The WSJ recently ran a fascinating editorial by Phil Gramm that broke down spendable earnings into quintiles of the U.S. working age population.
Although the bottom quintile makes less than 3% of the earnings, they have almost 13% of the spendable income because of all the transfer payments.
The second and third quintiles are only slightly better off in spendable income because 1) they don’t get much in transfer payments, and 2) they pay much more in taxes. The second quintile makes 7% of the earned income but only has 13.9% of the spendable income, just 1% more than the bottom quintile.
And the middle quintile makes 12.6% of the earned income but only has 15.4% of the spendable income. In other words, between taxes and transfer payments, we’ve already come very close to equalizing spendable income for the bottom 60% of earners.
But here’s the real rub. The middle quintile works four times as much as the bottom quintile and has seven times the number of people working two jobs. (The same numbers for the second quintile are 2.5 times and four times.)
Is it any wonder that the working class people feel like they’re getting screwed?
Maybe it would be a good idea to just drop all the welfare programs and make direct payments as Branson wants. Then we’d see just how screwed working people really are. For example, people making $80,000 a year but only having, say, $55,000 in spendable income would see people not working at all getting checks for $45-50,000 a year. That just might be enough to create an uprising, or get Trump re-elected at a minimum.
The greater a person is in favor of Government Freebies, the lesser that person gives of his personal wealth.
That correlation, when graphed, has to be a straight up and down line. Or a straight flat left to right line depending on what you have on the X and Y axis. (LOL....you get my point right)
Dear mister Branson: What’s in your wallet?
Not money, votes. A military veteran should have a 10x multiplier to his vote.