to be utterly incensed that the gap between the very richest people and everyone else in society is getting wider and wider?

[Mintyy]

They are rich. Why can't it stop there?

Why do they have to go from being multi millionaires to billionaires to multi billionaires?

I wouldn't find it so hard to swallow if the opportunity to earn more was open to everyone, but it most definitely is not.

The fact that the gap between the richest and the poorest in our country is widening enormously really sickens me to the back teeth.

Yep, Green, the current system looks insanely complicated and only ends up giving tons of state money to international corporations.

Here's another of my charts - last one on this, I promise
Why have all this benefits in contributions out malarkey, instead of simplifying the whole fucking thing by ensuring a stable basic level of comfort? Then you can tax all earnings properly and stop indirectly funding Tesco, Boots & co via welfare.

Also, you could remove the minimum wage requirement under those conditions - on the proviso that employers pay their taxes.

Oh Garlic, I wish I understood your graphs!

When I said there was fat to be trimmed off public services, I didn't mean things like policing, fire services etc. It's just that when I was a "community link worker", I was always being given lovely lunches at all-day inter-departmental meetings, fancy biscuits at morning meetings when a coffee and a glass of water would have done... And some managers said things like "I've got to spend the rest of my budget, or I'll lose it next year" - and my local builder, who is also a school caretaker, has given me loads of really useful stuff for my childminding business. He said, "the school asked me to take it to the tip, but it's never been used")

I have just started another thread in AIBU, on which I am expecting to show my ignorance even more.

How can we address the inequalities that bother us all so much? I don't want people who work hard to be rich to be penalised for their efforts, or move abroad, but I do want ordinary working people who also work hard to get a fair chance of giving their children the 'ordinary' things that this society takes for granted (decent food, internet access, maybe a cheap camping holiday once every couple of years).

pommedeterre - they still don't work as hard as someone who has three cleaning jobs and kids and elderly parents to look after and still struggles to make ends meet.

Lots of people work hard and do overtime. Lots of people have very pressured jobs. Senior execs now earn on average 180 TIMES what the average worker gets. They are grabbing an every bigger slice of the pie, for no objective benefit - in fact quite the reverse, high executive pay has an inverse relationship to company performance.

It's not about entrepreneurs - most of these people are managers, not people who have created anything or taken any risks themselves. The risks they take are with other peoples' money.

Their pay is set by their peers in a cosy 'you scratch my back' system where execs who are awarded high pay rises sit as non-execs on other boards approving high pay rises for their mates.

The whole system stinks. It is corrupt and destructive, for society, for shareholders (which is all of us now everyone has to contribute to a pension) and for companies.

Brilliant summary, edam. I've got some positively mind-bending stats somewhere, about executive officers' pay packages compared to the wages of the hordes who make the money for the companies they run. But I shan't make a graph of them You must admit the last one was pretty, green!

I take your point about peripheral wastage but, sadly, I think you'll find that anywhere. Effective re-use is probably the best we can hope for until people actually learn how to their jobs properly - so there's a good excuse for your free stuff

How can we address the inequalities that bother us all so much? It's a very big question with a fairly straightforward answer: there has to be a more efficient redistribution pattern. People don't actually mind the rich being absurdly rich, as long as everyone can get on with their lives in relative comfort. We look to be sailing close to a tipping point, though. When you make so many of the people suffer that everybody knows someone desperate, it finally sinks in that the general comfort level has been threatened. There's a middle-class crime crisis at the moment, with people stealing electricity and petty fraud going through the roof. When the middle classes are thinking "I need this, they charge too much, I'll steal it," they can't help but see those who're worse off are now likely to steal their stuff for similar reasons!

Whether our governments and the corporations that run them are willing to do anything about it is another matter. If they won't, we're in for some pretty scary times.

Of course executive pay increases were driven by the demand for transparancy. when no-one knew what the executives were earning, then the pay was low - as soon as it was published (by law), all new execs wanted paying above the average, and all companies paid above the average as they wanted to show they had an 'above average' exec. Averages then increases, so pay follows.
This is the law of unintended consequence - by demand to know exec pay, it increased exponentially and will continue to do si unless it is kept private again.

What has looking after kids and elderly parents got to do with a pay packet? Work outside of work has no impact on salary.

This thread show how successful the propaganda of the rich is.

London being the global centre of billi

Billionaires is damaging to the UK economy.

What has looking after kids and elderly parents got to do with a pay packet? Work outside of work has no impact on salary.

No, it's got nothing to do with individual's pay-packets, but everything to do with how the economy would (not) cope if all care had to be paid for.
pomme, surely you must see that people providing care for dependents, whether children or elderly or anybody else who requires care, support the economy as a whole for NO return whatsoever?

Yes of Course.

When i was comparing salaries and hours worked it had no place though as it is outside work.

The work pressure on top execs vs cleaners is completely different. I really think it is odd to pretend otherwise.

I do feel that extreme wealth encourages extreme bad taste. I don't mind too much about not being a trillionaire oligarch when I see how they build and furnish their houses!

I think the oligarchs with bad rase possibly had bad taste BEFORE they were oligarchs. Their extreme wealth allows them to indulge their tendencies, it didn't create them. There are plenty of very wealthy people with good taste. And plenty of poor people with execrable taste.

This thread show how successful the propaganda of the rich is.

Indeed. Nobody really minds the rich being ridiculously rich. Societies, including ours, are generally tolerant of inequality. But when the coefficient gets too high, it strangles growth and causes instability. This happens when the rich take so much more, there's not enough left for basic comfort & safety all round.

The low-waged and unwaged matter a great deal to the rich. The low-waged create the profits that pay the rich. If your rich vice-president had to clean his own house and office, do his own shopping and raise his own kids, he wouldn't be vice-president. If he had to do his own repairs, nurse his own family members and make his own curtains, he wouldn't be rich.

If his employees can't get healthcare or can't afford someone to help them out at home, he'll struggle to find an efficient workforce. If his employees' children can't get an education, his company won't be able to find an efficient workforce. If the masses can't afford anything, his company's market will dry up.

There is no reason why he shouldn't pay the people who do those things a good living wage; he's got every motivation to do so, except personal greed.
There is no reason why he should depend on those same people's taxes to part-fund the employees who create his profits.

Because these things matter to an economy in total, but not to an individual vice-president, economies have to avoid the above scenarios by redistributing wealth in ways that are perceived as fair enough. The spike and trough in our current national data (and world, as it goes,) show this isn't being done well enough right now.

London is the global centre of billionaires. Billionaires are damaging to the UK economy.

There's a reason why these graphs never show the top 1% in relation to the population. The chart would have be so tall, to accommodate their incomes, that the 1st - 95th percentiles wouldn't show at all. The four next-highest groups would just be little dots.

The rich will stamp down wages as low as they can without inciting revolution.

Tbh I don't think we're far off.

Where did all the philanthropists go?

I think on mn if you earn a lot of money then you are evil by definition.

Hell, no :) Lots of super-rich people are kind, diligent and responsible. One of my favourite rich people is Warren Buffet, who's both super-rich and highly critical of the systems that allow him to make unfairly huge profits (he does his own redistribution.)

The point isn't a personal one, it's administrative. A system that makes the welfare of the many depend on the personal values of the few cannot work efficiently. This has been the root cause of every major revolution in human history.

One concern I have is that the focus on the super rich and executive pay distracts from what would really help most ordinary people. If you want to reduce the pool of profits available for executive pay one way to do it would be by raising the minimum wage to a living wage and severely restricting the use of zero hours contracts.

Whether or not the chief exec of Burberry or Sports Direct get a stupid pay rise probably won't impact the people who work for them. A higher minimum wage would and guaranteed hours would (note - I don't know if Burberry or SD use zero hours contracts)

Chaz, I support a universal income - set at basic comfort level, not borderline poverty - with rent controls, regional adjustments and NO means testing. Child benefit & disability-related payments would have to be tweaked. After that, minimum wage could be abolished and ALL earnings could be taxed. This would, I think, free up constricted markets to find their own levels. Higher earners wouldn't need to whinge about benefit claimants, since everyone would be getting the same.

This would probably lead to even higher peaks in the top 5%, with a much gentler curve through the majority 95%. Therefore, the upper rates of taxation would have to be increased (and collected!) but that should have little impact on their overall revenues, as costs can be reduced and their domestic markets will be more stable. I would have thought the 'elite' would rather like that - unless they really do want to own everything, and never mind if the lower echelons die off through starvation & disease.

Just copied this from American political website, the daily kos:

" And you can be sure that the 1% will install leaders that do this as quickly as possible. Climate change is coming, the resource crunch is coming. The pie is shrinking quickly and they have to grab as much as they can for themselves. "Administrative massacres", to use Hannah Arendt's chilling phrase, will become common ... thin excess populations.

" There is no other humane response to the crisis of technological unemployment other than for the government to step in and do a massive downward redistribution of the savings in efficiency from mechanization, in the form of public goods such as a guaranteed income and job guarantee (along with food, shelter, education, and health care). Either this happens, or unimaginable tragedy. Either New Deal Plus, or Final Solution Minus."

I probably disagree with the author on job creation, as I don't feel pretend jobs have the desired effect on social health. If it's more cost-efficient for a council to replace all its workers with machines, it should do so. I think people's natural drive is generally to work, and we will create our own initiatives. If this leads to a two-tier society, it's not a problem as long as all are safe & healthy.

Garlic, you have thought about this a lot, haven't you?

I think people's natural drive is generally to work, and we will create our own initiatives...

Have you read The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedhoff? I read it about twenty years ago. She was a model/anthropologist who spent a fair old while living with a 'primitive' tribe in South America somewhere or other.

You've reminded me about a story Jean Liedhoff tells in her book. There was a bloke in the tribe who was partly westernised, had been raised by missionaries or something (I forget the details). When he returned to the tribe, he didn't want to work, and was just plain lazy. They supported him totally, without criticising him at all. They built him a house, tended his garden, cooked him food etc. He took shamelessly from all them, in a way which clearly appalled Jean Liedhoff (who was raised in Europe) but, after two or three years, he got bored of being a waster, and began to work. Nobody commented, they just quietly included him in the work of the tribe. He soon became a 'normal' and hardworking member of their society.

I suppose one could argue that he wasn't sufficiently damaged by his few years of western upbringing to become a waster for life. Also, he was just one bloke, in a tribe/culture of people who all worked together, so not too much of a drain on their resources as a whole.

When I look at some of my recent-immigrant Eastern European neighbours - not the Polish, most of them work like the clappers, but some of the Czech and Bulgarian and others (there has been a huge influx over the last few years) - I wonder just how long it would take them to reach this stage, and whether or not the country can afford it... but I do believe that you are right, that the work-ethic is built into all of us - unless it is beaten out of us somehow...

I'd just like to say I'm really enjoying your posts, Garlic.

Great thread.

Oh! Thanks! I thought I was yammering on a bit ...

I think we should all read this and weep that they failed and all the change since then has been hardship for all