Posted on 09/20/2006 7:46:02 AM PDT by A. Pole
Most poor people in the U.S. have plenty of material goods but no real "wealth" -- since the primary ingredients in "wealth" have nothing to do with money. The combination of a solid work ethic, good common sense, and a high priority for virtuous behavior is far more important for a person's economic well-being than anything else.
The truth:
The rich in the US as a whole are richer than any other group in the history of the world.
The "poor" in the US are wealthier and enjoy a higher standard of living than nearly everyone else in the world.
"Some of these bought policies may be for the purpose of making the rich even richer, most obviously the current regressive tax policies of the Bush administration."
The above quote kind of tells where this author is coming from. Also, I noticed somewhere in the middle that the author, James Kurth, likes Kevin Phillips and John Maynard Keynes, so I presume the author thinks the answer is government redistribution. (I don't think you'll find Kurth quoting Murray Rothbard.)
Kurth also laments the deterioration of unions and the inability to unionize office workers in today's information age - - these workers are too busy conspicuously consuming. In the end he concludes that the problem will take care of itself through crime and terrorism. (We asked for it!)
This statement is simply false, if we measure "inequality" as we should -- among individuals rather than among the average income in various countries. The latter method means that a tiny country where the average income has declined is weighed the same as gigantic China or India. The absolute number of people in the worst poverty (one dollar a day) peaked in 1980, and has been declining since; the percentage of people in the worst poverty has been declining for even longer. Individual income inequality -- measured by what economists call the Gini coefficient -- had been rising since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for the same reason that inequality in distance traveled rises at the beginning of a race before declining to zero at the end. The global Gini coefficient (which rises as inequality rises) reached its peak around 1970; it has been declining since. The combination of rising average income and declining global inequality is one we have never seen in human history, and it coincides quite nicely with the globalization era.
So the problem with stagnating income among these groups is not so much an economic issue as it is a social/behavioral issue.
You are right here, and you can add to that that many households are now single people with no children at all, people who used to live with their parents. That they can afford to live alone now is also part of the story. "Household income" is one of the least informative statistics the government publishes.
A final issue that as far as I know no one has studied is what Herrnstein and Murray notoriously called "cognitive stratification" -- the increasing tendency of people to mate with people very close to them in the cognitive distribution. Presumably, the more this occurs, the greater income inequality among their offspring will be. This may be a part, even a big part, of increasing income equality, not just in the US but in most industrial societies, but AFAIK (which, admittedly, is not very F) the literature never standardizes for this effect.
But you see, owning a business or being responsible enough with one's earnings that your aren't poor is sure to draw the ire of the Left in this country (and apparently from some "conservatives" as well). Since they can afford to hire help; whether it be to cut the lawn or clean the house...they pump more money into the economy and the pockets of those hired to do the job hired for.
If they were not hired by these "rich" people to provide a service, would they be more well off or less? Why?
I'm still trying to figure out which "regressive tax policies of the Bush administration" this guy is talking about.
Why don't you answer?
BTW, you might wanna update your ping list. At least one of those folks has been gone for a quite a while now...
The only "regressive" tax that the federal government has ever had is Social Security and that was created by FDR.
I didn't see one either although he seems to imply that we should be taking more from the top and giving it to the bottom. How did an article suggesting greater wealth redistribution ever get published in something called the American Conservative?
Tax cuts. They rob money away from "the poor" and hand it over to "the rich".
(Source: Democrat Talking Points, page 1)
And why would a conservative post it on FR? Oh, wait, a conservative didn't post it, A.Pole did.
Oh yeah I remember now the new Lexus vs. the new muffler notion.
Personally, I love to pay extrem wages to get people to do my dirty work. I love paying bloated union wages too. I guess that means I'm not rich.
Is this the same "conservative" who pines for the good old days when "The Party" ensured everyone was equal.......equally miserable?
Yes. Makes you wonder why he fled that utopia of equality to come to mean old America.
last time I checked, willie green and fitz have been banned.
you might want to check your entire ping list.
also, the lower class is not expanding, but the middle class is shrinking and that can mean only 1 thing.
THE UPPER CLASS IS GETTING BIGGER, as the middle class becomes wealthy.
Class warfare generally isn't.
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