[tracerbulletx]

The premise of this article is absolutely disgusting. The inequality that matters isn't the difference between blue collar workers and college grads with marketing and tech jobs. This is just propaganda to destroy the middle class.

[DoughnutHole]

Why is idea of decreasing inequality between the lower and middle classes so offensive? This isn't a zero-sum game.

The college-educated middle class aren't losing anything here - their wages went up too.

All that's happening is that the wages of low income workers increased more.

This is great if you actually care about the quality of life of low income people. The difference between middle class people like me and the lower class in terms of the meeting of basic needs (food, health, education, housing) is enormous - far bigger than the gulf in quality of life between me and Jeff Bezos. I don't have a crippling yacht addiction I desperately need to deal with.

[danaris]

The problem isn't "trying to decrease the inequality between lower and middle classes".

It's painting the middle classes as the source of the inequality. That's what leads to the zero-sum thinking that lets the upper classes sit back and laugh while we fight.

Was the purpose of this article to paint that picture? Hard to say. But when you read a lot about smug Silicon Valley programmers and their six-figure salaries and how different that is from the poor people who have to root through their garbage (whoops, no, they made that illegal), and rather less about the very unsexy carried interest loophole and other means by which the billionaires of the world grow and maintain their wealth, the intention behind that disparity becomes less important than the impact.

[PKop]

Matters to you because you wouldn't be harmed by it?

All egalitarian, equality doctrines will end up here, why wouldn't they? What is the limiting principle?

This is why they should be rejected. Pretty funny to see the outrage when the equalizing starts moving down the spectrum. Why shouldn't that blue collar worker want you to be equalized to him, why should he care about your disgust?

[femiagbabiaka]

Matters because it is nonsensical. There are some cases, such as AI research contributing to automation that replaces workers from one industry with another, or perhaps more directly, Uber replacing taxi workers, where income can be envisioned to be taken from one set of workers pockets to another.

But in reality, that's not how this works. Each company is distinct and has its own funding models. And the vast majority of money taken out of all workers paychecks regardless of industry isn't extracted by other workers in unrelated industries, it's removed by the employers to line their own pockets.

[heavyset_go]

I think you're mistaken here, blue collar workers and white collar workers are in the same boat when it comes to the precarity of their means of providing for themselves and the relations they have with the entities that dole out those means.

Division is what I interpreted as what elicits disgust here, when workers of all stripes would be stronger if they instead were united.

The scraps that are thrown to blue and white collar workers alike pale in comparison to the wealth disparity of those who need to work as a whole versus who they must work for.

[esolyt]

It doesn't matter because it's tiny.

The inequality between a Google engineer and a Starbucks barista is tiny compared to the inequality between a Google engineer and Elon Musk.

The article only covers the former and not the latter and therefore acts as the kind of propaganda expected by WSJ. In the author's defense, they admit they're focusing on one narrow benchmark and ignoring capital gains and dividends in this article. The article still has value. But the fact remains that the article has the word inequality in its title and completely fails to cover inequality in its actual sense, the way we understand it in a political context.

[lp4vn]

You know, in the last years I started to believe that this kind of article is pure clickbait striving to elicit a reaction from the reader.