Distribution of Wealth in America
TheKindCromang
1,463 Posts
The top one-hundredth of one percent (TOP 0.01%) make an average of $27 million per household.
The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us is $31,244.
What's going on here and why are people spending their time complaining there aren't enough tax cuts?
The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us is $31,244.
What's going on here and why are people spending their time complaining there aren't enough tax cuts?
Comments
More here
1) They don't understand how this inequality affects them. I don't blame them here because, in general, I think the impact of this inequality has been very poorly communicated, esp. by national leaders. It's largely been left up to media figures to make the case (i.e. documentarians, editorialists, etc.) but I don't think this has really gotten the message across as to why wealth inequality is something that Americans should be concerned about, let alone outraged. I think this reflects a rather major ideological victory.
2) They assume they'll be on the winning side of inequality (which, of course, they won't) and therefore, have little desire to challenge a system they believe will benefit them, however erroneous that assumption may be.
I will say, since the recession hit, I think there has been a shift. Class inequality used to rank relatively low in terms of what my students were concerned about (obesity used to be easily be #1) but now it's risen to #4, and general concerns around the economy (including unemployment, poverty, etc.) is #1, followed by racial and gender inequality. So it does seem like there's a gradual change towards more awareness and concern over class inequality.
This is a huge point right here.
This book pretty much nails down what is behind this perception, and why people continually vote against their interests:
^^^^^^
this.right.here
my dude on FB just hipped me to this Vanity Fair article about this exact topic of the thread. interesting read.
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105?currentPage=all&wpisrc=nl_wonk
WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION
SOCIALISM
I love this Warren Buffett quote: ???There???s class warfare, but it???s my class, the rich class, that???s making war, and we???re winning.???
He has the sense and decency to be disgusted by that, but there are a lot of rich people in this country who think that shrinking the middle class is a great idea. There's a strain in this culture that misses super-cheap labor. Call them neo-confederates or neo-feudalists, but they're mostly just assholes.
Or maybe the internet will fix it?
Either way America still rules.
This--in a major way. And I think it represents a pretty major ideological victory as well, just getting so many people to assume that they're gonna end up rich and therefore vote today as though they already are rich.
This.
...will never happen.
Look at the Royal Family in England. A huge percentage of the population there revere and identify with them even though their own lives could not be more different. Witness the anticipation of the upcoming wedding.
You can also look at any number of TV shows and magazines here. People love to idolize the rich even if they know, on some level, that they will never be one of them. This is one of the opiates of the masses, not a catalyst for revolution.
Zactly....
The "American Dream" is to be rich, and more recently, famous.
Even if it means spending your last dollar on a lottery ticket or revealing your shortcomings on Maury.
If you told the average citizen that the top 1% of our population earns 18% of the country's annual income and then asked them what percentage of the country's total income tax they thought this top 1% should pay, their answer would be 18% and not a penny less.
When they find out it's closer to 30% it doesn't jive with their basic concept of right and wrong.
And yeah, they all aspire to be one of the 1% income earners and wouldn't want to pay more than what they perceive as their "fair share" if they ever reached this near impossible goal.
If there is a better explanation than that, other than they're simply ignorant or dumb, I'd like to hear it.
A percentage of this country looks at the uber rich as greedy and evil.
A bigger percentage looks up to them as successful.
1) A sizeable middle class didn't evolve in America until the 1910s, so it's a rather new phenomenon in the country.
2) During the Great Depression they did studies of middle class families in Oakland and found one of their major concerns was maintaining their image because they did not want to look poor. Even during the worse economic times in recent American history then, the middle class were concerned about their position, and aspired upward rather than aligning with the working class and poor that they were closer to at the time.
3) The U.S. has the worst distribution of income in the industrial world. This too was a recent phenomenon. Basically government policy since the 1970s shaped the current situation.
January/February 2011 Foreign Affairs
REVIEW ESSAY
Why the Rich Are Getting Richer
American Politics and the Second Gilded Age
Robert C. Lieberman
Hacker and Pierson refreshingly break free from the conceit that skyrocketing inequality is a natural consequence of market forces and argue instead that it is the result of public policies that have concentrated and amplified the effects of the economic transformation and directed its gains exclusively toward the wealthy. Since the late 1970s, a number of important policy changes have tilted the economic playing field toward the rich. Congress has cut tax rates on high incomes repeatedly and has relaxed the tax treatment of capital gains and other investment income, resulting in windfall profits for the wealthiest Americans.
Labor policies have made it harder for unions to organize workers and provide a countervailing force to the growing power of business; corporate governance policies have enabled corporations to lavish extravagant pay on their top executives regardless of their companies' performance; and the deregulation of financial markets has allowed banks and other financial institutions to create ever more Byzantine financial instruments that further enrich wealthy managers and investors while exposing homeowners and pensioners to ruinous risks.
In some cases, these policy changes originated on Capitol Hill: the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, for example, and the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a repeal that dismantled the firewall between banks and investment companies and allowed the creation of powerful and reckless financial behemoths such as Citigroup, were approved by Congress, generally with bipartisan support. However, other policy shifts occurred gradually and imperceptibly.
Hacker and Pierson's second important point is that major policy shifts do not always happen in such obvious ways. Many of the policies that have facilitated the winner-take-all economy have just as often come about as a result of what Hacker and Pierson call "drift," which occurs when an enacted policy fails to keep up with changing circumstances and then falls short of, or even subverts, its intended goal. The American system of separated powers -- with its convoluted procedures and bizarre rules, such as vetoes and the filibuster -- is especially conducive to drift, particularly compared to more streamlined parliamentary systems in other countries that afford majorities relatively unimpeded dominance over the policymaking process. Policies in the United States, once made, tend to be hard to overturn or even to modify.
Sometimes drift occurs through simple neglect or inertia. An example is the phenomenon known as "bracket creep," the process by which prior to the indexing introduced in 1981, inflation pushed incomes into higher tax brackets. But Hacker and Pierson particularly zero in on instances of intentional policy drift, when policymakers deliberately sidestepped or resisted available policy alternatives that might have reduced inequality. Allowing corporate executives to be compensated with stock options is one such case; stock-option compensation tends to bend incentives toward the short-term maximization of share prices rather than planning for long-term growth. Consequently, such compensation has allowed top managers to capture jaw-dropping gains despite their companies' often dismal performances. The long-term cost of corporate failure is borne not by CEOs and their executive minions, of course, but by rank-and-file employees, who get laid off when companies need to cut costs and whose pension investments are wiped out when companies' stocks sink.
In the 1990s, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which regulates accounting practices, noticed this practice, correctly predicted the damage it would do to the economy, and then sought to curtail it. But Congress, spurred on by the lobbying efforts of major corporations, stopped the FASB in its tracks. As a result, Americans spent the 1990s and the first decade of this century living under 1970s accounting rules, which allowed top executives to more or less help themselves and, through the mutual back-scratching habits of corporate boards, help one another.
Similarly, labor law has failed to keep up with the times. Policymakers have repeatedly failed to enact reforms that would have accommodated new union-organizing techniques and empowered unions to counter the growing power of business to resist labor's demands. In this realm, the United States is running a twenty-first-century economy under 1940s rules. A clearheaded understanding of the power of drift in policymaking puts the Republican congressional minority during President Barack Obama's first two years in a fresh light. Obsessive obstructionism is not just a symptom of general crabbiness; it is a shrewd and sensible part of a larger strategy to enrich corporations while gutting long-standing protections for the middle class.
The dramatic growth of inequality, then, is the result not of the "natural" workings of the market but of four decades' worth of deliberate political choices. Hacker and Pierson amass a great deal of evidence for this proposition, which leads them to the crux of their argument: that not just the U.S. economy but also the entire U.S. political system has devolved into a winner-take-all sport. They portray American politics not as a democratic game of majority rule but rather as a field of "organized combat" -- a struggle to the death among competing organized groups seeking to influence the policymaking process. Moreover, they suggest, business and the wealthy have all but vanquished the middle class and have thus been able to dominate policymaking for the better part of 40 years with little opposition.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/67158?page=show
Agreed
What percentage of your graduating students this year do you think will wind up in the Middle Class or higher 5 years from now?
There are plenty of rich people who aren't greedy and evil.
Then there are rich people who would happily steal the last dime from a homeless guy, or who don't give a shit if people die in order to make them a few extra dollars.
People like Don Blankenship of Massey Mining, for example:
http://www.bnet.com/blog/clean-energy/what-mining-disaster-massey-ceo-blames-regulation-for-low-profits/3154
And this bastard:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/03/rand-paul-mine-safety-regulations-jobs/
Yeah, they're successful, but I'd say that anyone who "looks up" to pricks like them is severely defective.
Sure....there are evil assholes at every income level....but we've learned not to judge a class/race/group of people based on a lowest common denominator....or at least we've been taught not to.
Where such is concerned I'm mostly self-taught. And my knowledge of history tells me that rich people have an incredible ability to ignore whatever horrific things happen to the poor in any society.
Even a total atheist like me sees the wisdom in the biblical comment about rich men, camels, and the eye of a needle.
I don't think greedy, shitty rich people are the lowest common denominator among the rich. I think they're right smack in the mainstream in that particular group. And yes, so are incredibly generous people who do a lot of good.
I've known people of both sorts. I'm sure you have, too.
malthus, smith, etc.
Without leaping headlong into the class debate, I think this is a natural psychological reaction to the abstract realization that there are billions of humans on this planet, and a large portion of them are suffering in some way or another at this very moment. Which is not to say that it is positive, but more of an amoral self-preservation instinct.
THIS IS THE ANSWER. People's perception and stupidity.
Why are poor and middle class people voting republican unless their votes are 100% based on dumb social or religious beliefs? If people vote out of self-interest it makes no sense for those in the bottom tax bracket to vote for anyone in the GOP...especially in light of Ryan's proposed budget cuts.
The GOP is very good at twisting the concept of "limited government" so that these get-offa-my-lawn types think that the term can be universally applied as the ultimate problem solver.