better income equality than almost all of asia, africa, south america and eastern europe....combined. and unlike the EU, we arent about to collapse from all the debt used to pay for that socialist utopia....at least.... yet.

__________________
Nasa under Obama

The Don

How do you calculate income equality?

I don't care if someone is really really rich, as long as I don't starve on a day to day basis.

Capitalism is shit mate!

__________________

Flamingnun

I'm not entirely sure you remembered to factor in how those respective governments spend the taxes they receive into your equation. Sweden pays 50% less than the US, yet it's a utopia in comparison. Go figure.

__________________

Lloydy

Are we looking at the same map? To me it looks like most of the world has a more equal distribution than the US.

__________________
Keep the red flag flying high

stoneric

And it's a myth that 15% of us live in poverty.

John F. Kerry

you know, my knee jerk reaction to this is to want to argue against it, to show examples of how sweden and the us are uncomparable.


but u know what? like i often say, if whats working is so great , no one would want anything else.

I freely admit that we have some economic issues to deal with. So frankly, my question now is - what can we do that sweden does? i think we should look at what they do, and why they have the situation that you are describing. even if we can adopt a small part of what they do, maybe it would improve things here. I think ultimately they are not comparable for various reasons.... but if there are some lessons to be learned from how they manage things, then i am all for learning them.... we need solutions.... objective solutions.... im not too concerned about labels.

another chart i saw last night showed us as having one of the higest corporate tax rates in the world, but apparently, one of the lower personal income rates in the west.... why is that? it makes me want to learn more about tax policy.... but what little i know, tells me its complex, convoluted, and that even the smart people, hell, even the people who designed the system...cant even really explain it that well....


so, if im considering swedish socialist policy to figure out possible ways to do things better.... its only fair that i also consider things like the flat tax, which, despite doing some bad things arguably, would definately make the tax system easier and simpler and less complex and easier to understand... ive always thought, and I still think, that a rearranging of the pieces could fundamentally improve the situation....maybe now that aarp has admited that some medicare benefits need to be changed and phased out...maybe the time has come to get a working system in place.... and for that system to work, and be good, and even more importantly, be accepted as legitimate by most of the people- we should without bias look at every system and try to find the best parts of them and combine them.... its not just good because we get the best parts of each, but its better than that because the sharing and borrowing of principles from everything from euro socialists to free market tea partiers will make everyone feel like they had some input into the new system and that the system in place isnt designed to be a "political victory" for one partisan side or the other...but like an almost "scientific" precision designed medicine for the exact conditions the patient suffers from.

thoughts?

__________________
Nasa under Obama

Sugar420

my first thought is that the chart seems to show that the USA isnt doing so bad, but the chart does not show that the inequality gap has increased since the 1970's, and the rate of income gap increase has accelerated since the 90's
meanwhile income inequality has decreased in other parts of the world.
if this trend continues (and i dont know any reason to think it wont) it could turn out very bad for the USA. maybe Canada will have to build a huge fence along its southern border to keep the illegal aliens out

SageTree

Fortress Canada

Could always just say "woops!!! our bad" and get back into the Commonwealth

__________________