Davos security guards
Credit: Jeff Stein/Washington Post
Imagine you had complete control of the U.S. government: What one thing would you do to reduce the country’s staggering economic inequality?
It’s no small task: The 400 richest Americans control more wealth than the poorest 80 million households, and as the richest citizens continue to capture the lion’s share of new wealth — the top 5 percent has captured 74 percent of the wealth created in this country since 1982 — the situation is only growing more extreme.
But while there’s consensus that America is a wildly unequal country, there’s broad disagreement on what, if anything, should be done to address that. That’s certainly true in Congress, where disagreement and deadlock have consigned meaningful action on inequality to the realm of the hypothetical.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask what could happen. And in that spirit, we asked experts from across the ideological spectrum what they would do to address inequality if they were king (or queen) for a day.
Their ideas included a sovereign wealth fund for all Americans, […]
Distribution of income is the core problem. Over the past couple of decades the system has been tweaked to give most of the personal income to a small number of people. Most of them are convinced that their income is a result of their own hard work and brilliance. The few who get most of the money don’t need to spend it, so they put it in storage in the stock market. As a result, the economy has been slowly imploding.
Some of those options would be helpful, but the job guarantee might be the best.
Proposed by Bernie Sanders just lately.
pdf co-authored by one of Bernie’s econ advisors: Stephanie Kelton from the MMT
school of economics
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/rpr_4_18.pdf
Some of these ideas are good and some not so good. Any of them which take money out of the hands of people who have more than they need and disperse it to those who do not have enough are good ideas. It should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence which ones are the good ones.