I waited to see if anyone would diary this very important piece of new research, but maybe it was overlooked.
Economic growth in the United States: A tale of two countries
by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman December 6, 2016
http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/economic-growth-in-the-united-states-a-tale-of-two-coun
tries/
Formerly, we had no hard numbers to counteract the claims of “median” this and “median” that increases under Dem management. (Even ignoring the unadvertised change in methodology in calculating those “medians”, dear Bureau of Census.)
Also: “…economists and policymakers do not have a comprehensive view of how government programs designed to ameliorate the worst effects of economic inequality actually affect inequality. Americans share almost one-third of the fruits of economic output (via taxes that help pay for an array of social services) through their federal, state, and local governments. … Yet we do not have a clear measure of how the distribution of pre-tax income differs from the distribution of income after taxes are levied and after government spending is taken into account. This makes it hard to assess the extent to which governments make income growth more equal.2”
Well, now we do: “In our paper, we calculate the distribution of both pre-tax and post-tax income. The post-tax series deducts all taxes and then adds back all transfers and public spending so that both pre-tax and post-tax incomes add up to national income. This allows us to provide the first comprehensive view of how government redistribution in the United States affects inequality…”
And conclude: “…government redistribution has offset only a small fraction of the increase in pre-tax inequality. As shown in Figure 1, the average post-tax income of the bottom 50 percent of adults(117M Americans) increased by only 21 percent between 1980 and 2014, much less than average national income. This meager increase comes with two important limits.
First, there was almost no growth in real (inflation-adjusted) incomes after taxes and transfers for the bottom 50 percent of working-age adults over this period because even as government transfers increased overall, they went largely to the elderly and the middle class. Second, the small rise of the average post-tax income of the bottom 50 percent of income earners comes entirely from in-kind health transfers and public goods spending. The disposable post-tax income–including only cash transfers–of the bottom 50 percent stagnated at about $16,000. For the bottom 50 percent, post-tax disposable income and pre-tax income are similar–this group pays roughly as much in taxes as it receives in cash transfers.”
Please, read the entire paper. It destroys the blathering and handwaving that liberals use to conceal what has been done.
A discussion of the paper in the NYTs…http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/business/economy/a-bigger-economic-pie-but-a-smaller-slice-for-hal
f-of-the-us.html?smid=tw-share
When do TPTB start attacking Piketty and his colleagues as Putin/Russia stooges? This is a needed and greatly refined data on US income inequality and upsets all the decades of corporate/GOP/Democratic propaganda that dismissed worker angst as nothing other than whining among losers.
A couple more excerpts:
Yep.
Pew has some warning signs even for Dem cities….
“For purposes of this analysis, our standard of measure was metropolitan areas that are middle class, not middle-class voters specifically. Middle-class communities were defined as metropolitan areas in which at least 55% of the adult population lived in middle-income households in 2014. (The national share of the population that is middle class is 51%.)
Of the 221 areas examined, there are 57 such solidly middle-class areas, and they were almost equally split in 2008, with 30 areas voting for Democrats and 27 for Republicans.
In 2016, Trump successfully defended all 27 middle-class areas won by Republicans in 2008. In a dramatic shift, however, Hillary Clinton lost in 18 of the 30 middle-class areas won by Democrats in 2008.”
GOP gained ground in middle-class communities in 2016
(http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/08/gop-gained-ground-in-middle-class-communities-in-201
6/)
Begs the question if Clinton lost those 18 communities or Trump won them. For now I’m going with the former bc Trump seems not to have gained voters over Romney in those communities. Clinton and Dem elites viewed such communities as her sweet-spot when in fact they were nothing of the sort. Too many workers scrambling for work and/or pay that has unmistakably declined in the past eight years. And Nancy Pelosi is an idiot for claiming that “all’s well” in the Democratic Party.
No, she’s not an idiot, she’s a liar, being deceitful, protecting the established rice bowls.
I wish more attention were paid to this. Too many people dont realize that economic growth concentrated at the top doesn’t just not help the non-top but actually hurts the non-tep.
Its often said (this is bipartisan) that if the economy grows 1% for the poor/middle and 10% for the top, the poor/middle still gain. No. In this scenario, the cost of living (especially housing in urban areas) grows by closer to 10% than 1% so the poor/middle still end up worse off.
Lewis Lapham Hostile Takeover. A teaser:
Cue the H.L. Menken quotes re: the intelligence of the American voter.
You know Lewis we did lose the nomination
So sorry but it was on the ballot