11-13-2015, 05:35 PM
(11-13-2015, 01:37 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Income disparity causes lots of problems in society. /
Most of those are "manufactured" (read: fake) problems. Yes, the rich are getting richer shaving off a % of that wealth transfer to developing countries. But that wealth transfer is almost entirely from the lower and middle class to those countries, not to the rich. And that growing wealth gap is global - there's nothing inherent to or special about the US economy enabling the rich to steal from everyone else.
And wage growth has slowed, but what's driven the stagnation has largely been a transfer from wages to benefits (specifically, health care). Now we would have seen our purchasing power grow some with declining prices, but the prices have been inflated by monetary policy (i.e. hidden taxation).
Barring protectionist intervention (which I think bears considering, because classic economic models tend to focus on labor more than resources - if resources are limited then productivity and labor can become almost irrelevant), our standard of living will continue to be exported to developing countries.
