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.