Income inequality: has the discussion escaped from liberal chat rooms into

[hedgehog]

general common knowledge?

[Warpy]

1. Of course. The problem is that people are divided

Some are still buying the bullshit that rich people invest in the US and create jobs, so more money should go to them. Others are waking up to the fact that no rich man ever created a job unless there were hundreds of poor men with money in their pockets to buy what that job produced.

This is a long process, converting the stupid. I imagine we're about halfway there on a good day and about an eighth of the way there on a gloomy day.

[frazzled]

2. Liberal chat rooms neither originated the discussion

nor are they probably responsible for spreading it. It has been studied and discussed for many years by scholars (economists and social scientists) in universities and think tanks, written about by journalists, discussed by politicians, and for a long time tracked by the government (see, for example, this 2001 Census Bureau data collected on income inequality since 1967:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070208142023/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ie6.html )

I remember talking about it in the 1980s.

I think we fail to recognize that most of what we discuss here has not sprung full-blown out of the head of our collective Medusa, but rather filters down to us from academics, economists, straight journalists, funded think-tank studies, etc. We wouldn't even know what to talk about half the time if these people weren't doing the serious work of investigating and analyzing these issues.

[GeorgeGist]

3. +1

[Wounded Bear]

4. I think a study of history will reveal...

that income inequality is one of the most common pre-cursors to violent revolution.

Unfortunately, that seldom leads to democratic outcomes. Usually, it just leads to "new boss same as the old boss" outcome.

[question everything]

6. And there will never be a revolution in this country

The reality is that most people, even the poor, do not want to remove the rich; they want to be rich.

Many still believe the old phrase that anyone can get rich if only... (pick your action).

In the midst of the great recession someone was standing at a public place with several pie charts. One showed a fair distribution, another - where the wealthy get their large share of the pie. And the "man in the street" preferred the one that tilted toward the wealthy.

This is the problem with the Republicans - they do not care about others until... they are in their shoes.

And what happened here in the last 30 years is that only did we move from a farming and manufacturing based economy to a service based one; we moved from everyone on his own. We no longer have large corporations that employ many people and that, yes, feel some responsibility for them. Henry Ford, not known as benevolent, claimed that he wanted to pay his employees fair wage so that they could purchase the products they were producing.

Today, Walmart employees cannot afford to buy there.

We do not trust large institutions and do not expect them to do their part for the betterment of society.

[hedgehog]

7. I am very grateful for the work these people have done -

it gives us factual back-up to our gut feelings! To me that's the difference between liberals and conseratives - we live in a reality based world, not a fantasy one.

My concern is that if the general public is unaware of the reality, nothing will change.

[Springslips]

5. Occupied did

And I was and still am a critic of the movement. It can't be denied though that their branding of the 99% brought the income issue out. Despite all the things I think k they lack this in itself makes the movement successful.

[CTyankee]

8. Yes, you are right IMO. People who say Occupy fizzled out miss the point.

"The 99%" is now a common phrase used by political commentators in the MSM.

Sometimes movements causing the revolution don't actuallly "bring" it.