The poverty line mentioned several times in the video and shown on the graph is completely arbitrary. Income disparity is meaningless. Instead, look at the standard of living of the poorest. The poor in the U.S. live a life today that only the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts lived 120 years ago. They have heat, running water, air conditioning, and they so much inexepensive food available to them they're obese. 25 years ago, only the top 1% had a mobile telephone, and today, I would bet that 75% of the poor have not just a mobile telephone, but a smartphone, that has the computing power of an IBM or Digital mini-computer in the year 1980.
The poor don't have wealtth because they live a destructive lifestyle. The rich are wealthy because they live a constructive lifestyle. That is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich continue to make good decisions, while the poor continue to make bad decisions. The best way to decrease the total wealth is to subsidize the bad decisions and penalize the good decisions. That way you get more of the former, and less of the latter.
Try this thought experiment. Family #1 makes $30,000; Family #2 makes $100,000. Let's suppose a family " needs" $35,000 to make it. The income disparity is $70,000. Now, let's magically triple everyone's income. Family #1 now makes $90,000; Family #2 now makes $300,000. If a family "needs" $35,000 to make it, which case is better?
I bet family #1 would rather have $90,000. They don't care what somebody else is making, they've got more than before. But the author of the video would be extremely unhappy with this change, because now the income disparity is $210,000. The disparity has grown, but is that something we should really care about? Is the first situation "more fair?"
When I was a kid, nobody flew on an airplane, and nobody took a vacation to Cancun. Rather, we got into the back seat of the station wagon, and drove 500 miles to our uncle's house, while my brothers and I beat on each other in a car that had no A/C. When we got there, we ran around the backyard with our cousins for a week, while the parents drank beer and threw burgers on the grill.
Nobody had 10 pairs of shoes. I had one pair of play shoes, and one pair of church shoes. And when the sole wore out, we used shoe goo to patch the bottoms. I wasn't poor, I was middle class, and everybody I knew did exactly the same thing.
Our poor people now live a livestyle that was unheard of just as little as 30 years ago. A yet we lament our present state of affairs, and say how unfair it is. Sit down one afternoon with your grandparents, or an elderly neighbor and ask them what life was like in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And really listen. You'll be shocked and amazed how tough life was, and that wasn't even the depression.
These videos really attempt to tweak the human tendancy to be jealous of those with more than we have. It's an implicit moral claim on the sweat of another man's brow, and to me it's disgustsing.
