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We are, as scary as it seems, heading towards a two-tier society. One where the upper middle class and rich are doing extremely well, and an underclass that is living paycheck to paycheck.

That's not what the linked data seems to show. The report indicates that the share of the population in the "rich" and "upper middle class" buckets increased while the share in the "middle class", "lower middle class", and "poor and near poor" shrunk, with the LMC shrinking by the highest percentage.

In the type of two tier scenario you describe we would expect either the P/NP or LMC or both to grow rather than shrink.

Check out the following: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

Real wages for the average worker has been flat/down, over the past decades. However, real wages for the rich has grown tremendously during this same time period.

It's heartening that the average worker's wages haven't fallen significantly. But one would hope that given the amount of economic growth we've achieved in the past decades, the middle/lower-middle classes would also get some of the benefits, instead of simply running in place.

I think the crux of the matter is that human labor is losing its value, but the world is structured such that labor earns your place in society.

Many are losing their position in society as a result, resulting in varying degrees of dissonance and varying degrees of reactionary behaviors.

I find it difficult to blame any one group of people for their actions when they are losing at a game they never opted into and were never told the rules of. I also observe a lot of bigotry and lack of empathy coming from those who have a better grasp on this "game." It's toxic.

How do we re-adjust how we think about ourselves? What obvious truth are we missing regarding what humanity should be?

> What obvious truth are we missing regarding what humanity should be?

Highly educated / experts in their field of interest, in a society where money is no longer relevant, since all the logistics are fully automated?

Wait. That sounds familiar, from somewhere... Wait...

UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS

I truly hope humanity reaches that state someday, and it would be so good if it did so while I'm still alive.

Well before Krugman, it was Kurt Vonnegut. In 1952, he published his first novel Player Piano, which describes a society where most jobs are automated. There's a sharp class divide between the few "managers and engineers" who work and most people who live in an unemployed underclass.

It's very prescient and very very good. Highly recommend.

Yeah, I was just going to recommend that too. Great novel. It was punch cards vs. transistors, but the future was foreseen.

It's interesting how you want to take those who worked hard, got a degree, bettered themselves, and who are using their skills to better society (programmers, doctors, lawyers), and reward them with higher taxes.

Apparently you missed the memo... nobody who is successful got there through hard work, sacrifice, initiative, or diligent application of their own will. It's all a result of luck and/or leaching off of the backs of the exploited masses.

Apparently I did miss the memo. All successful people are a result of luck and leaching. TIL.

Actually that is, in my opinion, a perverted world view. Surely you don't believe it.

I think the parent is trying to say that successful people all have luck, while not all hard working people are successful.

I feel this is a correct, one way relation, as being born in the right country is luck in itself.

Sure, this is something that I can support. The parent post seemed too simplistic a characterization.

That (my post above) was sarcasm, for anybody who missed it.

> It's all a result of luck and/or leaching off of the backs of the exploited masses.

I can't accept someone truly believes that. You are polarizing this discussion. While it is known that people born with an advantage have a higher chance of succeeding in life, those people have to do their part in order to succeed. That means seizing opportunities offered to them, studying hard, working hard. They might have had an easier time having access to things, but that doesn't mean they could just slack off and yet succeed.

I can't accept someone truly believes that.

Yeah, seems incredible to me as well. But reading some of the rhetoric flowing around here over the past couple of years, it seems to be an amazingly popular point of view.

My grandfather survived 5 beach landings in WWII and came home to open a restaurant. He worked every day (you have to or people in that industry will steal from you) to provide for his family.

The only luck or exploitation he had was having the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki so he didn't have to die on a Japanese beach (his medical records at that time listed him as suffering from typhoid and dysentery - but because the war effort was stretched so thin, he was also listed as "combat ready". He would have died)

You forget - taxes pay for all sorts of infrastructure, the legal system, and the underlying mechanics that allow those successful people to find success.

Tell me with a straight face that the next big startup is going to come from Somalia or hell, even Flint, Michigan.

I'm not following how that has anything to do with the comment you replied to. I personally am actually very anti-tax, but that's an orthogonal issue as to whether or not individual effort counts for anything or not, and whether or not "it's all luck".

Note too that "success" doesn't necessarily have to mean "building a startup and having a big exit." There are many levels of success.

Let me simplify: taxes are critical for basic infrastructure that makes you successful at all levels. If you want zero taxes, go build a business in a jurisdiction that doesn't have them and see how you fare.

While this comment may seem a little inflammatory, it does not deserve a downvote, as it brings an interesting point of discussion.

In my view, there are two different things we have to balance with something like UBI:

1. Provide for those who have "fallen behind" via wealth redistribution.

2. Reward those who are doing exceptional work.

We as a society are generally are good at the second point: skilled worker are generally above median income and thus at or above middle class. We also have ways, albeit not perfect, to deal with the first point: via welfare and other programs.

The problem is the future. I believe that we will continue to try to automate people's jobs, because it is lucrative to do so: if you automate 10 persons' jobs away, you can sell that automation for 8 persons salary, which creates savings for your clients. However, as we automate away more jobs, how do we ensure that people can still live? We can't just leave a large portion of the population to die on the streets. We must come up with a compromise solution that ensure that both people are taken care of and people are rewarded with their good work.

I personally don't know how to balance this without higher taxes on the rich and well off, to the point that I have accepted that this is probably the way of the future. I feel that if we do not apply wealth redistribution, society may become unstable and I would end up worse than paying extra taxes each year.

Lastly, as a sibling comment addressed: those that do well have good luck, which is built on society's shoulders, so I find it natural to give back. I understand that others might not think this way, tho.

And, as everything is completely automated, what use for money is there?

(In the following argument, I am assuming free energy via solar / water / wind combination, which is perfectly doable today, but isn't fully implemented for logistic and political reasons. Yet.)

If you have everything fully automated to the point that it doesn't cost you or anyone else to produce it, what would be the point of attempting to sell it? And why would anyone buy anything, if everything is automatically produced for free?

Even if scarcity of labor goes away, there will still be scarcity of energy and natural resources. We would still need money to apportion the limited resources. We would likely be fantastically wealthy by the standards of today, but there would still be some limits.

As a sibling comment has said, there are scarcity of energy and resources. Now let's even pretend that can be a solved problem (not that I think it is possible, just from a physics POV): there will still be a transitional period where the issues I outlined will exist, and all of my arguments still apply during that period.

So suppose I'm a member of the upper class, and I always act in a selfish and rational way, seeking maximum benefit to myself at all times, without regard for benefit to others unless it also helps me.

Living thus in a society with a socio-economically paralyzed, beaten-down underclass will have negative outcomes for me. Parts of town fall into disrepair, limiting my movements and driving down my property value. More bums pester me on the street. Class-warfare politics threaten my interests. Etc. Crass but there you go.

In the grand scheme, I'm incentivized to avoid this scenario, and if raising taxes on myself can do it, then maybe I'd consider it, arguably without acting at all in contradiction to my purely selfish, purely rational nature.

The reward for working hard is that they're being paid more in the first place.

There are plenty of arguments to be made about progressive taxation, but this idea that it punishes the rich is tiresome. Reducing the size of someone's reward is not punishment.

"Punished" with enormous salaries and slightly higher taxes. Please sign me up for such punishment--that sounds wonderful.

> ... against any scapegoat that can be blamed for this assault. Mexicans, Muslims, China, Free Trade - all perfect targets.

The definition of scapegoat implies that the reasoning or blame isn't valid.

If you're an out of work construction or retail worker, replaced because a foreigner not paying taxes and using currency arbitrage can out-compete you, then the foreign worker is not a scapegoat.

If your city's main factory was moved to a low cost country while enjoying tarif-free imports, then free trade agreements are not scapegoats. They ARE the reason you are unemployed.

If you just finished up training a foreign guest worker to do your job, and are now unemployed, the H1B system IS to blame.

Forget about the morals or fairness of it all - it's not the point I'm arguing. And it's likely Trump would be unable or unwilling to enact his promises if elected.

But trying to frame legitimate reasons for the economic problems of 80% of the population as some sort of 'boogyman' sold to the rubes is disingenuous and just flat out incorrect.

> We need to tax those who're benefiting tremendously from the current economy

While I agree in part with the sentiment, I think this needs to be done carefully so as not to end up in a situation where everyone is at a disadvantage.

Take for example that a higher earner is able to afford a high deductible for his yearly health expenses. If you start taxing that person heavily to the point where they can't afford that deductible anymore, all you did was to increase the bucket of people who can't afford proper healthcare.

It's not just about taxing the richer, it's about adjusting the system as a whole.

Another example, this one personal: my wife and I earn a high combined income. Because of that, we're able to afford a more expensive apartment in our city's Downtown (not luxurious by any standard, just a little above the average in our area). That frees us from having to use a car most of the time (we have one that we use sparingly and incurs minimal yearly costs), which 1) drives down car costs 2) is friendly to the environment 3) makes us happier thanks to not having a long commute and 4) somewhat (although minimally) helps local government revenue because we're paying for bus fares. If we were taxed to a point where we couldn't afford our rent anymore and were forced to move to the suburbs, we'd see a dramatic increase in car costs (more gas, more frequent maintenance), we'd be joining the ridiculous lines in traffic during our commute, which would likely lead to more stress and more health issues, and we wouldn't be part of the group of people providing revenue to the local transit authority. So it's not like high earners can be indiscriminately taxed and that would only help other people but not impact those being taxed.

This discussion also comes down to the question, "who is a high earner?" I don't think people earning $100K+ (or couples earning $200K+) should be the target here, but executives earning millions upon millions every year, as well as the corporations they run.

I doubt that such a society will last very long, given how democratic access to weapons is becoming, with the ability to simply print them.

I wouldn't bet on 3D-printed small arms destabilizing society. 3D-printed tanks and attack helicopters, maybe, but I'm not holding my breath on that...

Also if that 3D printer doesn't help magic pills for experience, deep knowledge of logistics and anti-psyops manipulation, it won't help much against any large modern military, no matter how much gear people have

It's absolutely possible to win a war even though only the other side has a military worth the name. Look at Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even Vietnam.

"Quantity has a quality all of its own."

If society becomes a matter of a tiny minority and everyone else, "everyone else" just needs to be armed, not well armed. There is also the simple reality that our military and police are not formed of "Elites" who can expect wealth and privilege in society at large. It's hard to imagine a truly divided society in which the military is on the side of the ultra-rich, without vast changes being made over decades.

What exactly are you trying to achieve by calling a candidate as popular as Trump "extreme"?

> as popular as Trump

You mean hated by 70% of the electorate?

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/washington-post-a...

There it is again. Unfavorable opinion is very different from hate. Why pretend they are the same thing?

Why are you pretending that "Popular" and "Extreme" are mutually exclusive?

They are not completely exclusive, but more extreme politicians are certainly unlikely to become very popular, and more importantly, the more popular they are, the more dangerous it is to think of them as extreme. Especially if you turn out to be wrong.

> the more popular they are, the more dangerous it is to think of them as extreme. Especially if you turn out to be wrong.

I don't think this is true at all. The closest thing I can thing of to this that would be true is "The more popular they are, the more dangerous it is for you to call them extreme. Especially if you are right."

There's is generally little danger in thinking of a moderate politician with moderate followers as extreme, or even of overtly calling them that, no matter how popular they are.

OTOH, there's plenty of danger in calling an extreme politician with a demonstrated history of encouraging violent reprisals against dissenters extreme, especially if they are popular (and, especially if the people with whom they are popular are also extreme.)

The danger I was referring to is in shaping your own worldview to be too widely divergent from reality. If you don't care about that, I suppose that's your choice.

We don't have polls that accurately measure the intensity of political feelings, only their magnitude.

Would you accept "extremely widely unpopular, reaching a historically unprecedented low" instead of "hated"?

> What exactly are you trying to achieve by calling a candidate as popular as Trump "extreme"?

Trump is the single most unpopular major party nominee for President in the history of opinion polling, and was able to win largely because of the structure of the Republican nomination process being designed (and refined over several cycles) to lock-in the early advantage of a candidate able to most effectively appeal to particular extreme activist constituencies early in the process by creating large delegate majorities from small electoral pluralities, a design which has particularly extreme effects when the field of candidates early in the process is crowded as it was this year.

Yes, but he IS still a major party nominee. It's like being the least skilled basketball player in the NBA. If you call him extreme, what does that make, say, the Independent American Party?

Racist? Yes. But in other aspects, he is actually not that extreme:

- much less of a war-monger than Hillary, - has been gay-friendly forever, before it became politically expedient (see his press interviews from 2000). - he actually employed a lot of women in high-up positions

I am far from a Trump enthusiast, but calling him extreme is not entirely accurate.

>>he actually employed a lot of women in high-up positions

Yeah, about that... if you ever get the chance, you should look into how he treated those women.

Hitler was popular wasn't he? Did that make him moderate?

I was thinking Genghis Khan, but yeah that works too.

There are actual experienced political people who believe that Trump is a trojan horse who is running to implode the Republicans this cycle.

Go to Youtube, listen to a rally speech. It's pretty content free, even in the context of a presidential candidate rally.

Back to /r/the_donald with you!

You are correct on taxes, right in heart on UBI (I don't think technology has sufficiently advanced to produce a cheap enough high standard of living to be a universal guarantee - maybe when trucks and ships can drive themselves and 3D printers can make most things at a push of a button), but I have a rather controversial opinion about automation and humanity's future that I know I'll get yelled at for:

Birth control must be a right or we will outbreed our planet's resources.

Chemical contraception should be provided free of charge to anybody that wants it. The cost will be a pittance compared to the lifetime societal costs of unwanted children mostly born into and stuck in poverty, and doomed to repeat the cycle with their own unwanted pregnancies.

> Birth control must be a right or we will outbreed our planet's resources.

I would argue Education / stable society reduces rate of birth more than birth control.

What do most all 1st world modern economic countries on this list have in common? https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... The birthrate per woman is under 2.

Yes! You are quite right: education is the best birth control.

Unfortunately, accidents happen. We should promote both.

Why not mandate a child/baby license as well to confirm a parent has the resources to take care of a child as well?

EDIT: I think china did control population control, and if population control is a world shattering issue maybe we should look at it.

Baby licensing and other attempts to use gov't to control reproduction have a sordid history. The 1 Child policy involved a lot of misery/unwanted abortions/infanticide, plus a bad gender gap.

If we must go back to the first half of the 20th century for examples, government efforts to select parental fitness look pretty ugly too-- happy to expand a bit on the "natalism" of the 3rd Reich!

I don't think people should be restricted from having kids in any way. That is entirely up to them.

However, birth control should be provided for free because the cost of pills is far lower than the cost of a human being.

That being said, I think it would be worth looking into a "parental preparedness"...erm...I really hate the term "license" for this but it'll have to do. Anyway, something to demonstrate that you will be a good parent would be useful in determining eligibility for things like WIC benefits. But that's just an idea and should be attempted before implementing.

Incentives work great. If you can't afford to raise a child, you should get a stipend each year that you don't have any.

Huh, it's like the pro-life version of paying serial killers not to kill.

Is this an American healthcare thing? Because my reaction to your post is to wonder why you think it's a pressing concern?

I feel like birth control in a variety of forms is already fairly readily available, and it seems likely to me that it will only get more accessible in future.