Wealth Redistribution? Who gains? Who loses?
When the rich do it, they tell us they earned it.
But, in fact, the 2008 economic crisis was wealth distribution to the top. Although some banks "failed" at least on paper, that was a direct transfer of wealth from certain homeowners, especially those who had equity in their homes until the homes fell below market value due to the crash and those who had equity but lost their jobs or became ill and temporarily could not pay their mortgages. The banks really made out on that one. They resold the houses and sold new mortgages that will pay them handsomely what they really want which is not repayment of the cost of the house but the ongoing payments of interest on the loan. Redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the rich bankers (and I agree that not all bankers are rich).
The importation of goods made with cheap labor overseas that allows the very rich to skim profits of the sales before the products enter the US and deposit those profits in low-tax banking havens around the world is also wealth redistribution to the top. (Avoiding paying a fair share of the infrastructure costs of the production and sale of the products from the profits made on those products.)
Exploiting the desperate laborers who are left unemployed by your (not you personally, NYC Liberal) outsourcing and importing and harboring of profits in tax havens overseas to work for cheap in your pizza joint and sell food with no nutritional value and maybe even containing synthetic junk is also wealth redistribution to the top and the poisoning of everyone.
Exploiting the precious, limited resources of the earth as quickly and as carelessly as you can, pocketing the profits and hiding it in tax havens around the world -- also redistribution of the wealth of the earth to the rich.
And now, the rich are trying to redistribute even the pennies it costs to educate children to themselves.
Making an honest living, living better than your neighbors because you created something that makes the lives of your neighbors better? No one resents that. That is not unfair wealth redistribution.
Fast-trading on the stock or commodities market and getting yourself plugged in to that market so that you can trade the stock or commodity that someone on a farm in the Midwest has just indicated an interest in so that you make pennies off that and other similar farmers is like playing an old swindlers' game " Under which cup is the bean." That is wealth redistribution to the rich.
Oh! And profiting from the sale of addictive substances? Beer, wine, whiskey, cigarettes, cocaine, heroine -- that is wealth distribution. And laundering the money from those sales when the products are illegal -- very definitely wealth redistribution.
So wealth redistribution happens all the time. And we do not hear the rich complain about it.
Only if the wealth is being distributed to the hungry, the unemployed and the sick do we hear complaints about wealth redistribution.
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