US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
nytimes.com
US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
1–10 of 106 posts
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#2Real title was, 'Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart'.
Despite some of the recent coverage, this chart indicates that gains are not going to the top 20%: they are going to top 1%, and particularly To be clear, this is not many programmers: "In 1980, the top 1% of adult earners in the U.S. made $420,000 a year, on average (before taxes and measured in 2014 dollars) — 27 times as much as the average for the bottom 50% of earners. Today the top 1% of earners make an average of $1.3 million a year — 81 times as much as the average for workers in the bottom half."
HBR also found that gains are increasingly going to the top firms: there is a global set of winners and losers. Inequality is growing everywhere, in all fields. https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/03/corporations-in-the-age-...
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#3It's an interesting question. Most of peoples incomes are rising, it's just whose incomes are rising more than others. Is that still fair?
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#4A great book on income inequality for those interested is Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland.
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#5"Most Americans would look at these charts and conclude that inequality is out of control. The president, on the other hand, seems to think that inequality isn’t big enough."
Would nobody else reading this want some further information to back up this statement? Its a shame it wasn't nearer the beginning of the article as I could have stopped reading earlier.
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#6If everyone gets 2x as much tomorrow as today, income inequality rises.
Ask people if they would support everyone getting 2x their income tomorrow.
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#7It's an interesting question. Most of peoples incomes are rising, it's just whose incomes are rising more than others. Is that still fair?
Economists don't generally buy the buy idea that you can make some people better off without making others worse off.
In short, if all the gains happen for one group, even if the other group isn't directly losing money, their purchasing power will be eroded by the rich. And I'll add that this sort of thing keeps stacking up, because as the rich continue to be able to buy up things like land at a higher rate than the poor, the rich are then able to extract even more money from the poor through rents.
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#8If everyone gets 2x as much tomorrow as today, income inequality rises. Ask people if they would support everyone getting 2x their income tomorrow.
Yes, this is how inflation is leveraged by those at the top to dilute the bottom 98%.
People think in terms of dollars instead of purchasing power, the fed need only boil the water slow enough for people to remain compliant.
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#9It's an interesting question. Most of peoples incomes are rising, it's just whose incomes are rising more than others. Is that still fair?
Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.
Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%
#10It's an interesting question. Most of peoples incomes are rising, it's just whose incomes are rising more than others. Is that still fair?
Businesses are all too happy to use tactics that aren't 'fair', as long as they're legal-ish. Even then, they lobby for favourable laws, that are rarely also favourable for consumers, and more often hostile.
Make no mistake, only one side is concerned with 'fair'.