Revised estimates of the share of national income going to top earners

Picketty definitely does not ignore wealth inequality. Most of his book is devoted to explaining why the return on existing wealth is the most important factor in inequality. He proposes a global tax on wealth, not income, to help combat inequality.

I am a fan of the once popular ideas of Henry George. From Wikipedia:

Georgism is an economic philosophy holding that, while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land (including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of Henry George, the Georgist paradigm offers solutions to social and ecological problems, relying on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.

I would add that today, other common capital could be taxed in the same manner, be it the electromagnetic spectrum, the human audio spectrum, the visual spectrum as well as other so called externalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Yes, I've always thought it's odd how people tend to focus their ire on high-earning professionals like doctors, lawyers, consultants, etc. while ignoring the trust fund kid worth 200 million dollars. I'm guessing it's because most of us have never met someone worth that much money.

Really, it's the top 0.1% I'm concerned about. Most of the top 1% are basically upper middle class people who've met with significant professional success, and the only part of the middle class that done well the past two decades (and good for them).

Capital without income is not particularly useful. The problem is we use the IRS definition of income ignoring unrealized gains which distorts the income perspective for the top 1% / 0.01%.

Like most of us I haven't actually read Capital in the 21st Century, but isn't his whole point that the capital gains of the ultra rich outstrip the income of any worker? Anecdotally I hear anger towards hedge fund managers and inherited fortunes, not doctors. And if they are earning a half million a year, I'd hardly call them any kind of middle class.

A thought experiment: what would a world look like where wealth caps exist instead of universal basic income? Say, total individual wealth is capped at say, 1000 times the national median per capita wealth? Anything higher and your income is taxed at a very high rate.

They don't ignore wealth inequality. Wealth is harder to measure and because many people's wealth has already been taxed once there's little political support to be had for proposals to tax it again. Of course that leads to runaway inequality, but 'x has too much money and should just have to give up some of it' is not a winning political platform unless you live in a communist country where there's some sort of sociopolitical consensus in favor of that idea (and even communist countries struggle with this in practice and usually end up with corruption instead).

A much worse problem is the focus on inequality of incomes at a snapshot in time.

A doctor may go much of their life with low income, and make it up in their mid and late career. But a 22 year old doctor isn't what we thing of as "poor".

We need to follow people over time and use other indicators to see how poor they actually are. Consumption might be a much better measure in many ways.

In a country where 69% of the population has less than $1000 in savings[1], income inequality is more important than wealth inequality. You need excess income to accumulate wealth.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/09/23/survey-...

Picketty's book does at least attempt to address this. He proposes a switch from income tax to wealth tax. He shows that most inequality is a result of the growth of existing wealth (most of which was inherited). Taxing wealth instead of income can help reverse, or at least stop the increasing levels of inequality. A very small percentage of wealth would need to be taxed to accomplish this.

Haha, identical incomes is what Scott Winship would call Denmark.

I've recently got exposed to someone questioning whether or not we should even care about inequality, a provocative idea for sure. Hillsdale college had a worthy lecture posted earlier this month. Scott Winship talks about Intergenerational mobility as an interesting orthogonal concept (https://youtu.be/vDUhpaO1YCE?t=305) William Watson says in the same lecture "The question I was assigned 'Do we want income inequality', just so it's clear I don't care about inequality. What I want is fairness, or equity." (https://youtu.be/vDUhpaO1YCE?t=3131).

A classic one I like on the topic is Sowell's manna from heaven slant on income and its distribution...

Peter Robinson: Intellectuals and Society once again, “The very phrase income distribution is tendentious. Wealth can be created only after capital and labor have reconciled their competing claims and agreed to terms on which they can operate together in the production of wealth”. Income distribution, the very phrase is tendentious how come? Thomas Sowell: Income is not distributed, and newspapers are distributed. Social security checks are distributed and one time milk was distributed. Income is not distributed, people earn it directly from those for whom they provide some good or service. And, the argument made by many people you see, is that the, it’s a question of capital and labor have conflicting interests and dividing up the income. No, no, there is no income to divide up before they first reconcile their conflicting interest and decide on what terms they’re going to produce that income. There is no preexisting, there’s no manna from heaven for them to fight over.

10%-12% for the top 1%

and 1%-2% for the top .01%

graphs of % of income by 1% and .01%

https://youtu.be/d-6PusM9aks?t=32

graph of US gpd adjusted for inflation

http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/

It makes the results much more striking, even more at the top than the bottom, but not necessarily in a bad way. Raw percentiles aren't representative (e.g, knowing that the bottom 50% makes $50K and lower doesn't tell the full picture). I do think that using "median" rather than "average" would be better (though a bit trivial, median of "top 10%" is the raw 95th percentile). Also, by using "average" it is possible to match them directly to the "share of total wealth" numbers.

I also thought that "average of the bottom 50%" was a weird metric. Seems like using the 25th percentile would make more sense. And there could be a significant difference between that and the mean-of-the-lower-half.

Have you checked here? http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2

Not sure if that gets you what you are looking for.

Well, the three visualizations in the article all use Tableau Public, and you can download them yourself and play with the data.

Piketty's data for all countries is available here (does not include this latest batch yet): http://www.wid.world/

There is a link to it in the article: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/

Yeah, well the problem is that while Trump campaigned on change, the actual changes he plans to implement will just centralize wealth at the top even more.

America had a chance with Bernie, but due to some combination of media attention, Clinton's ambition, DNC's corruption, Russian interference, increasingly-polarized news, and the generally anti-socialist slant of American political discourse, they threw it away.

Bernie was the "fuck this, change everything" candidate that actually had the disenfranchised's needs at heart. Trump claims the same but doesn't substantiate it.

EDIT: And honestly, I don't think Bernie would have been able to accomplish much, or that Obama has done much objectionable. I get the sense that Obama actually wants to improve things for the middle class, but is realistic about what he can accomplish with Republican houses shutting him down at every turn simply because any policy that helps the middle class appears anti-capitalist (i.e. socialist) when capitalism is increasingly synonymous with centralization of wealth as efficiency grows.

EDIT Again: This whole "campaign for the poor but systematically serve only large businesses, then tell everyone that the democrats -- who actually systematically care about humans a little bit -- are the devil" thing is kind of the GOP's M.O., and, as an outsider, I think it's disgusting. Trump is only an exceptionally bad example because he amplifies some of the standard GOP stances while mixing in his own crazy brand of narcissism.

Republicans controlled Congress during most of Obama's presidency. Congress controls taxes, spending, and most money-related policies. In fact Republicans have been in control for the majority of the past few decades. It was their policies of cutting taxes, gutting government safety nets, "reforming" welfare, gutting banking regulations, and so on that have helped accelerate these trends.

Democrats lost election after election to them and so shifted their policies to match, hoping to chase votes.

Now we don't really have any populist politicians or political parties left.

It seems we are resigned to lurching from panic to panic with anemic growth until we hit the wall of another Great Depression. Then the pain will be so monumental that the 1%'s influence will be swept aside. What form things will take on the other side of that transition no one can say. I also wouldn't hazard a guess on how long it takes; The Panics of 1873, 1893, and 1907 didn't seem to teach anyone any lessons because they repeated the same anti-regulation low-tax "rah rah rah capitalism!" mistakes in the 1920s and triggered the Great Depression. In some ways you could say our systems worked too well to counter-balance the 2007 crisis; they prevented things from getting really bad and forcing change.

Trump's tax plan is more favorable to the wealthy than Hillary's

Do you think Trump is going to change that? Unless he is an idealist who can follow thorough and destroy his own fraternity. I have doubts.

No this article talks only about taxable income. Wealth inequality is far more important and for some reason nobody talks about it.

From that perspective neither mainstream candidate made any sense.

Trump planned to cut taxes bigly for the wealthy.

Clinton planned to raise taxes moderately for the wealthy, but supported globalization policies which created that wealth in the first place.

Not really. Globalism allowed management to get rich without having to share much or any of the pie with anyone else by outsourcing and shipping manufacturing to low-cost no-regulation jurisdictions.

Massively lower taxes reduced the redistribution effect, accelerating the accumulation of capital to the top.

A global capitalist economy can't survive 90% crushed labor, 9% upper-middle, and 1% who own almost everything. Those conditions eventually lead to revolution. Or rather it would be more accurate to say those conditions have historically led to unrest, collapse, and/or revolution.

Why would future generations feel any loyalty to their nation or this system if they're barely making ends meet while they watch billionaires cut their own taxes to make themselves richer and shift more of the burden of maintaining society on the poor and shrinking middle class?

None of this is good for the startup ecosystem. Fewer consumers with money to spend means less customers and less advertising targets. That's the problem with capital accumulating at the top: without customers there are fewer and fewer legitimate investments that have any yield so capital is forced to make increasingly reckless investments or do the equivalent of stuffing the money under a mattress. None of that is putting capital to useful work.

One of the points Piketty makes in his book is that the rich generally aren't the heroic creative geniuses of Ayn Rand's imagination.

Most wealth is inherited. Wealth grows faster than the economy at large. The rich get richer. They spend their money lobbying for lower tax rates, and they get them. They lobby for privatization, and they get them. They lobby for monopolies and patents and bailouts, and they get them.

Interesting to note that half the population are no richer than they were almost 50 years ago.