Some years ago I did the arithmetic for Australia. The wealth of the top one per cent if spread around the bottom 10 per cent of households was sufficient to buy each of the latter a modest suburban home and a small family car. Things have gotten worse since then and probably more so in America.
Dave -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes Sent: Friday, 1 November 2013 4:39 AM To: Progressive Economics Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Malcolm Gladwell's New Book Asks Us To Pity the Rich Ron: "Would we gain much if the financial wealth of the upper 1% were spread amongst the lower 99%?" Yes, of course, we would gain a lot. Mainly because whoever ends up in the new recalculated top 1% will be comparatively less wealthy and powerful than the ancien 1%. Of course, since we're fantasizing, a hypothetical reallocation should go much further. ----------------- I think we need to consider just how the 1% got their money. It's been channeled by government policy through tax and corporate regulation to the effect of handing power over the economy to the private sector. Reallocation needs to be a reversal, where governement retakes control over that money and spends it on social needs instead of corporate need. While Doug and others note that the financial sector only amounts to 15% of GDP, the quantity isn't as important as how that money is used to manage and manipulate the economic engine through a sequence of investment and non-investment that essentially sheers the rest of the engine. Social need has to take back its place over economic desires of the 1%. Clearly whole sections of the society don't belong in a marketplace model: welfare, health, education, and housing---particularly housing for the poor, old, and other sections of the population most in need. Food, housing, and minimum living standards need to be pulled out of marketplace models and re-instituted as social need which becomes subsidized by government, etc. All that is what we mean by socialism and what we would do as socialists, so ... etc. So the answer is we gain a tremendous amount in a regulated and deliberately managed reallocation and distribution system. I don't care about the 1% happy or otherwise. I want their money back doing its job for the rest of us. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
