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Originally Posted by Azure
Except it isn't as simple as actually just 'redistributing' the wealth.
Even countries with lower levels of poverty and a higher average standard of living or quality of life than the US have rich people who constantly accumulate the majority of the wealth in their respective countries each year.
It is hard someone making $75k per year to compete with someone making $35 million in trying to generate more wealth. At some point we need to accept that there will be rich people, and there will be poor people, and the solution is class mobility and not wealth redistribution.
The problem in the US is that the middle class is eroding and turning into the 'poor' class, and the poor class is stuck where they are at because they don't have any proper class mobility. You can attribute that to a variety of different things, all of them not having anything to do with rich people getting richer.
At the end of the day, rich people are going to get richer no matter what you do.
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Yeah, but based on the evidence of various countries around the world, the places with stronger class and social mobility almost invariably have lower income inequality, higher taxes, a more robust social welfare system, and higher rates of union membership than places that have poor mobility.
So like it or not, wealth redistribution through higher taxes and economic systems encouraging income equality appear to be a key component in ensuring strong economic mobility. And you see this effect even within countries. Just as the countries with higher taxes and higher union membership rates have the strongest class mobility, so too do the the regions of the US that have those things when you compare them to the rest of the country.