Smaller than the gap between a Walton and a Wal-Mart greeter.

Define wealth please.

I've already posted how it's used to define poverty. You seem to be using a personal definition which makes exchanging ideas impossible.

Thank god you can attack his argument without going full ad hominem #HIV #AIDS #toxiccult

Itshotinvegas .

Ok maybe this will make it clearer I think .
The wealth gap is like any other ratio in economics .
It’s just a freakn ratio to help us , normal human , to estimate and try to make fair comparaison to help us explain why certain problems arises in specific situation.

Can wealth gap be something that doesn’t matter ?
Of course , when the wealth gap is reasonable ....

But Someone with 0 wealth Is a big problem and all the nba example you try to use is irrelevant because all Nba players have a wealth and especially income that no normal worker will ever be able to attain .

The wealth gap like any other ratio are subject to diminishing return , like taxes, interest rates , etc .

Too much or too little is bad , same principal with wealth gap , income inequality or whatever else .

And anyway all of this came for one reason when I said the economy isn’t working for the benefits of the majority.
Seems you don’t agree and uses millionaires nba athletes to show a poverty problems doesn’t exist in the states even tho people works full time ....

And instead of trying to poke holes on facts .
Why don’t you show us with facts or data how it’s actually is in the states and how great and rich the majority of Americans are ?

It shouldn’t be very hard if we all are delusional....

yeah people fail so hard when they try and make sports analogies..

lebrons 2020 contract is 39million. the league minimum is 675k.

so lebron makes 58x the lowest paid person in the nba..

those are like 1970s corporation numbers..

according to the 2019 estimate which has certainly been eclipsed due to the wealth generation at the top due to covid, said the average ceo made 278x the AVERAGE employee.. not the minimum employee like in the nba numbers..

LOL

Of course, we really shouldn't be comparing the NBA minimum to LeBron, but to the owner.

Got it. Thanks.

My income is below the official poverty line, yet I live better than millionaires did sixty years ago.

Yeah, I'm giving up trying to get this point across. A wealth gap isn't really indicative of anything. Like, MrWookie actually thinks making the gap wider by using the owner actually helps his case. No one's going to care about the low paid NBA player having such a wide disparity between the owner, because the standard of living is so high already due to their income, even if they have more debt to income, or waste their income on spending instead of owning things i.e. zero wealth.

After all this bleating about the NBA, your point was apparently that poor people aren't really poor because...technology is better nowadays?

Uh that's cool and all but that's not gonna save a poor person's life who doesn't have $500 sitting around to pay for an unexpected medical emergency!

btw, do you own a home? I'm curious how you define this. I know you're in CA and generally older, so if you bought a home a long time ago and have a cheap mortgage (or no mortgage!), that may be the case.

If you're renting, I dunno, you might have to define "living better". Smartphones are cool but they're not that cool.

Only in a lefties mind is a person making hundred of thousands of dollars a year, but has a zero net worth, "poor".

Uh:

I am pretty sure the poverty line in California is below "hundreds of thousands of dollars a year", and you said this post is along the lines of the point you were trying to make.

I mean, if you think that there are people who exist who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and have literally zero net worth, that's pretty cute and all, but it doesn't mean much. People making 50k and with pretty close to zero net worth are much more common, especially among millennials who have never been able to afford a house.

The only real metric is the quality/standard of life at the bottom. Wealth/income are all impractical metrics. Once again, even in a social utopia, the bottom is not going to generate wealth, or income (other than government entitlements). It does not matter how much or little wealth Bill Gates accumulates. Is wealth the goal, or standard/quality of life? If wealth is the goal, you want people like Bill Gates to handle capital so they develop something like Windows, of which other people can use to generate wealth.

Huh, weird:

IHIV didn't like this post, I guess "being able to not die or go BUSTO from treatable health issues" isn't a "quality/standard of life" problem

High cost of medical care is not a wealth inequality issue. One of the chief arguments for M4A is that it would purportedly lower the cost of medical care. Is your argument that the cost for health care is fine, we just have to get people to become more wealthy? If it's simply a wealth inequality issue, why do you want free healthcare? You should be focusing on how to get people to save more, and make better financial decision.

What? This makes no sense. You're leaving a lot of confused people in this thread, I think you need to explain what your actual point is much more clearly.

You argued "The only real metric is the quality/standard of life at the bottom. Wealth/income are all impractical metrics." Okay, so let's look at quality/standard of life. Seems bad for quality/standard of life if a single unexpected medical expense can bankrupt or kill you!

That is not me saying "the cost of healthcare is fine", that's me responding to your argument.

You are trying to interject the cost of healthcare is where you are confused. If you want to increase the quality/standard of life for people at the bottom, go for it. Wealth inequality has nothing to do with that. Bill Gates having billions of dollars of wealth relative to the zero wealth of poor people is irrelevant to fixing the healthcare system for the people who have zero wealth. Even in a socialist utopia, these poor people will still have zero wealth, and the richest will still have a wide difference in wealth relative to them.

It's not at all irrelevant. If we took money from people like Bill Gates and gave it to poorer people then those poorer people might be able to afford healthcare. If we took money from people like Bill Gates we could also use it to fund socialized healthcare.

That healthcare is expensive, and that and poor people have no money, are BOTH problems that cause the quality-of-life issue of poor people having bad/no access to healthcare. As you've identified, there's multiple possible solutions! We could make healthcare low-cost/free, or we could try to make sure poor people have more money.

You can pick whichever solution (or both!) you like, but they both probably involve changing taxation in the United States so that Bill Gates has less money when it's all said and done.

I live in Orange County and can't even afford a studio apt. I always rent a spare room in somebody's house.

Plus I can't even afford a car. Which is fine, since I can't drive anyway. I take public transportation and Uber.

I bought a used laptop for about $100 about four months ago. (It's s 2009 Lenovo.)

Conservatives barely scraping by while defending to the death the right of others to pick their pockets is pretty much on brand.

I'm not going to take us down this path again, but everytime one of you pretend Bill Gates wealth is in some bank vault, I'm going to post this image. I guess you are just going to force him to sell his stock, or take it from him.


Curious, what happens to all the initiatives Bill Gates is funding with his wealth right now?

I mean, conservatives don't need a whole lot to live on. I was mocked for wanting the Democrats to settle for another $1200 check, coupled with $400/wk extra in unemployment Trump was offering, becasue D's wanted more, and a big amount for city governments, who are not their constituents (absent the union members who were looking to benefit). So, who picked my pocket?

You don't understand how orders of magnitude work, as we established long ago, or at the very least you don't have an intuitive feel for them. I'll help you out - if you spend one dollar a second, it would take about 11 days to spend a million dollars. At the same rate, it would take about 31 years to spend a billion dollars.