dreaming of gini

I do believe that radio was considered the opiate of the people back in the day, and I have some early memories of sitting in the living room staring at this chest of drawers sized radio and listening to programs, Our Baby Snooks and The Green Lantern come to mind.  There used to be, and surely there are now, with all this internet and cable radio stations going around, stations that aired these old shows.  The Lone Ranger, Beagles' show that showed him right from wrong was prominent among those old radio shows.

I agree with Old Dog they were pretty good, not great but good in the way that tv can sometimes be good.  And I know that tv has come a long way since everybody sat down at 8:30 PM of a Wednesday and watched I Remember Mama, but in general it is pretty crappy (a lot of what goes by the name of progress is just more of the same old shit, just faster and faster), and I just want  something to watch with half an eye while I fiddle with the computer before dropping off to sleep.


It took about fifteen seconds of grueling internet research to reveal that what I am thinking of as income inequality is the gini coefficient.  1 is where one guy has everything and 0 is where everybody has the same amount.  I just went to wiki (where by the way I contributed five bucks yesterday because it is an essential research arm of Beaglestonia) and this gini thing is a lot more complicated than I thought it was, but the essential feature is the statistical distribution of wealth.

 I guess in my perfect world the gini would be zero.  We are all created equal and all that crap.  Of course we would never get there the same as we will never end poverty, or drug addiction, or terrorism, but it's a nice thing to work towards, nicer to see the poor man in a tidy cottage and the rich man in a mansion on the hill, than to see the poor man in a ditch and the rich man in a Disneyland castle.  I don't mind, or more properly, I don't see how anything can be done about, individual discrepancies, just how the whole thing balances out.


We all know that the gini index is inching towards zero, and I think everybody except the one percent (soon to be the tenth of a percent) thinks it is a bad thing.  But is it the government's job to do something about it?  Everybody thinks it is the governments job to do something like fight drug addiction, but nobody thinks it is the government's job to stop Hollywood from making those stoopid romcoms.  It seems to me that libertarians would think it is none of the gummint's business whereas those meddling democrats would think it is.


I guess my main tool to lower the gini would be a sharply graduated income tax.  The kind that those conservative pols used to promote, but have gotten out of the habit, that you could do on a postcard, except theirs was a flat tax, and mine would be a soak the rich tax and all income would be counted  Okay that will never happen, but I thought I'd throw it out there if just for an example.

I don't quite get the reasoning behind the social credit, but it doesn't sound that dissimilar from the earned income credit that we have now.  During my McGovern days there was something called the negative income tax which went something like everything you made above say, 25Gs the gummint would take a cut of, but if you made less than that the gummint would give you enough to raise your income to 25Gs.

Everybody says they want a job but mostly what they mean is they want a salary.  As automation continues to steal jobs, we need to have something to pay people for.  How about for, ahem, blogging?  Tweeting your private parts (Just saw Wiener, great doc)?  Posting cat videos on YouTube?  Maybe the internet, the current opiate, can get us through modern times, much like that previous opiate got us through the dark ages.