Australia Has Made Great Progress In Solving The Inequality Problem

I started life in very humble circumstances. I lived years of my life in poverty. Now, I am doing all right. The question always haunts me: "How do we solve the problem of inequality?" Star Trek and Elon Musk see a world coming with so much plenty that money will not even be necessary. The Australian government decided not to wait. They developed an innovative and "think outside the box" solution. They did not confiscate money or property from the rich. They did not create social disruption and unrest. Here was their solution that works brilliantly: The idea is not just to break up the concentration of wealth at the top but to build it from below. The best way to fight inequality in the age of AI is to spread the equity around. How would sharing wealth work? The appropriate model is Australia’s superannuation system, which was passed into law in 1992 under former Labor prime minister Paul Keating. As he explains it, thanks to deregulation, tax cuts and labour bargaining by enterprises instead of industry, productivity grew by 2 per cent. To capture and build on the wealth created by that growth instead of just dispensing it as income for consumption, he instituted a savings plan in which employers and employees would contribute 2 per cent of payroll to a fund which would be widely invested across markets to earn compounding returns for retirement as a supplement to basic pensions. In the ensuing decades, the system has grown in value to $3.2tn, greater than the GDP of Australia. As a result, the average wealth of voting-age Australian adults today is among the highest in the world at about $600,000. This is a start. We need to expand on this a lot! Be careful out there! Stay "Far from the madding crowd." Amo-a, -JackW