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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I may get in trouble for this but it's funny how what is effectively attempted wealth redistribution - I mean massive money printing and deficit spending - is actually having the opposite effect of creating massive inequality, where there are now all kinds or people for whom money is basically nothing, while there are others who still make basically what they did in the 90s. That is why I'm not a socialist, not because I don't believe in equality, but because government overreach always makes inequality worse.

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I think you misunderstood the point of all that spending. The goal was to keep things operating as they where not to somehow increase equality.

Most people got a trivial amount of cash just enough to limp through the worst of it often much worse than they started. Anyone that kept their job where basically forced to save as restaurants etc shut down. That’s what boosted the stock market, a giant influx of cash from regular people.

18 months of a small amount of cash is not a meaningful attempt at wealth redistribution.

And even that small amount was able to spur massive inequality. Or are you making the "we've never tried true communism" argument?

How is that "a small amount of cash"? I see comparisons all the time here on how absurdly high the net worth of Jeff Bezos is, but taking all of it wouldn't have even covered just the first round of the stimulus checks.

Jeff bezos’ net worth is a number that gets divided into 1

The stimulus program is divided into several hundred million and intended to help all of them

Just because they are both numbers representing money doesn’t mean they are comparable

People making less than $75000 a year received a grand total of $3000 over 18 months. Some of them received a few thousand in supplemantary unemployment benefits - during a period when they were not working. No, this isn't a huge amount of money for any person, certainly not anything that makes any microscopic dent in addressing inequality. That wasn't the point of the program.

No, but the net worth of the top 1.5 % could cover the first round of the stimulus checks 10 times over: https://www.statista.com/statistics/300482/us-high-net-worth...

Keep in mind that 1.5% is 5 million people, and that we've done a lot more than just the first round of the stimulus checks.

One guy couldn't cover 300 million stimulus checks? Amazing!

'Overreach' can only be defined in relative terms.

They squirm and recoil when you reveal the true plan. Careful.

That wasn't an attempt at wealth distribution lol. The Federal Reserve's corporate bond buying program was always to be bigger than stimulus checks and payment protection program. I was more so amused how PPP got all the headlines and watched neighbors turn on each other, while the corporate bond issuers move in silence.

It was in the CARES Act of 2020 and watching the corporate bond market closely, it's just a matter of reading comprehension.

Inequality in the US is far worse than any comparable country, i. e. Western Europe, Canada, NZ, etc. All those countries have higher taxes and would be considered to be more actively involved in the economy. Here’s a nice chart: https://images.app.goo.gl/WpcWjHghC5XTmYKn6.

It shows, among other things, that besides being too small overall, US tax policy does nothing to reduce inequality. That’s because it has seized to be a typical progressive tax regime.

Instead, the top 1 % pay lower rates than the middle class. And the top 0.1 %, in turn, pay less than the 1 %: https://images.app.goo.gl/seh6KtpZ2GbQcH2AA

None of those countries is socialist, by the way. The closest is probably East Germany until 1990.

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