| sundin13 said: I agree that politics was dominated by conservative economics from about Reagan to Trump pt. 1. I think we started seeing a bit of a shift during the Obama era, but it wasn't significantly felt in broader economic policy. I think we really started seeing the change in economic philosophy during that first Trump term and it was felt in policy in Biden's term (I think everyone would likely agree that Biden's presidency in 2022, looked a lot different from what a Biden presidency would have looked like in 2010). That said, I think reducing everything down to the GINI Index is simplifying things much too far. There is far more nuance to these discussions than one number can demonstrate. |
Maybe. But going into details you will find examples that point in many different directions. Because real politics is messy and there are many different people with many different backgrounds, that are affected in different ways by policies.
What the Gini-index demonstrates is, that neither democrats nor republicans are willing to do substantial changes, only superficial ones. That is since Reagan/Bush, because they clearly enabled policies that redistributed wealth towards the rich and increased inequalities. What we can see, that Clinton accepted that change and the democrats after as well. Only superficial changes were enacted. If something would've cut deeper, that would've impacted the Gini-index. Nothing did.
That is because the democrats are also a neoliberal party that is afraid to anger big corporations. Rolling back the changes Reagan did would anger some companies, because what the Gini-index expresses, that wealth floats towards big global corporations (and the people owning them). The democrats will not piss off Google.
To bring it back to racism: minorities are often on the lower side of the wealth inequality. Sure there are rich non-white people, but the distribution is that the curve for non-whites will trend more towards the lower wealth than for whites. So reforms that fix general inequality expressed by the Gini-index would proportionally help more people in minority population, but not exclusively. So: affordable health care for everyone, proper workers rights for everyone, better free public education, free or affordable and good public transport - all that would help the working class and minorities. But as the Gini-index showed it didn't happen. Even under democrats.
