It's one thing to say that something might cause or correlate with a reduction in inequality, but I definitely wouldn't extend this to a claim about the wealthy having "more to lose" (with whatever political consequence could be gleaned from that, like an imagined greater competence or diligence from them in preventing collapse) or truly suffering more as a result in any human sense.
It can be technically correct that they have relatively more to lose in terms of a metric measured in dollars, but this is disconnected from a more important measure of real quality of life, where it is clear that they do not personally suffer nearly as much as any other social class from the same relative or absolute loss of money. I'm not saying that this is what anyone here was doing, but when I've seen elsewhere claims that they have "more to lose" or are "more negatively impacted" in the context of a broader political question it's usually in the same class of things wealthy-backed propagandists say to justify the existence an ultra-rich class (that they are "burdened" with risks or "the responsibility of leadership" or some other nonsense).
If you do look at it in strictly dollar-for-dollar terms, any reduction in gross income for the poor means a proportionally larger reduction or total elimination of their disposable income, while for the wealthy virtually the entirety of their after-tax income is disposable and can absorb nearly any plausible reduction short of becoming poor themselves. Even equal relative reductions between social classes aren't really equal in gross terms, as the wealthy person is likely paying some higher marginal tax rates, causing their loss of gross income to translates into a even lesser amount of actual dollar income lost.
But beyond the above, there are more important reasons for the loss of "real income" or quality of life for the rich being almost independent of their relative or absolute loss of money. For a truly wealthy person, a 50% reduction in income might mean flying first class on their weekend trips instead of chartering a jet, for instance. They're tapped out on any of the basic things that can improve a person's life, and would only be substituting extreme luxury for lesser luxury, and importantly the actual reduction or gain in happiness from this is nowhere near linear with the money spent or saved compared to the expenses everyone else deals with (which in my opinion is also a justification for equality as an intrinsic good from the perspective of democratic government, given the "demand-side" wastefulness of wealth concentration).
It's not just in personal spending, either. If a wealthy person (a person who can live off interest) does any useful work at all, that activity is itself functioning for them as another leisure activity or in service of their personal ego/greed; compare this with the total lack of financial security among most workers, who are dependent on the wealthy exercising political control over opportunities and the government in an arbitrary fashion that provides enough work (and never does in practice). This isn't even going into the numerous accumulated intangible advantages the rich have even when they do screw up badly enough to "lose everything", such as advantageous personal connections, wealthy family members, far better education opportunities, tax policies and liability limitations that are extremely generous to large losses, accumulated personal property immune from bankruptcy, the wild world of government bailouts, etc.
So while I do think there's a relevent point in there about inequality and the GFC or perhaps the pandemic, in real terms of how life is actually lived I don't think it's reasonable to say that the rich are going to be impacted more or suffer more from declines in the ultimately most important ways (especially given that economic disruption is always likely to spook the rich into withholding investment and suppressing demand, further creating permanent unemployment).
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4226685 times)