Canadian Politics Today

New forum, same discussion, how comforting!

Personally TimG's point of view seems more plausible to me... high inequality is likely to be a symptom of various social/economic issues that also cause other downsides like slower growth. Inequality is inherently a measure of outcomes, not causes. You can't address inequality directly, what you can do is look at underlying causes like education systems, healthcare systems, infrastructure, etc.

Living and working in the US, it seems inescapably obvious that a huge portion of the population simply doesn't have useful skills that can be used to get a well-paying job. So of course they're incomes aren't rising when the simple tasks they can do are being replaced by machines or done elsewhere for much lower than US minimum wage. That's not something you can fix by redistributing money around on the back end, what you have to do to try to address this is totally change the culture and education system to make it easier and more tempting for people to learn useful skills. There's been a decades-long shortage of people going into technical fields and yet more people have an instinctive revulsion to math than ever, while religion is replacing science in classrooms in half the country.