Courtesy: The Atlantic
You might consider America’s vast wealth inequality, vividly illustrated in this viral video, to be offensive, infuriating, or irrelevant. But it is not terribly mysterious.
Rich people have more money. More money tends to lead to bigger properties, fatter savings, and better access to capital markets. As a result, the top 1% of the country controls between 40 and 50 percent of the total wealth from stocks and bonds. What’s more, the very very richest people tend to be lawyers, doctors, and executives, especially in finance, with equity in their firms and companies. The overwhelming source of high wealth (as opposed to high income) at the tippy top comes from stocks, real estate, and business equity. And it’s basically going to the tippy top.
The share of total household wealth, which has fallen at the bottom thanks to the housing bust, is accumulating at the top 1 percent.
Watch the 6 minutes video and you will understand why cpitalism in its present form is not working for the 99% of the Americans. The scary part is that other countries are following this model. The Promised Messiah (as) instituted the system of Wasiyyat as the ultimate economic model that will save the world! So I invite all readers to read, reflect, question and learn more about this unique system that will save mankind. Focus on the core concept and the philosophy of this system and how it addresses to solve the economis crises through charity not interest!
Categories: Business, Economy, United States
It doesn’t only matter how hard you work. Rather it also matters the direction you put that effort in and how lucky you are. Forcing the top to give to the poor reduces investments by that much and forces the top to look outside the US for investments by that much.
The real solution as the the top VOLUNTARILY gives charity that is sufficiently large to benefit the poor. That is how religions and specifically Islam solves the problem. Voluntary donations not forced taxes. i.e. Al Wasiyyat.
Salaams. The article / argument seeks to address an important theme but does so by setting up a false dichotomy: capitalism or something else. The USA and many other advanced societies already recognize through their governance models that the free market system and capitalism have their weaknesses; unfettered markets and unbridaled capitalism lead to too much concentration of wealth. There is ample economic literature to this effect. To address the weaknesses, tax systems and redistribution of wealth – in varying degrees depending on the country – are well-known mechanisms. Nor are tax systems limited to merely how much citizens are taxed on income and other proceeds. Rather, tax systems include, for example, incentives for charitable donations. It is not by chance that the USA is arguably the largest source of charitable giving worldwide (or at least in the top 10 if one chooses to quibble with statistics). In sum, the article might take a different approach rather than pitting one system vs. another – an approach that rarely ends up in more than a zero sum game. Instead, perhaps the article could address the prospect that there may already be a de facto sort of Wasiyyat scheme in operation in the USA and other Western countries by virtue of incentives and cultural traditions for centuries of charitable donations, volunteerism, etc. Alas, perhaps free enterprise, free markets, capitalism moderated by advanced governance systems, are not so distinct from Islamic approaches after all.