Income Inequality

[prole]

I think it's an interesting topic that looks very different when you look at actual people as opposed to statistical abstractions like "households," or income quintiles.

 

The changing composition of "households" over time has a significant effect on what a metric like "household income" would look like over time, even if the distribution of incomes per worker in society were held completely static at early 1970's levels.

 

Ditto for the income quintiles. The fact that the top quintile of households contains more people than the bottom quintile, and that the households in the top quintile contain more than two income earners while the bottom quintile contains something like 0.6 matters quite a bit.

 

Then there's the fact that very few people stay in the same household income quintile for life, and tend to be in a lower quintile at the beginning and after the end of their working life than they occupy in their peak earning years. Et...cetera.

 

You can go on like this for quite some time. All this has been covered before ad nauseum, but I think the conversation was one that most people with an interest in the topic will find worth listening to.

 

Yes, this is a conversation worth listening to. Having listened to the program again, one could only say that Morticia Addams spends the majority of her airtime reciting stale, discredited tropes (tax cuts for the rich work, immigrants heart America), reslicing the data pie so many times we're left with a misty soup, scapegoating the current economic mess for a problem that has been well underway for decades, and (in a fit of intellectual honesty) declaring that she and her ilk aren't really bothered with the issue of income inequality to begin with. The last bit (neoliberal ideology) should be the starting point for this discussion rather than parsing "statistical abstractions" to obfuscate or deny what any of us can perceive with our own senses: the bunkerized archipelagos of gated communities, the fortification of public space, increased surveillance in public and private spaces, the militarization of police, predatory profiteering and pay-to-play in education and health care, and decreased access to the political system and meaningful representation that 30 years of Reaganomics has given us.

[Off_White]

done with a woman knocking your balls back and forth across court?

 

Guess that's why Serena Williams is like a bad divorce, eh?

[sobo]

done with a woman knocking your balls back and forth across court?

Yes, I've had enough of that bullshit for one lifetime.

[Jim]

I heard the piece and while the woman was articulate I'd agree that she was pushing the same old trickle down theories. Tax breaks for the rich help all, a rising tide, blah, blah, blah. And after all the she's not bothered by income inequity. Common sense notes that there are winners and losers in a capitilistic system and that's ok - folk's have a problem when the moneyed people have all the influence and keep getting all the (tax) beaks and bailouts.

[ivan]

 

Yes, this is a conversation worth listening to. Having listened to the program again, one could only say that Morticia Addams spends the majority of her airtime reciting stale, discredited tropes (tax cuts for the rich work, immigrants heart America), reslicing the data pie so many times we're left with a misty soup, scapegoating the current economic mess for a problem that has been well underway for decades, and (in a fit of intellectual honesty) declaring that she and her ilk aren't really bothered with the issue of income inequality to begin with. The last bit (neoliberal ideology) should be the starting point for this discussion rather than parsing "statistical abstractions" to obfuscate or deny what any of us can perceive with our own senses: the bunkerized archipelagos of gated communities, the fortification of public space, increased surveillance in public and private spaces, the militarization of police, predatory profiteering and pay-to-play in education and health care, and decreased access to the political system and meaningful representation that 30 years of Reaganomics has given us.

didn't they do a movie about this?

i found the ending rather depressing though...

[prole]

Common sense notes that there are winners and losers in a capitilistic system and that's ok...

 

Is it? The issues that come up around increasing inequality are central to any meaningful discussion of what it means to live in a democratic society. The notion that it's acceptable for a social system to generate flat-out "losers" at all, much less at an accelerating pace, is antithetical to the notions of freedom and citizenship that underpin the social contract. The real effect of neoliberal capitalism is to create a permanent underclass no different than the "old-world" social orders that liberalism was supposed to free us from. The only practical difference is that social hierarchies are now enforced by the market rather than arbitrary absolutist law. Can anyone suggest with a straight face that life opportunities are anywhere close to equitable for children born to poor or working class families in Yakima as those born in a Bellevue enclave? Is the zip-code birth lottery the direction we as a society want to move toward? The ghouls at the Manhattan Institute would have us believe that this is not only natural but desirable. And it may very well be from the abstracted technocratic formulations of elitist thinktanks and the bulletproofed black marble lobbies on Park Avenue. For the rest of us, not so much...

[ivan]

how can you not have "losers" in a world of limited resources?

[prole]

Right now I think we could at least settle for equality of opportunity. Otherwise, we'll continue toward the kind of ossified class-bound society our forefathers were trying to escape.

[Jim]

You're stetching my statments 'me thinks. Not to sound too much like JayB but I guess it depends on how you parse my term of "loser". But to think that somehow we as a society are going to figure out a way so everyone can sustain a $50k income - well it ain't going to happen. Under the best of circumstances there are always going to be some folks, even if given the right opportunities, will fall short for lack of motivation, too much reality TV, or the desire to emulate the Dude.

 

Can we make progress on the undeniable flow of money and power to the top - yes. Will it ever be a perfect society - no. We're dealing with humans here.

[prole]

Under the best of circumstances there are always going to be some folks, even if given the right opportunities, will fall short for lack of motivation, too much reality TV, or the desire to emulate the Dude.

 

Yes, I'm okay with that. The fact that there will always be such people should not be an excuse not to work toward the "best circumstances" possible. Keep that whole 'all men are created equal' thing going, you know? As it stands, people are working their asses off and still falling through the cracks.

Edited September 15, 2010 by prole

[prole]

how can you not have "losers" in a world of limited resources?

 

Isn't the point that our "limited resources" are being disprorportionately consumed by a small minority?

[Jim]

Under the best of circumstances there are always going to be some folks, even if given the right opportunities, will fall short for lack of motivation, too much reality TV, or the desire to emulate the Dude.

 

Yes, I'm okay with that. The fact that there will always be such people should not be an excuse not to work toward the "best circumstances" possible. Keep that whole 'all men are created equal' thing going, you know?

 

No one can argue with that. But let's wait - 3,2,1..FW?

[ivan]

Isn't the point that our "limited resources" are being disprorportionately consumed by a small minority?

yes, that is the point - your post above seemed dismissive of the fact though that a pretty sizable # of folks in the country aren't going to have a pot to piss in however

[JayB]

I think it's an interesting topic that looks very different when you look at actual people as opposed to statistical abstractions like "households," or income quintiles.

 

The changing composition of "households" over time has a significant effect on what a metric like "household income" would look like over time, even if the distribution of incomes per worker in society were held completely static at early 1970's levels.

 

Ditto for the income quintiles. The fact that the top quintile of households contains more people than the bottom quintile, and that the households in the top quintile contain more than two income earners while the bottom quintile contains something like 0.6 matters quite a bit.

 

Then there's the fact that very few people stay in the same household income quintile for life, and tend to be in a lower quintile at the beginning and after the end of their working life than they occupy in their peak earning years. Et...cetera.

 

You can go on like this for quite some time. All this has been covered before ad nauseum, but I think the conversation was one that most people with an interest in the topic will find worth listening to.

 

Yes, this is a conversation worth listening to. Having listened to the program again, one could only say that Morticia Addams spends the majority of her airtime... reslicing the data pie so many times we're left with a misty soup...

 

Lots to chew on there but I'll stick with the stats for a moment. I'm willing to listen to an argument to the contrary, but it seems to me that the more your analysis is based on entities that have an existence outside of a sociologist's spreadsheet (people), rather than one that does not (income quintiles) you clarify rather than distort what's actually going on in society.

 

Take a single example - the "household." Take two households with two adults and two children each, in which all four adults earn an equal salary. Now keep one intact, and split the other into two independent households.

 

Nothing has changed about their jobs, their incomes, etc - but splitting one of them in two has just increased the level of income inequality between these households by a factor of two. This is clearly significant, particularly when the tendency to form stable households with two incomes is not evenly distributed across all social groups or "household income quintiles."

 

Speaking of which, when you focus on quintiles instead of people it's easy to get the impression that each "household income quintile" contains the same number of people, that the average age is identical in all of them, that the households in the lowest quintile contain the same number of incomes as those in the top quintile, and that people are born into a "household income quintile" and stay there rather than cycling through a number of them over the course of their lives. None of which are true, and all of which matters if your goal is to actually understand what's actually happening in society.

 

If you look at actual humans, very few of them leave the labor force with a real income that's less than or equal to the real income that they entered the workforce with. As most people gain skills and experience a chart of their real earnings would look like a volatile plot with a trendline that generally slopes upwards, reaches a peak somewhere between 30 and 60, and then declines sometime at or near retirement.

 

That statistical picture looks quite a bit different than that generated by "income quintiles," and if you are interested in understanding whats driving actual differences in the amount of money that actual workers are earning now as opposed to some arbitrary point in the past - it's a much better place to start than a data set that's confounded by things such as differing tendencies to marry and divorce, etc, etc.

 

 

 

[prole]

[Lucky Larry]

let me throw a wrench into it: me thinks the biggest problem is motivation. The direction of societies motivation toward the "elite class". If the masses can't have it they will strive for it even if it means living vicariously, even minimally, through green lawns, cars, internet, porno, music, TV, movies, cheetoes, climbing, fishing, vacations, fast food etc. Even the poorest of poor have TV. Remember the depression; people still went to the movies to escape reality. It is all an escape from reality and totally useless behavoir. Food, water, shelter; sound familiar? That's all we really need but it's too F'in boring. Get some grunt to do the nasty work and some hack to fix me when I'm broken and leave me alone to waste my life as I see fit in a totally useless manner(one definition of privacy). 8 billion people-now fix it? I am a simpleton and old enough to know it. Every original thought I have had has not been original. My own personalized solution is????Geez, I forgot. Where was I? Oh ya, everything is fucked up because of all the fucked motivation. Some climbers are funny, they never admit to being selfish or arrogant or addicts. We're fucking hunters hunting for life threatening trashy cheap thrills. Now rationalize that. I'm sure someone can. Does that bug me. Sure, they make more money than me. So should we give up? Probably be better for the planet. Do third world people believe in the green revolution? If it puts food on the plate. Other than that I think it's all BS, feel good, buy, bye, by, y. If you made it this far check out 'privacy' on wikipedia. 70% of all new hires are based on histories that have been screened with the internet search engines. Old fucks like me will be living in cars or worse after I post this history of my negativity. Geez.

Edited September 16, 2010 by oldlarry

[Hugh Conway]

done with a woman knocking your balls back and forth across court?

Yes, I've had enough of that bullshit for one lifetime.

 

guess you don't want to hear the 9/11 jokes either

[Lucky Larry]

Right now I think we could at least settle for equality of opportunity. Otherwise, we'll continue toward the kind of ossified class-bound society our forefathers were trying to escape.

any movement this way would mean a blood bath. anyway, it will all implode by it's own motion. gawd save the Queen

[pink]

let me throw a wrench into it: me thinks the biggest problem is motivation. The direction of societies motivation toward the "elite class". If the masses can't have it they will strive for it even if it means living vicariously, even minimally, through green lawns, cars, internet, porno, music, TV, movies, cheetoes, climbing, fishing, vacations, fast food etc. Even the poorest of poor have TV. Remember the depression; people still went to the movies to escape reality. It is all an escape from reality and totally useless behavoir. Food, water, shelter; sound familiar? That's all we really need but it's too F'in boring. Get some grunt to do the nasty work and some hack to fix me when I'm broken and leave me alone to waste my life as I see fit in a totally useless manner(one definition of privacy). 8 billion people-now fix it? I am a simpleton and old enough to know it. Every original thought I have had has not been original. My own personalized solution is????Geez, I forgot. Where was I? Oh ya, everything is fucked up because of all the fucked motivation. Some climbers are funny, they never admit to being selfish or arrogant or addicts. We're fucking hunters hunting for life threatening trashy cheap thrills. Now rationalize that. I'm sure someone can. Does that bug me. Sure, they make more money than me. So should we give up? Probably be better for the planet. Do third world people believe in the green revolution? If it puts food on the plate. Other than that I think it's all BS, feel good, buy, bye, by, y. If you made it this far check out 'privacy' on wikipedia. 70% of all new hires are based on histories that have been screened with the internet search engines. Old fucks like me will be living in cars or worse after I post this history of my negativity. Geez.

[pink]

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time

For y'all have knocked her up.

I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe

I was not offended

For I knew I had to rise above it all

Or drown in my own shit.

[kevbone]

[sobo]

done with a woman knocking your balls back and forth across court?

Yes, I've had enough of that bullshit for one lifetime.

guess you don't want to hear the 9/11 jokes either

Oh, don't stop now, Carl!

[prole]

 

No wonder conservatives hate the census...

 

Census: 1 in 7 Americans live in poverty

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer Hope Yen, Associated Press Writer 1 hr 51 mins ago

 

WASHINGTON – The ranks of the working-age poor climbed to the highest level since the 1960s as the recession threw millions of people out of work last year, leaving one in seven Americans in poverty.

 

The overall poverty rate climbed to 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million people, the Census Bureau said Thursday in its annual report on the economic well-being of U.S. households. The report covers 2009, President Barack Obama's first year in office.

 

The poverty rate climbed from 13.2 percent, or 39.8 million people, in 2008.

 

The share of Americans without health coverage rose from 15.4 percent to 16.7 percent — or 50.7 million people — mostly because of the loss of employer-provided health insurance during the recession. Congress passed a health overhaul this year to address rising numbers of the uninsured, but the main provisions will not take effect until 2014.

 

The new figures come at a politically sensitive time, just weeks before the Nov. 2 congressional elections, when voters restive about high unemployment and the slow pace of economic improvement will decide whether to keep Democrats in power or turn to Republicans.

 

The 14.3 percent poverty rate, which covers all ages, was the highest since 1994. Still, it was lower than estimates of many demographers who were bracing for a record gain based on last year's skyrocketing unemployment. Many had predicted a range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent.

 

Analysts credited in part increases in Social Security payments in 2009 as well as federal expansions of unemployment insurance, which rose substantially in 2009 under the economic stimulus program. With the additional unemployment benefits, workers were eligible for extensions that gave them up to 99 weeks of payments after a layoff.

 

Another likely factor was a record number of working mothers, who helped households by bringing home paychecks after the recession took the jobs of a disproportionately high number of men.

 

"Given all the unemployment we saw, it's the government safety net that's keeping people above the poverty line," said Douglas Besharov, a University of Maryland public policy professor and former scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

 

Other census findings:

 

_Among the working-age population, ages 18 to 65, poverty rose from 11.7 percent to 12.9 percent. That puts it at the highest since the 1960s, when the government launched a war on poverty that expanded the federal role in social welfare programs from education to health care.

 

_Poverty rose among all race and ethnic groups, but stood at higher levels for blacks and Hispanics. The number of Hispanics in poverty increased from 23.2 percent to 25.3 percent; for blacks it increased from 24.7 percent to 25.8 percent. The number of whites in poverty rose from 8.6 percent to 9.4 percent.

 

_Child poverty rose from 19 percent to 20.7 percent.

 

In 2009, the poverty level stood at $21,954 for a family of four, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth, such as home ownership.

 

As a result, the official poverty rate takes into account the effects of some stimulus programs in 2009, such as unemployment benefits as well as jobs that were created or saved by government spending. But it does not factor in noncash government aid such as tax credits and food stamps, which have surged to record levels in recent months. Experts say such noncash aid tends to have a larger effect on lowering child poverty.

 

Beginning next year, the government plans to publish new, supplemental poverty figures that are expected to show even higher numbers of people in poverty than previously known. The figures will incorporate rising costs of medical care, transportation and child care, a change analysts believe will add to the ranks of both seniors and working-age people in poverty.

 

But of course, it's only fair to reserve judgment until these numbers can be respun and an argument can be formulated that concludes the problem is actually a result of these people making too much money.

[Hugh Conway]

done with a woman knocking your balls back and forth across court?

Yes, I've had enough of that bullshit for one lifetime.

guess you don't want to hear the 9/11 jokes either

Oh, don't stop now, Carl!

 

Knock Knock!

 

Who's there?

 

9/11

 

9/11 who?

 

You told me you'd never forget!

[Hugh Conway]

What's Al Qaida's favorite football team?

The New York Jets

 

What is the FDNY's favorite song?

It's raining men

 

What did the difference between the Oklahoma City Bombing and the 9/11 attacks teach us?

If you want to do a good job, outsource.

 

What did 9/11 teach us about New Yorkers?

They actually do come together in a crunch.

 

What's the last thing that went through Mohammad Atta's mind?

His ankles.