U.S. Tops Developed World in Income Inequality
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There’s income inequality, and then there’s the United States. New research shows that within the developed world, no nation has seen the income share of the top 1 percent grow faster over the past three decades than the United States.
To qualify for the elite status of 1 percent in annual income, an individual makes somewhere in the mid-$300,000s per year (or way more, like Mitt!).
(H/t to the Institute for Policy Studies.)
Growing Inquality = A Less Healthy Nation
There’s income inquality and then there’s total net worth inequality. Both are large, and growing, but a New York Times analysis of Federal Reserve data shows the gaping gulf in net worth between the 1 percent and the rest of us.
To qualify for the elite status of 1 percent in annual income, an individual makes somewhere in the mid-$300,000s per year (or way more like Mitt!). For net worth, the 1 percent threshold for net worth in the Fed data was nearly $8.4 million, or 69 times the median household’s net holdings of $121,000. (Because he’s worth roughly $250 million, Mitt Romney has no trouble fitting into the 1 percent in either category.)
Loads of cash, the study found, not only results in personal yachts, fourth and fifth homes and multiple cars with drivers, but in better health.
About 90 percent of the 1 percenters describe themselves as being in excellent or good health, compared with 75 percent of everybody else. About 85 percent expect to live into their 80s, compared with 68 percent of everybody else.
The rich are different from you and me–they live long, health lives because they can afford them.
Warren Buffett Calls Republicans’ Bluff on Taxes
Billionaire Warren Buffett is a thorn in the side of Republicans. This pillar of the capitalist community and CEO of the corporate conglomerate Berkshire Hathway, continues to press Congress to raise taxes wealthy people like him. When congressional Republicans answered him by proposing a voluntary check-off box on tax-filing forms for people who want to pay more taxes, Buffet threw down a gauntlet. He’d happily match the voluntary tax contributions made by GOP lawmakers, he said — and he’d even triple-match those made by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Speaking with Time magazine’s Rana Foroohar, Buffett said (with a chuckle, according to the reporter):
It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that [the deficit] can’t be solved by voluntary contributions.
Buffet made waves in August when, in a New York Times op-ed piece, he repeated Read the rest of this entry »
Far-Sighted Policies Can Fight Growing Income Inequality
The growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is not just a problem in the United States. Over the past two decades income inequality has soared around the world. But a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) says if nations make the right policy decisions, income inequality is not inevitable and can be reversed.
At a forum today at AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., John Martin, OECD Director of Employment, Labor and Social Affairs; AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, chairman of the Trade Union Advisory Council to the OECD; and Charles Heeter, chairman of the Business Advisory Council to the OECD, discussed the report and how to close the widening income gap.
The report looked at income inequality in all 34 OECD nations and found that the United States had the second largest increase between 1985 and 2008. Mexico led in the growth of income inequality. In addition, the United States led all nations in the growth of the share of a nation’s income that went to the top 1 percent.
While Trumka praised the OCED for focusing on income inequality, he said the report ignored an important aspect of the growing gap between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, “the dramatic shift in bargaining power between workers and their employers since the 1970s.”
I think the OECD’s work on inequality would be strengthened by a more explicit treatment of power and the policies that have diminished the bargaining power of workers. Read the rest of this entry »
Addressing Income Inequality Is a Global Task
The following is by John August, executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions. Read the full version of his column at L&M Partnership.
Many of us are pleased that the Occupy movement resonates with so many. While not everyone is prepared to join one of the hundreds of encampments that have grown around the country over the past two months, it is not uncommon for mainstream media to recognize that they are articulating widespread public discontent. From MSNBC to the New York Times to many local and online outlets, the media recognize that dominant themes of Occupy—income inequality and the need for good jobs—have become very popular themes.
Just read Paul Krugman in the New York Times every few days, and he lays it out: almost all the wealth created in the United States over the past 30 years has gone to the top 10 percent, with even more going to the top 1 percent, and yet more going to the top one-tenth of one percent. What was once dismissed as the rhetoric of “class warfare” by the mainstream is, today, impossible to avoid. Read the rest of this entry »
U.S. Workers Earned Less in 2009 Than in 2008
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Looks like Santa is bringing a lump of something to working families, and it isn’t a fatter paycheck.
New data show America’s workers earned less in 2009 than in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compensation was down by 3.2 percent in 2009 with declines in construction and manufacturing fueling the plunge. St. Louis County, the hardest hit, saw a decline of 11.5 percent. Read the rest of this entry »
U.S. Income Inequality Grows—Public Thinks It’s Not So Big
While the 1930s Depression raged and breadlines stretched for blocks in city after city, a poll found that the majority of the American public nevertheless identified themselves as “middle class.”
Uh, no.
But the myth of income equality, or near equality, persists even today.
This morning, the U.S. Census Bureau released data showing the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record. The top-earning 20 percent received more than 49 percent of all income generated in the country in 2009. The income gap has nearly doubled since 1968 and the United States now has the greatest income disparity among Western industrialized nations.
Public Backs Ending Tax Cuts for Rich, and More
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Note to lawmakers: It’s the economy, stupid.
Most Americans support ending Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. A new CBS News poll finds that a majority of Americans, 56 percent, say the tax cuts for the wealthy should expire for households earning more than $250,000 per year, as Democrats have proposed. Thirty-six percent of Americans say they should not be allowed to expire.
Lower GDP offers more reason for Congress to act. Jeff Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) outlines the ramifications behind today’s revisions to estimates of gross domestic product (GDP). The new data revised the GDP downward for the second quarter to 1.6 percent from an initial estimate of 2.4 percent. Bivens says this downward revision shows
without the stream of spending provided by the Recovery Act, the economy would have contracted outright. This is most troubling, as Recovery Act money is almost spent and will provide no boost to growth going forward. The case for more action from policymakers to support the recovery and return the job-market to health is now overwhelming.
The Assault on Public Employees
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In this cross-post from the Huffington Post and Seminal, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee writes that attacks focusing on public employees are misdirected: the real culprits for the nation’s economic mess are Big Banks and Wall Street.
For more than a generation, America’s working families have been under a constant assault from the CEO’s and extraordinarily wealthy members of our society. While median incomes in the U.S. have stagnated since the mid-1970′s, incomes for those in the top five percent have more than doubled. Since the beginning of our new century—and aided by record-breaking tax cuts—incomes for the top 1 percent have tripled, while working families scrape by, working harder and longer and taking home less than they deserve in pay and benefits.
Wage Gap Between Women and Men Bad, Women of Color Suffer Most
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The pay gap between female and male workers in this country got a hearing in a Senate committee yesterday. But you wouldn’t even know the hearing happened: The issue apparently doesn’t rank up there with the antics of drunk superstars or foolish golfers to get attention by the corporate media.
Right now, U.S. working women receive 77 cents for every dollar paid to a male worker. The ratio has remained nearly unchanged for years. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) has been pushing for more than a decade to pass a paycheck fairness bill, and yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee held a hearing on the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 12/S. 182).
