A sickening world we live in

I skim read the following article:

Call for new taxes on super-rich after 1% pocket two-thirds of all new wealth

What a sickening immoral world we inhabit.  Even in a rich country like the UK a sizable percentage of the population are going cold or hungry.. or both.  I find it absolutely unacceptable.

The Government says the UK has run out of money, so they can't just keep helping people. But we need to bear in mind that the top 1% have the same wealth as the bottom 60% of the population. The bottom 50% of the population has only got about 7% of all the wealth etc.

So there's plenty of money, it's just that successive Governments (especially Tory ones) consider the wealth of the rich and comfortably off as somehow being sacrosanct, so we cannot redistribute wealth at all in order to have a slightly less inequitable society.

For this reason I cannot have any sympathy when the Government and others claim that there's no money. This is false, there's a vast amount of wealth, it's just a small percentage of people hoarding it all.

Rishi Sunak (the UK chancellor) and his excuses

Rishi Sunak, regarding the UK's current cost of living crisis, has been reported as saying.

[T]he toughest part of this job is not being able to do everything that people would like you to do because we’re already borrowing quite a large amount of money, and I don’t think borrowing lots more would be sensible.

Why does he imagine he needs to borrow?  There's plenty of money out there.

The top 1% of the UK's population has the same wealth as the bottom 60% combined (i.e most of us).

The top 10% have almost half of all wealth (something like 47%).

In stark contrast, the bottom 50% of the UK's population have about 7% of all wealth (so the top 50% have 93% of all wealth).

I therefore simply have no sympathy for this "we have no money" line or references to "magic money trees".  This is an emergency. He is morally obligated to make the distribution of wealth ever so slightly more equitable so that people don't go hungry or cold (and sometimes both).

Absolute wealth or relative wealth

Jus' thinking. Which would people prefer:

a) To get paid £100,000 a year for a specific job whilst everyone else earned £50,000 a year.

b) To get paid £200,000 a year for a specific job whilst everyone else earned £400,000 a year.

I think people would tend to say "b", but in reality would feel happier with "a".

To be better off than others gives people satisfaction, but to earn less than everyone else is not good for one's self esteem. Of course, ideally, we ought to be solely interested in our absolute wealth.

Becoming rich is largely a matter of luck

Just read the following webpage:

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.

I think people have no idea how much our lives are ruled by randomness. One may often need certain qualities to become rich, but out of all these people who have such qualities, only a small percentage of them will become rich, and that through sheer luck.

Inequality in the USA.

People in the USA who are more wealthy than between 80-90% of the rest of the population are roughly as well off as they would be if all the wealth were distributed uniformly. So I find it curious that so many people belligerently defend this state of affairs. What does this tell us about their intelligence and morality?

England where I live is pretty bad, but not quite as bad as the USA.