However You Define 'Income,' the Rich Still Get Richer

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/however-you-define-income-rich-still-get-richer

How much income do America’s households take in? How much do they have left after taxes? Do federal taxes leave the nation less or more unequal?

Questions don’t get much more basic than these. Or more complicated. How, for instance, do we define income? Anything anybody collects from a paycheck, of course, should count.

But what about the money an employer shells out to cover an employee’s health insurance premiums? Or safety net benefits like unemployment insurance? Should these dollars count?

Conservatives regularly claim that we need a much more expansive definition of income than we can get from looking at people’s tax returns.

Statistics based on tax returns, they argue, overstate the income share of America’s rich because they don’t take into account the value of the government benefits — like food stamps — that the poor collect.

[lovemydog]

1. I am favor of maximum wealth provisions.

We have a minimum wage. We should have a maximum wage.

Progressive democrats should fight for it.

Sure, it's unrealistic at this point.

But we've got to fight for what we believe in. Not play some chickenshit game of being more like republicans.

[rogerashton]

2. Benefits should be counted in income.

That's pretty much a matter of arithmetic. But where inequality is concerned, we should focus on wealth, not income, for two reasons. First, wealth is power -- unequal wealth=unequal power. Second, for that reason, larger concentrations of wealth generate higher rates of return, i.e. more income that becomes wealth, making inequality still worse. Focusing just on income obscure that math. We need a progressive WEALTH tax, which should be devoted to funding a sovereign wealth fund.