On the topic of income or wealth inequality in U.S., a Washington Post story may be interesting. Middle-class Americans suffered as housing prices fell. It might be good if they could benefit from the present low prices. However …
I’m not suggesting we need laws preventing the rich from getting richer. Nevertheless we need to acknowledge aspects of our present system do promote inequality.
Your argument does not explain why middle class wages are stagnant, just why lower class wages are stagnant. Unless you are arguing that illegal immigrants are competing to run our IT departments and staff our corporate administrations. THAT’S for LEGAL immigrants!
Also, this notion that there is this thing called “economic reality” which is inevitably defined so as to favor laissez faire capitalism … bullshit!
The more money the Middle Class and lower income folks have to spend on consumption, more jobs are created by demand. That would be good for us and good for the economy. All one has to do is look at Greece. at the austerity measures, and see what a disaster that has been for the economy.
Another thing to think about, do you remember the 50’s and the 60’s? That’s when America was the most prosperous. That was back when the wealthy really did pay a lot in taxes, there was much less income inequality, and a man could work in a factory and support his family. The wealthy paid their share without being big crybabies, and we all had money.
I bet you didn’t know many wealthy people at the time.
I’m glad you didn’t say “fair share” in any case.
In any case, a comparison between 1960 and today isn’t valid, because there was no overseas competition. Furthermore, we can’t prove by this example that high taxes were the source of the general prosperity. It is a data point in favor of that argument, but hardly proof.
The linked-to article about student debt is by series moderator and Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz(*). Click on “Great Divide” to see the earlier articles in the series.
(* - Watch some right-wing bloviator appear – as he did once when Krugman was mentioned – whose only contribution will be to condemn as irrelevant and prejudicial any mention of Nobel Prizes won by liberals. :smack: )
While browsing miscellania I stumbled upon a list of the 30 wealthiest Americans ever. (Wealth figures have been normalized by making them a percentage of GDP.) The List was created in 2007; checking Forbes’ latest list of top billionaires it seems that Larry Ellison and two Koch brothers would now join the list, so I’ve added them to make it a list of the 33 richest.
I prepared a text version of the 30 richest Americans ever (it’s shown less conveniently on that page) but won’t post it lest that violate copyright. But what struck me were the dates. Here are the 33 birth years, in order, of the 33 richest Americans ever:
Notice the huge 55-year gap between Henry Ford (born 1863) and Sam Walton (born 1918) with no richest man born in between. When I was a kid, J.P. Getty was spoken of as the richest American but he doesn’t even appear on the list – the decades from the 1930’s through the 1970’s were a time devoid of the super-super-rich.
The 1920’s were near the height of Henry Ford’s wealth-building; the 1980’s the height of Sam Walton’s wealth-building. (Ford was the last-born of the super-rich of the 19th century; Walton the first of those of the 20th century.)
The list I saw at NY Times – extracted by them from a different source, and frequently cited in Wikipedia – had exactly thirty names. If you can find a 100-name list with the same criterion I might repeat the exercise (although looking up birth-years might get tedious).
BTW, one “feature” of the list I noticed is that, while it contains a brother pair (in addition to the Koch brothers I added); it contains no father-son pairs; i.e. only one generation is shown per rich family. I think the list-maker thought it would be redundant to list John Jacob Astor’s son for example, despite that he would qualify, mainly via inheritance, for the list.