I felt like I entered a wormhole in the GP comment where the ocean wasn't on fire, the Amazon wasn't burning down, a heat wave didn't sweep through the Northwest, and the polar caps aren't melting at an irreversible rate. The largest redistribution of wealth in history is happening right now while the global environment collapses and somehow there are cheerleaders egging it on so rich guys can play around in sub-orbit.
Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant?
It matters, I think. Because if people are only getting relatively poorer when compared to the top 1%, it’s not as bad as if they are losing their standard of living.
There are other issues about how excessively rich people can distort our society, but that’s not so much about the redistribution but the distribution, which is an ancient story.
I think wealth actually is being redistributed, but not in the sort of nefarious way that some people are claiming.
Last year incomes went up for the lowest earners. When less wealthy people get more money they tend to buy material, mass market goods. Large corporations tend to be the main suppliers of those goods. Thus, increasing buying power at the lower end of the income distribution results in companies earning more money.
Incomes went up for the lowest earners because of the trillions the government pumped into unemployment. You’re right that all this money gets spent and funneled up to large corporations, except now these large corporations are buying property en masse and aren’t significantly raising wages for the lowest earners, especially not enough to keep up with the inflation caused from all the stimulus.
I guess the point is these corporations need to be taxed at higher rates so low earners aren’t being shafted by our broken economic system.
> Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant?
How do you differentiate these? If you have 100 dollars, distributed evenly among 10 people, and then you print 100 more and give them all to Jeffery, then you have redistributed the wealth even though you only printed new money. He went from 10% of the power to 55%.
That doesn't make sense though, each dollar doesn't exist in a value vacuum, so you can't ignore the impact of uneven distribution. If Jeffery wants to own the entire town, he can (and then he can get loans against his property to continue funding operations). At that point it seems pretty inane to argue that re-distribution hasn't happened - money is a proxy for economic power, and when you give one person a larger percentage, that's redistributive. Maybe the other people in the town can still buy groceries, but now they're competing with the baron for things like land, and baron Jeff will always win, if he wants to, with all that extra money.
I actually decided to delete my comment here. I've had a challenging day and I don't feel like making it worse by continuing this conversation. Have a nice day.
Inflation would say otherwise. Everyone had the same purchasing power before, and so could buy roughly the same things. Now, Jeffery has more purchasing power than anyone else, which means they can outbid and can keep the better things for himself.
It's fair to say there is redistribution at play when wages have stayed stagnant for over 10 years (at least since the 2008 crash) while executive salaries and payouts have skyrocketed at an unbelievably disproportionate level. It's effectively a global aristocracy as a handful of people amass an amount of wealth that would be impossible to conceive of not even 50 years ago. They can't soak it all up from new money, they depend on keeping their wage bills and other costs low to keep their profits up.
And the standard of living is being lost when the people with stagnating wages are being priced out of the housing market, with renting or sharing being the only reasonable alternatives. Renting itself is a redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in many a case.
Not to mention that tax policies (like Trump's tax cuts for example) tend to disproportionately benefit the wealthy far more than the middle class, and the poor. I can't think of a more clear cut example of redistribution there.
The typical HN user is likely to be on the higher end of the scale and less exposed to issues like this (after all, many of us software engineers get a yearly payrise by switching job), but I find it hard to dismiss things like this when looking at my own country's politics.
The redistribution is from the young to the old, to those who stopped housing construction to that drive up the cost of living for those without houses.
Those who create wealth aren't redistributing it, they are capturing a small portion of what they create for others.
For many workers, wages have stagnated but total compensation hasn’t, when you account for increased costs of benefits. I support universal healthcare, but it’s important to realize how much it costs employers has gone up.
