It doesn’t bother you sometimes that some people starve while others hoard wealth that rivals the gdp of entire countries?
People going hungry, especially children, is a travesty.
What is your solution to it? We already have food stamps, welfare, fully subsidized healthcare, child tax credits, social security disability, free school breakfasts and lunches, Section 8 Housing, SNAP, WIC, CHIP, Medicaid, churches, charities, social security death benefit and so much more. People are still hungry.
Should we do more? The lesson of Africa says we shouldn’t. Decades of food aid to Africa did little more than make the continent dependent on food aid and drive all the farmers out of business because they couldn’t compete against free.
And I haven’t even brought up lthat there simply aren’t enough billionaires to tax to make even a tiny difference in any of this. Even if you took literally their entire net worth, converted it to cash (which is literally impossible) and spent it on the poor it wouldn’t make any difference.
THe child tax credit cut child hunger by 26%. We let it end. Giving people food isn't an especially hard problem in the US, yet we're not able to do it.
Increasing the eligibility and amount of the credit is helpful, but doling it out in repeated checks that you then have to go back and report on your 1040 is annoying. How many news stories are run about people who depend on their annual tax refund for living expenses? Reducing that refund by paying the money out earlier and celebrating it as a free handout is awfully manipulative.
Not really negatively manipulative IMO, I've worked with many people who don't really understand taxes and they think that a refund is some kind of free money "bonus" and often use it to make frivolous purchases and blow the whole refund at once. Most of these people don't really plan or budget on how to use their refund because they have no idea how much it's going to be, it's just treated as kind of a random winfall.
Doling that out in smaller increments and making the purpose specific (child credit, instead of tax refund) seems like a good nudge into better spending habits... especially when the amount is known ahead of time.
they think that a refund is some kind of free money "bonus"
For many people that get the child tax credit, a bonus is exactly what it is.
The word you should have put in quotes is “refund”. My sister, for example, used to pay about $1,500 in tax throughout the year yet get a $7,500 “refund”.
Isn’t that something? Pay x and get 5x as a “refund”.
in my opinion, as long as people are starving we aren’t doing enough… if billionaires aren’t enough tax the millionaires, if the millionaires aren't enough then tax me too… I can’t look at our existing failures and say “good enough, it’s just too hard”
Nobody should care about disparity, people should care about maximizing benefit for every American. I'm not saying it is easy to evaluate this, but it is obviously all we should care about. The existence of gazillionares is fine so long as individual wellbeing in this system is higher relative to other potential systems.
Firstly, evidentially, people do care about disparity: increasing disparity seems to adversely affect people physiologically, independently from wealth. That is, having someone else be significantly richer than you, independently of your own health, seems to create stress effects in a population. By the metrics of national health and well-being, it seems like wealth disparity is a bad thing in its own right.
Secondly, the problem with billionaires is not that they simply have so much money, it's that one's ability to influence society, including making and breaking the rules of society, is intrinsically tied to money. For example, consider the recent news about Bezos buying a new boat, and having to take down and rebuild a bridge to get it to sea. On the one hand, it doesn't really matter to me how much he spends on that boat - it's his money, and he can use it as he likes. However, the people of Rotterdam were promised that the bridge would remain put, yet Bezos' money (presumably via the shipyard that organised this) was enough to override the democratic process, presumably alongside adding a significant inconvenience to the people living there.
Or consider the recent trend of billionaires buying media companies. On the one hand, it's kind of irrelevant how they want to invest their money, but on the other hand, these media companies afford significant impact on the views and perspectives seen by society. If we really want to claim that we live in a democracy, it seems dangerous to also accept that one person can, essentially on a whim, buy one of the largest social media platforms with only vague hints as to what he plans to do with it. That sort of power is absolutely not something that you (I assume) or I personally can wield, yet it could well have a significant impact in shaping public opinion.
As long as money can be roughly equated to power, then wealth disparity will remain a very important thing to be concerned about.
I don’t want everyone to be the same, but unbridled disparity seems equally as bad to me… especially considering how arbitrary it can be.