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Originally Posted by woj
ok, so it may be true, but so what? what's the significance of this? what do you think is causing this low level of mobility? what do you think the solution is? "Most studies back up the idea that the U.S. has lost the upper hand for upward mobility to Europe and Canada over the last several decades. According to the Times story, 16% of Canadian men raised in the bottom tenth percentile of incomes were still there as adults. In the U.S., 22% remained in the bottom tenth." the stats you presented sound alarming, but this means that vast majority ( 78%) achieved upward mobility? where is the problem exactly? the whole statistic seems pointless, cause for every person moving up out of the lowest 10th percentile, someone had to drop down to it, so higher upward mobility implies higher downward mobility...
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Your logic is correct... which is why it is a fallacy to suggest this should be about taking from one group to give to another group. Someone who inherits millions of dollars is not the same as someone who earns millions of dollars. Someone who is poor because they prefer to get drunk and lay on the couch is not the same as someone who goes bankrupt trying to pay insurmountable medical bills. Over time the people in each group change and the groups should not be defined merely by their present income levels. A very small fraction of the population is wealthy enough that they have no ties to community, country or any governing structure. What the US does will leave someone like Buffet pretty much entirely unaffected. However, for 98+% of the country, how the rest of the country does has a major impact in how you do.
When some poor person without medical coverage gets sick and doesn't get treated, the chance of them infecting other people increases. When a poor person drives a beat up car from 1972 on a snow covered road, the chance of them crashing into you increases. It benefits everyone to allow poor people (who abide by our laws) to live a simple mostly painless life of subsistence. As we need less and less people, the number of people displaced (who are unable to 'earn their keep') will continue to increase. No tax increase or spending cut will change that fact. The central question of the next 50-100 years will be what do we do with them? So far we have been putting plenty of them in prison for nonviolent crimes like marijuana possession and whipsawing many of them by providing credit they never should have had access to and then repossessing whatever they bought.
It's a simple question with no good answer yet. What do we do with the rapidly increasing number of people who are somewhat educated, willing to work, nonviolent but unable to become a useful part of the economy?