Do Most Americans Favor Radical Wealth Redistribution?
dailyfinance.com
dailyfinance.com
Wealth redistribution amounts to the government taking money away from people that earned it through hard work and giving it to people that may or may not deserve it.
Sweden might be a great place for some, but it sucks when you actually want to start a company or do something against the status quo.
How many lottery winners are there in this world? not many. Does the lottery winner deserve it? Yes. They gambled with their money and won. This is an example of pure luck.
Does a Rich man's kid deserve it? Yes. Because someone in his family (grandfather, father, etc) put the hard work into starting or continuing a business.
"and those laws are currently skewing wealth distribution in a way that has nothing to do with merit."
I see. So, instead of providing for your own future generations with your wealth, it's better to "redistribute" it to complete strangers who really don't deserve it. This is even worse than any of our current systems because it's not based on anything. Money is just taken from the wealthy and given to the poor. It's out right theft.
"There is nothing wrong with adjusting those laws to distribute wealth more widely and give more skilled people an opportunity to build on what we as a society have achieved."
How are the current laws preventing any skilled worker an opportunity for success? The only laws I see preventing success are the restrictions and taxes imposed on new businesses. As an example, in Michigan (and a few other states), businesses are taxes on their gross rather than their net income.
"Hard work will make you a decent living, but beyond that you need a significant amount of luck."
I hate this line of thinking the most. It's used as an excuse for laziness and a way to cut down successful people.
There are opportunities all around us (the luck). Without skill, most people won't have any idea what do or how to capitalize on them. Most people also aren't willing to put the amount of work it actually takes to be successful. Success takes sacrifice.
Commenting here - there's two biases they're missing. The first is the "middle choice" bias. If you give people three options: "Do you prefer nothing, a medium amount, or a large amount?" overwhelmingly the middle will be chosen. That's before getting into the merits - when you give someone uneducated on a topic a choice, intuition defaults to the middle.
Second is the word "distribution" - wealth isn't actually distributed. It's built, mined, manufactured, planted, harvested, bartered, bought, sold, negotiated, renovated, cleaned, transported, traded, invented, shipped, developed, and many more things. But it's not distributed. The word itself is flawed, though unfortunately, the most obvious other way to describe is also flawed. ("Should people who honestly build and create wealth be allowed to keep it or have it taken from them by force?" is biased in the other direction) But regardless of questions on framing a debate and choice of words, I doubt this sort of post is going to lead to a good discussion. Someone in favor of mandatory-wealth-moving-aroundedness is going to reply that distribution is a fine choice of word. Someone against is going to reply no it isn't, and taking-by-force is an accurate description. In the end, no one's mind will be changed, and we'll have learned nothing new or interesting.
To clarify: imagine a society where everyone makes the exact same income up until retirement (50 years in the workforce), and everyone saves the same percentage of their income each year in a personal retirement fund. Assume also that retirees spend their assets down to zero by death in a linear way. In this society with perfectly even income distribution, wealth by quintile will be as follows:
Top quintile (40+ years working, or newly retired): 36%
Second quintile: 28%
Middle quintile: 20%
Fourth quintile: 12%
Bottom quintile (<10 years working): 4%