Curious why you made the distinction about real personal income when it is also rising. I agree wealth inequality is rising but not that it is coming at the expense of real personal incomes.

The long-term trend is that the average person’s income is rising but we’ve seen recent declines due to high inflation. Can you expand on your line of thinking? I’m not sure I follow your reasoning.

Most households living below the poverty line have at least one unemployed person, so giving people jobs is pulling them out of poverty. Whether or not they are treated fairly at work and are satisfied with their working conditions is another story.

My parents never could’ve either but $500k household net worth only puts you in the top 20% of households so it’s not like they were exceptionally wealthy and we don’t know if they borrowed to invest or what exactly their specific situation was. Miguel Bezos was a Cuban refugee and then worked as an engineer for Exxon and Jackie Bezos was a secretary so i mean this is pretty middle class IMO.

That doesn’t mean that all billionaires clawed their way to the top as i mentioned above, or that we shouldn’t make progressive changes to the tax code. It’s just important that we separate truth from fiction to make educated decisions.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz grew up in a Brooklyn Housing project, George Soros survived the holocaust and worked waiting tables, David Murdock of Dole Foods was homeless. There’s tons of examples.

Here’s a fun article that ranks the whole Fortune 400 list. 80% of them inherited their wealth or at least grew up middle class.

Jeff Bezos actually scores high on the list because his Mom had him when he was 17, he flipped burgers in high school and by and large did not grow up rich.

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Oh I’m sorry i didn’t realize there was empirical evidence for socialism. Please send me a link to some of these successful socialist societies.

You wouldn’t be any better off on a socialist system. The people at the top of the party would control everything and the working class would be even poorer than they are now. You’re just licking the left boot instead of the right one.

Right? There are pros and cons with every system. People disagree based on value judgements not based on misinterpretation of facts. People in their echo chambers will have you believe that everyone on the other side of the political spectrum all thinks the same way “the same people who say X also say Y!” Rarely is that the case. Most people are actually centrists who have their own independent beliefs on a wide range of topics.

I am a libertarian. One thing I think people of all political stripes need to do is to start judging policy proposals by their outcomes and stop judging policy proposals based on their intentions. So you want minimum wage because a higher minimum wage will lower poverty? But is raising minimum wage the right way to achieve that goal?

Here are ten studies that provide some evidence that raising minimum wage does a poor job of lowering poverty:

1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

See the thing with every policy is that it creates unintended consequences. If you tax gas, gas becomes more expensive and the price of food goes up, if you add zoning regulations it makes it harder to build and house prices go up, if you raise wages through legislation (even though we all want to make high wages) that raises the costs to businesses and they have to raise prices or reduce labour at the margin. This has the effect of helping specifically minimum wage workers but for people without a job making it harder to find one. In the long term prices will go up to make minimum wage feel like less than it used to, necessitating the need for constant minimum wage increases. Do you really want to be fighting the same fight all the time over minimum wage only to have it raised when it’s far too late and most people are already making more than the minimum wage? What a waste of political will.

IMO UBI is a great option, Milton Friedman was famously very pro-UBI, but also need to be sensible about what regulations and laws we are passing and use a science and evidence-based approach, not one that sounds good when you first hear it.

Also why would you want to be in an echo chamber? I’m more of a libertarian but I like surrounding myself with people that challenge my views.

There’s more demand for rentals then there are government resources to provide social projects.

People need a place to stay and not everyone has piles of cash for a down payment. Vote for the change you want, but in this system we need rentals.

That situation is a bit different. Oil Companies performed proprietary research internally and promoted those results as scientific. Whereas, the implication in this post here is that anyone who ever worked for an oil company in climate science can no longer do climate science for an agency.

The insulin response you’re talking about is very small and it doesn’t lead to a chain reaction.

I think it’s sort of a catch 22. The people that tend to be the most knowledgeable about a particular science often have industry experience doing the exact thing you want them to study now. The idea that people could study the effects of aspartame for decades but are now “tainted” because they used to work for a soda company doesn’t necessarily square up to economic reality.

If however, you choose to put your foot in the sand there you’re going to have a bunch of people on a committee that have no idea what they are doing (which by the way people will also criticize you for) Remember when Trump appointed senior cabinet positions to people with completely unrelated experience? Such as Ben Carson (a former medical doctor) being appointed secretary of housing.

It’s a lose/lose situation I’m not sure what you all are expecting.

Probably on a per capita basis but we are all contributing to climate change (the majority of it): https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

Do you have a source?

Not a coincidence. End of cheap money era.

Rome was a republic for like 500 years.

What socialist societies that have existed have lasted a long time?