alt Hacker NewsBut, again, the gap between the poor and the wealthy is irrelevant. Income inequality doesn't describe what's best for the most. If more income inequality produces a better outcome for the majority, it becomes very difficult to argue income inequality is, itself, bad. While the GINI index has certainly increased over the last fifty years in the US, real median household income and real personal consumption expenditures have too, all while poverty rates have substantially declined. It is exceedingly difficult to argue by any objective metric that rising income inequality has handicapped median standard of living.
We see similar trends around the world. In fact, the countries that have struggled the most with stagnating standards of living are precisely those that have most aggressively imposed redistributionist policies.
Income inequality with rising standards of living for the median is only bad if your politics are driven by envy.
It's not irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant when the same arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. People want to fairly compensated: the premise of "a day's pay for a day's work" is based on it. If the idle rich are vacuuming up profits that properly belong to the working class, you're asking for a revolution. There is absolutely nothing to suggest a causal relationship between massive wealth in the upper classes and any benefit for the rest of society. last time that happened in the US, the robber barons and Wall Street class nearly brought down the world economy.