A socioeconomic theory:

(Big shout-out to "Ishkur" at FARK.com for this - Spot-on, IMO)

I have a theory. A socio-economic theory. This theory explains all the crime, all the corruption, all the social and moral decay, all the ills and pitfalls in a system that plague us daily, from crooked cops to white collar criminals to homeless drug addicts on the street. I call it Ishkur's General Theory of Inequitable Distribution of Affluence.

It's a basic premise. In every system, there are rich people, and there are poor people. And there is a gap between these two. The wider this gap, the more problems you have. Everything evil, immoral, degrading, corrupt and criminal stems from the size of this gap. The smaller this gap, the better everything is.

Now, that doesn't mean the goal is to eliminate the gap completely. You can never get rid of the gap, and for economic prosperity's sake you don't want to get rid of it. That's socialism/communism, and it leads to stagnation, misery and despair. We've all been there. Likewise, you don't want the gap to get too large. That leads to feudalism, human property, and more misery and despair (except for a chosen few). We've all been there too.

The trick is to find a happy medium by which the rich can stay rich enough to foster investment, growth and employment, but not too rich that they suck up all the money and the poor are literally dying of starvation in the streets (see France, 1789).

Now, the poor: They may be poor, but they need to have money. In fact, poor people should be as well off as possible without driving up the prices of things. When Henry Ford built his first factories, he did something crazy: He paid his workers $8/day, which was an incredible amount of money in those days. His friends in the business sector were aghast, and threatened him to reduce the wages. They feared that he would drive up the median income of workers in all factories across the board, and that just didn't sit well with them. At the next business summit Ford calmly told them, "Gentlemen, if I do not pay my workers $8 a day, there will be no one with any money to buy my cars."

Henry Ford understood that poor people need money to buy the consumer crap the rich people hire them to make. So you want affluence on both sides of the divide, and only the way to do that is to have a really fat middle-class.

In economics, it doesn't matter who has the money or where it's going, so long as it keeps moving. The purpose of money is to change hands; it's supposed to be spent. When money is not spent, it stays in the same place and doesn't do anything useful or help anyone, and that's bad.

This is why supply-side economics (aka Reagonomics) was such an abject failure: The belief that if you give money to rich people, they will use it to build factories and hire labor and make everyone around them wealthy via a model insultingly referred to as "trickle-down". That didn't happen, for a number of reasons. For one thing, money does not create jobs -- demand for work creates jobs. If there is no work to be done, no employer will feel compelled to hire more labor no matter how much money he has (and besides, if the work is out there, no employer has ever not found the money to hire. Even if they are flat broke. They will take out loans, raise venture capital, apply for grants and subsidies, sell shares, or do whatever it takes to find the money to hire, but just giving it to them will not make the jobs magically appear). And secondly, none of it trickled down. Instead, the rich only spent it on each other, re-investing in their own companies, capitalizing in others, and driving the stock market through the stratosphere (contrary to popular belief, a roaring stock exchange is not entirely an indicator of overall economic health; it's only an indication of the wealth of its participants, who number comparatively few to the vast majority of Americans who have little to no net worth or savings to speak of). This widened the gap, which, according to Ishkur's General Theory of Inequitable Distribution of Affluence -- IGTIDA for short -- is bad.

When there's a lot of money at the top, that means there is less money at the bottom -- really the best place where money can do some good and make a difference. There is no change in a person's standard of living between 1 billion and 2 billion dollars. But the difference between $10,000 and $20,000 can completely change someone's station in life.

(and before you interject, yes, I know that wealth creation is not a zero-sum game, but it also doesn't exist in a vacuum either. If someone makes a lot of money really quickly, that means people elsewhere lost some money, especially after inflation sets in)

The truth is the poor in America don't have any money at all, and haven't had any for several decades or so. The rich solved this problem by lending out credit to the poor so they can continue consuming at their current rate, essentially replacing money with plastic, racking up record amounts of debt. This has been happening since the 80s, and it's going to collapse sooner or later (especially after the Boomers retire, en masse, within the next 10-15 years).

If you want to solve society's ills, stop crime, fix the economy and end corruption, one thing needs to be done: The rich must get poorer, and the poor must get richer. The gap must get smaller. I know that is never going to happen in America, though. Not without some torches and pitchforks.

Gap. Disparity. An inequitable distribution of affluence. The money is in one location for too long, and it is not moving. All problems stem from it."