Saturday, August 22nd, 2020
Stephan: Wealth inequality in the U.S. has become the central social crisis. You cannot have a healthy wellbeing oriented society when a tiny group of people are so rich that they live in a different world from the overwhelming remainder of the population. The top 1% have an average income of $718,766.
In my opinion, it is not so much that the uber-rich have bad intentions for everyone else, it is that they literally cannot imagine and empathize with the daily lives of the non-rich. When you can have anything you want, the way you want it from that perspective a monopolistic corporate structure is the way to go. Then you and people in your circle can efficiently get what you want. Works for the rich but not for anyone else. We should go back to the tax structure of the 1950s when. as the Tax Foundation has it, "The top federal income tax rate was 91 percent in 1950 and 1951, and between 1954 and 1959. In 1952 and 1953, the top federal income tax rate was 92 percent." You simply live in a different world when your hourly income, exceeds the yearly income for most individuals, and families, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alice Walton all have incomes of a $1 million an hour.
Biden will bring in social progressives because he believes in facts, and the people around him are also fact-based. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are competent. Talk to anyone in Burlington, Vermont, and they will tell you would a good mayor he was. Warren's record is completely oriented to fostering wellbeing, and her programs work. It is becoming clear to a growing number of people that the only way we are going to get through climate change is by making wellbeing the first priority at every level. We have to get rid of Trump, and the circus of orcs around him, and put some in prison.
The concentration of market power in a handful of companies lies behind several disturbing trends in the U.S. economy, like the deepening of inequality and financial instability, two Federal Reserve Board economists say in a new paper.
Isabel Cairo and Jae Sim identify a decline in competition, with large firms controlling more of their markets, as a common cause in a series of important shifts over the last four decades.
Those include a fall in labor share, or the chunk of output that goes to workers, even as corporate profits increased; and a surge in wealth and income inequality, as the net worth of the top 5% of households almost tripled between 1983 and 2016. This fueled financial risks and higher leverage, the economists say, as poorer households borrowed to make ends meet while richer ones shoveled their wealth into bonds — feeding the demand for debt instruments.
“The rise of market power of the firms may have been the driving force” in all of these trends, Cairo and Sim write in the paper. Published this month by the non-partisan Fed […]
I can’t help but think of the combination of capitalism and socialism that has made Sweden such a successful society. There individuals and companies can be rich, but they are taxed appropriately to contribute to the well being of the society. America is so far out of balance as to be on the verge of toppling over if things don’t change.
It is hard for me to believe that only a $720,000 average puts a person into the top 1%. I assumed it would be much higher by at least a factor of ten.