How does income and wealth inequality play into this? I think it is a symptom of our greed. If we chose to live humbly we would have little need for greater and greater sums of money. We would stockpile less of it and give more away in order to make a difference. As employers, we would love our employees as ourselves and pay them better wages. But we don’t. Because we’ve bought into the greed of the American dream.
Let me take a few minutes to show you the problem I’m talking about.

While I do believe wealth inequality is an issue, the generator of that inequality is income inequality. The wealth a person has was at one point income and so enters the equation as income inequality. Government has little near-term incentive (and therefore no will) to do anything about this issue of income inequality. Those who lobby are large organizations that don’t care. Individual large donors to political campaigns are rich and don’t care about fixing inequality, in fact they like and benefit enormously from the status quo. The tax code has so many loopholes for write offs. And the tax rate for long-term capital gains (investments held longer than a year) is only 15%. When you bear in mind that the beneficiaries of this rule exceed the social security maximum and don’t pay it and despite making vast sums of money more than the middle class, are taxed on those investments less than you are on your income. You are likely in the 10% bracket plus you pay social security and Medicare, another 7.65%, for a total of 17.65% on each additional dollar you earn. The guy (and he probably is a guy) that makes hundreds of thousands if not millions, is going to only pay 15% on his capital gains. I say this simply to make you aware that our nation’s and all other nations’ rules are designed to benefit the rich. The rich are in power – of course the rules benefit them. When it comes down to it, government will not fix this. Those in power benefit from our tax code far too much. It is our job as Jesus’ disciples to make the difference we desire to see in the world.