And this bleak income disparity isn’t going to turn around anytime soon:
With the top one percent of the population now owning more wealth than the bottom 90% [and the top one percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent], the acceleration of wealth to the top could easily intensify, not mitigate. Some might argue that the more natural state of mankind, unchecked by taxation, is not equality, but concentration, in which just a few families ultimately are able eventually to assume command of all wealth. So it was in the Gilded Age, when a few families came to control whole industries. Why has this concentration of wealth occurred only recently in the U.S.? It’s hard not to suspect that the reduction of the estate, income, dividend and capital gains tax rates on the upper reaches of wealth, to the lowest level since those rates were raised at the outset of World War II, has had some influence. — Why the Rich Get Richer | FrumForum
UPWARD MOBILITY? NOT IN AMERICA:
HERE ARE SOME LIES PAUL RYAN DELIVERED to the Heritage Foundation this week:
“We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of income movement between income groups,” he argued. “Telling Americans that they’re stuck in their current station in life, that they’re a victim of circumstances beyond their control, and that the government’s role is to help them cope with it — that’s not who we are, that’s not what we do.”
That is what they do in class-riven Europe, he said, where “Top-heavy welfare states have replaced the traditional aristocracies, and masses of the long-term unemployed are locked into the new lower class. The United States was destined to break out of this bleak history.”
Turns out that is — not true.
There are a lot of data available on this issue, but the clearest chart (above) comes courtesy of the Economic Mobility Project, which looked at the correlation between parent and child income in various countries. Turns out in America, you’re more likely to stay rich if born rich, and stay poor if born poor, than you are in most European countries.
Let the eagle soar.
