21–30 of 105 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a rather simplistic analysis of why poor people often vote republican in the USA. Ironically, I just visited Gothenburg in "socialist Sweden", and it was the most racially/poverty segregated city I have ever been to in the modern world.
To be fair, Sweden has only recently started becoming multicultural, so they might need some time to learn how to handle it fairly.
It's not a bad article, but it makes the same observations about opportunity we've read about a thousand times before. The article mostly describes the status quo, but doesn't say much about the root causes or about possible solutions. Maybe the full book is better, but I doubt it. The author doesn't strike me as a person with deep insights. One sentence from the article really sticks out: "The American ideal of a cl…
He may (or may not) be contradicting himself, but the argument isn't wrong. By hoarding wealth, the richest prevent their own wealth from growing (out of risk aversion and greed), and they end up either voluntarily transferring wealth or it's taken from them by an angry underclass. You can see why (after the fact), they would've preferred the former. Posted this yesterday but Acemoglu and Robinson's Economic Origins…
For households without kids it wouldn't be egregious to have the ability to make 529 size contributions to Roth-IRA.
"Race played a significant role here, with whites reacting (almost entirely incorrectly) to a sense that Americans of color were overtaking them." I suppose that 'almost' is there to exclude population numbers, what with whites projected to become a minority by 2050 (in the US - the white population is pretty small on a global scale, at ~8%).
To Europeans the whole US "white" thing is ludicrous. Americans count Hispanics as non-White, and while a good percentage of them are probably mixed, a big group are definitely what we'd call "white". You guys would go to Spain and Italy and call locals "Hispanics", based on your definition, while no German (for example) would ever do that.
It is only natural that the people in possession of resources are reluctant to share them; that is also the case in most countries, in my experience. The weird thing about the U.S. is that so many below-median-income folks are right-wing -- the very ones that would benefit from increased wealth distribution. I guess part of the explanation comes from the mirage that is The American Dream. In some sense a lot of us To…
These are not rich oligarch industrialists at all.
If your total household income, husband and wife together, is $112k, you're middle class in most of the country. In some areas like the Bay and Manhattan, you're lower middle class. You generally don't have access to subsidized rent and you don't get subsidies for health care.
Making people at this level earn less so everyone will be more equal just means more fall into poverty.
A better solution is to focus on returning skilled high pay jobs to the US in order to get more people into higher brackets.
> Income growth has not been uniform within the top fifth, of course: a third of the income rise went to the top 1 percent alone. But that still left $2.7 trillion for the 19 percent just beneath them.
2.7e12/326.e6*.19 = $1574 increase each on average. For the income range discussed, this is just barely keeping up with the rate of inflation.
I liked much of what the author had to say, but claiming that America has a more rigid class structure than a nation with a hereditary monarchy seems like a stretch.
"Race played a significant role here, with whites reacting (almost entirely incorrectly) to a sense that Americans of color were overtaking them." I suppose that 'almost' is there to exclude population numbers, what with whites projected to become a minority by 2050 (in the US - the white population is pretty small on a global scale, at ~8%).
We're all mongrels: http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm More to the point: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/opinion/the-myth-of-a-whi...
That being said, you also are likely to pay more taxes both nominally and proportionally if you are benefiting from a 529 deduction - so when you take the revenue side of the equation into account the proposition looks a lot less lopsided...
It's not a bad article, but it makes the same observations about opportunity we've read about a thousand times before. The article mostly describes the status quo, but doesn't say much about the root causes or about possible solutions. Maybe the full book is better, but I doubt it. The author doesn't strike me as a person with deep insights. One sentence from the article really sticks out: "The American ideal of a cl…
He may (or may not) be contradicting himself, but the argument isn't wrong. By hoarding wealth, the richest prevent their own wealth from growing (out of risk aversion and greed), and they end up either voluntarily transferring wealth or it's taken from them by an angry underclass. You can see why (after the fact), they would've preferred the former. Posted this yesterday but Acemoglu and Robinson's Economic Origins…
Spreading the wealth helps everyone from a Rawlsian perspective. But if you're already rich you have nothing to gain from redistribution. If civil unrest starts brewing you can easily skip the country and wait for the storm to pass.
> the US has those differences hidden
Taxi drivers have missing teeth. There is nothing hidden about this. It's in plain sight. Just like the homeless in every city asking if you can spare a dollar. Just like the ostentatious displays of wealth in the "right" neighborhoods. It's impossible not to see this, unless you're a clueless dummy isolated by privilege.