Two issues have come up more than once here that I have a problem with.
The first is the money in politics. I think the last presidential election cost around a billion dollars. That works out to less than a dollar a year per citizen. It doesn't seem like a lot of money to spend to determine the direction of your country. As for the lobbyists and corporate donations, it sure looks like the general public can generate a lot more money through millions of small donations then any corporation could part with. Even looking at a few of the previous elections, I think Obama and Harper both benefited from lower average donations from a larger group of people. I think the problem might not be the money, but rather that only a few are engaged enough to spend it while the others complain. I would wonder how many of the protestors have donated even 5$ a year to a party or political campaign that they believe in.
My second complaint is the wealth gap. I don't see a wealth gap as a bad thing by itself. If inflation adjusted income is dropping in any quintile there is a problem, but if everyone is making more money but some are seeing their wages increase faster than others why does that matter. As an example, if I start a business that bills out all employees at an hourly rate equivalent to cost plus 20% then if I need 5 employees to make the same income as the employees. From there, for every extra employee I hire, their salary will stay constant but my profits will go up. Looking at that purely from the perspective of the wage gap, hiring extra employees would make me a monster and sharing a rate increase with them in the form of a wage bump would be a neutral act.
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