NEW YORK, Oct. 12, 2007
Income Inequality Hits Post-WWII Record
The Skinny: Richest 1 Percent Of Americans Taking Home Almost A Quarter Of The Pie
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Income inequality has gotten so severe, even President Bush is blushing. (CBS)
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You know America's embarrassingly little income inequality problem has gotten bad when even President Bush is blushing.
New IRS figures out today reveal that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americas earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, the Wall Street Journal reports. That's up sharply from 19 percent in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8 percent in 2000, at the beak of the previous bull market in stocks.
The IRS only started keeping these kinds of figures, which include capital gains, in 1986, so there's some guessing involved. But academics say the rich haven't gotten such a big slice of the pie since the Roaring '20s.
Meanwhile, the median tax filer's income fell 2 percent between 2000 and 2005, to $30,881. Median, of course, means half of Americans earn less than that.
In an exclusive interview, the paper grilled the President over these numbers.
"Do I think some of the salaries are excessive at the top? I do," Bush said. "I don't think it's the role of the government to regulate salary. But I do believe it's a role of boards of directors to be very transparent with shareholders about these different packages, the employment packages that these executives get."
Excessive executive compensation "just sends a signal of unfairness, and the people in America want ... fairness," Bush told the Journal.
Yes, ideally, fairness. But in the meantime, one suspects a lot of Americans would settle for health insurance.
Kicked Off Welfare, Japanese Man Dies For Want Of A Rice Ball
America has income inequality issues, yes, but today's most galling story of wealth disparity is set in Japan.
The New York Times reports on the sad tale of a 52-year-old Japanese welfare recipient whose partly mummified corpse was discovered alongside a thin notebook detailing his last days.
His last entry: "My belly's empty. I want to eat a rice ball. I haven't eaten rice in 25 days."
A rice ball costs about $1. The man starved to death because he had been kicked off the welfare rolls by the city of Kitakyushu, which had held up its handling of his case as a "model." Several other destitute men have starved to death in similar circumstances in other Japanese cities in the past few years, but it took the diary to draw attention.
Japan has traditionally been hard on welfare recipients, and with no religious tradition of charity, it has few soup kitchens or places for the indigent. Welfare applicants are expected to turn to their relatives or use up their savings before getting benefits. Welfare is considered less of an entitlement than a shameful handout. And the pressure on cities to keep their welfare rate flat is intense.
"Local governments tend to believe that using taxpayer money to help people in need is doing a disservice to citizens," said Hiroshi Sugimura, a professor specializing in welfare at Hosei University in Tokyo. "To them, those in need are not citizens. Only those who pay taxes are citizens."
Generation Q (For Quiet) Shouts Back
On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offered his assessment on what's wrong with kids these days. They're too quiet, man! They'd rather launch a Facebook page for their favorite cause than get out in the streets and raise a ruckus. And so he dubbed them Generation Q.
Today, some of those 20-somethings respond on the Times letters page. Taken together, the letters presented a portrait of today's young people as very, very self aware -- and more than a little square. Maybe that's true; maybe it's the interpretation of the letter page's editor. In any case, here are some highlights:
"Today's college students may not be as outwardly radical as their 1960s counterparts, but their passion to change 'the system' is still alive," writes Shannon Cox Baker, a sustainable-building consultant from Boulder, Colo. "Protests, sit-ins and boycotts brought much-needed attention to the hot-button issues of the 60s and 70s, but these measures fell short of achieving their intended goal: change."
"Students have learned from these shortcomings and recognize that paradigm-shifting change does not result from outside pressure. It must be pragmatic and must come from within."
"That is why students today who desire to make a difference in the world are pursuing engineering, law and business instead of -- or in addition to -- philosophy, religion and political science."
Ouch! Hitting a columnist right where it hurts -- in the liberal arts.
Will Bates, a 20-something from Manchester, N.H., responded to Friedman's complaint of youth's over-reliance on the Internet by dropping some websites. But wait, he pleads, before dismissing this generation as "too online," please check them out. So here they are: StepItUp2007.org and 1skycampaign.org.
"More than anything, we want our movement to take on global warming -- to express our outrage and also hope that we can do better," Bates writes. "We're not blogging and harnessing the power of online networks; we're trying to inspire on-the-ground political engagement."
That's fine for issues like global warming, on which there's a rapidly developing consensus (see Al Gore's Nobel Prize). But what about more controversial ones, like, say, the one implied by the lead item of this column?
Melissa Sullivan of Boston hints at the Internet's perils for those who take these kinds of issues.
"As a 20-something, I'd like to express this unfortunate truth with which I live: in a world built to make sure I succeed to the best of my ability, I am also warned to be cautious."
"Don't show your affiliations, we are urged, lest your ideology keep you from that school or job that would be the best for you and your future. So purge your essay, resume and Facebook page of any connection that might be unpalatable to potential employers and sacrifice part of your identity to the murky "what ifs" of the future."
"Maybe, in the worship of caution, we've lost our connection to those passion-inspiring causes and have become the quite, inoffensive and ultimately employable Americans."
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See all 46 CommentsPeople;
surely the same forces that keep worker salaries low would keep executive salaries low! Duh!
clearly, what you were taught in economics was worthless; it does not apply in the real world.
in the real world, executives get to set their own salaries (or choose the consultants who do so). in a 1989 study published by the philadelphia inquirer and widely distributed; executives of large coporations in japan and europe averaged 17 times their base workers salaries but the US average was 2014 times base workers salaries.
The US workers are getting less and sharing a smaller piece of the pie, and executives are getting more - a bigger piece of the pie.
Wake up, people. this is NOT free enterprise; this is PRIVATE enterprise. And it is very very bad for the 90+ % of us who actually work.
Posted by formrusmcsgt
Actually Prostident Reagan was the first to expose the true agenda of the elitists, with his "trickle down" BS, which started the US war on the poverty stricken and the decimation of the middle class.
Millions of people are on the road to financial independence via hard work, saving, education, investment and prudence. These basic tenets seem unknown to the masses of over-breeding scavengers living on credit cards and hopping from one job to another, thinking the government or the taxpayer owes then a better pay check.
The more the wealthy earn, the more taxes they pay and the more jobs they can export. There are fewer good employees left in this country. Many only want jobs with big pay, short hours, freedom to get on the internet whenever they want, and lots of benefits.
When a business owner can find good employees, they will share in the wealth of the business. Too many employees won''t put in the time to learn and become valuable. They expect the owner to take better care of them. They seem shocked when someone from "outside" the business has to be hired for the higher paying job, not realizing they could have had it if they had only put in the effort to improve thmeselves.
When Bush got elected in 2000, I said he''d try to take Americ back to the beginning of the 20th century economically. He has succeeded in this if nothing else......
Posted by donbl1
Neither, it is the result of corruption, protecting those who steal the most money.
When the people of a tiny country like Singapore live, on the average, far better than Americans, one can hardly call that developed.
The workers are being left behind because of outsourcing labor to slave wage countries like India, Indonesia, and China.
Posted by NVME3 at 11:16 AM : Oct 12, 2007
And where is the draft ??
Posted by bthrasher102 at 04:30 PM : Oct 12, 2007
The National Debt Ceiling has been raise 5 times under Bush.
The National Debt was $5.6 trillion when Bush started - it is now $9.1 trillion.
How much is Iraq costing and how are you going to pay for the Bush/Cheney war ?
The next president is going to have to clean up after Bush and that will probably mean an increase in taxes to pay for the mess we see now !
The really sad part is this is what all those working class Republicans have been voting for all along and they didn''t even know it.
FDR has finally been defeated.
Hooray for the Reagan revolution!
Well, King George, the emperor has no clothes, and supply side economics and tax breaks for the super wealthy are not helping America! time for new leadership!
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The Clinton inequality years were a ramp because of the dot com stock market and the inequality fell off dramatically at the 2001 recession and has only now reached the Clinton induced inequality.
The increasing income inequality has been going on for a long time through Democratic and Replublican Presidents and Congresses.
We aren''t communists so is this the normal consequence of a developed country in a democracy? Or, is this just the product of increasing technology leaving some workers behind?
Posted by bthrasher102 at 04:04 PM : Oct 12, 2007
You use interesting numbers, like stating that it started "a half century ago". Go to:
http://www.demos.org/inequality/numbers.cfm
You will see that Reagan started it, and it understandably accelerated under Clinton (it was impossible to fight the lobbyist money behind "no new taxes", and once you get a big chunk of money it enables you to go out and get more chunks), and is accelerating even faster thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
All because of that irrational "trickle down" idea.
I mean, c''mon - when one rich person garners the income of 1000 workers, is he or she going to put that money back into circulation by buying 1000 washers or dryers, 1000 cars, 4000 bags of groceries a week, and on and on and on?
"Trickle down economics" is merely greed hidden behind gobbledigook.
Those people at the receiving end of the inequality curve, in combination with those people who are benefiting from the 10-year chart of XOI, are the very same people that got Bush elected.
Before you say it, yes they also had to dupe the Christian coalition et al among the conservatives in order to reach today''s (Reagan started it) rate of wealth consolidation.
Which even they are beginning to recognize, now.
Posted by motherjones at 12:09 PM : Oct 12, 2007
THANK YOU FOR SAYING THAT IT HAS TO BE SAID OVER AND OVER.So many have suffered under this Pres. and it is time for a new day, a new dawn, no one stays down forever.
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