Via Slate, a don't-miss historically and statistically informed read: Timothy Noah's The United States of Inequality.
Via Slate, a don't-miss historically and statistically informed read: Timothy Noah's The United States of Inequality.
The latest bit of evidence here.
More evidence here.
I think I'll just keep the list going for a while. What fun!
Bank-friendly Dems threaten to block Financial Regulatory reform bill.
Death of public option causes health insurance stocks to climb 20-30% to a 52-year peak.
Obama sells out, and then sells out some more.
Follow the money. And don't forget the iron law of institutions.
Wheee!
Read this; it's brilliant.
Richard Gwyn, in today's Toronto Star, has an excellent "opinion" piece on the prospects for regulation and reform in the U.S. The short cut:
Krugman says:
Skeptical? Doubtful? The U.S. and most other countries have been doing trickle-down for decades now. Why isn't the efficacy (or not) of these sorts of manoeuvres an empirically established fact? I take it that, as a matter of fact, big tax cuts typically don't end up much stimulating the general economy, but evidently it's better to pretend that there is a live debate about all this, and better yet to pretend that the debate is grounded in ultimately "partisan" concerns. Better, that is, than simply admitting that the real function of the cuts is to buy off conservative and business elements---in this case, so that the real job of spending-based stimulation of the economy can get done.
Larry Bartels's 'Unequal Democracy' reviewed here. Looks to be a treasure trove of interesting and/or surprising and/or hopeful info about the attitudes Americans hold about various political issues -- eg the alleged "rightward shift" in the US is pretty much entirely at upper income strata. (Not too surprising, when was the last time any high profile sources paid the slightest bit of attention to the "little guy"?)
Great lecture here by Harvard's Elizabeth Warren. It's an hour long so I'll summarize. She's compared household expenses today and in momndad-time, finds all sorts of creepy stuff. Eg, spending is down on all fun stuff, way up on unfun stuff; the latter eats up all the $ from working women and much from dad. Unfun stuff hasta be paid so need two jobs to avoid fail. Add decreased safety net and increased ed costs and you get rise in bankruptcy, esp for fam with kids. Scary portent: the lucky pull away from the unlucky, eventually Brazil.
No, wait. It's believable. In fact, it was easily predictable. Which doesn't make it any less astounding:
The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows.
The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.
This post argues frighteningly that the true rate of inflation in the US last year was over 16% -- by contrast the government-reported figure was an absurd .8%. The former wouldn't be surprising, considering the absurdly high prices of real estate and health care, on top of near $4 gas, widely reported spikes in food prices, etc. If the 16% figure is right that certainly wiped out whatever your pay raise may have been last year!
Among the stats released by the IRS (and you know, girlfriend, that the rich have all kinds of ways of hiding their income, so things are undoubtedly much worse than these stats indicate):
-- The top 1% earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, up from 19 percent in 2004.
That is, the top 1% gets more than 1/5 of all income.
-- The bottom 50% earned 12.8 percent of all income in 2005, down from 13.4 percent.
That is, the bottom 50% gets about 1/8 of all income.
One of the interesting things about keeping track, to whatever small degree, of things like this is seeing the same old ludicrous and empirically disconfirmed excuses wheeled out over and over by Bush et al. So last time stats on inequality came out, Bush was all about his "the income gap was an education gap"; now it's that "skills gaps yield income gaps". Whatever.
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