Sep 28 - Americans Have No Idea How Bad Inequality Really Is

[CHL]

we need to leave the bum who has all the resources available in a country but refuses to take advantage of it.
Jesus gave talents to some people...find out what he did to those who didn't use....

Bold: This is a vague, inacurate statement with little basis in reality.

Underlined: I don't understand the enormous cognitive dissonance of the religous right. How do you reconcile your faith in your "god" and "jesus", someone who would most likely be a socialist if alive today, with your fundamentalist capitalistic fetish?

 

[Chris.B]

Bold: This is a vague, inacurate statement with little basis in reality.

Underlined: I don't understand the enormous cognitive dissonance of the religous right. How do you reconcile your faith in your "god" and "jesus", someone who would most likely be a socialist if alive today, with your fundamentalist capitalistic fetish?

it's one thing if the poor had no resources but it's a whole different issue when the poor refuses to use the resources they have available to them that most people in other parts of the world can only dream off.

Jesus cursed the fig tree which was unproductive

 

[Serious]

@Yup

 

[Jhoon]

If you believe Americans dont know there is inequality, you must be a proud American. They are aware, the rich is daring you to do something about it.

 

[Yup]

@Yup

What's up​

 

[Serious]

What's up​

You're the pharmacist right
Who loves bad economies, because you and your husband make a lot of money right.?

Join in on the conversation

 

[Yup]

You're the pharmacist right
Who loves bad economies, because you and your husband make a lot of money right.?

Join in on the conversation

Eugh...I am flattered by the invite but I think you've got me confused with someone else.

I don't even live in the US

 

[GunRanger]

All that just to say taxes are bad?

Spoiler

@ believing the free market will allow the money the rich collect to trickle down and increase the quality of life for those at the bottom...

It is increasing the quality of life for people. Americans are just mad it is no longer them eating all the cake.

 

[88m3]

Our Invisible Rich
SEPT. 28, 2014



Paul Krugman

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

• Our Invisible Poor” took on the then-prevalent myth that America was an affluent society with only a few “pockets of poverty.” For many, the facts about poverty came as a revelation, and Dwight Macdonald’s article arguably did more than any other piece of advocacy to prepare the ground for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
  
  I don’t think the poor are invisible today, even though you sometimes hear assertions that they aren’t really living in poverty — hey, some of themhave Xboxes! Instead, these days it’s the rich who are invisible.
  
  But wait — isn’t half our TV programming devoted to breathless portrayal of the real or imagined lifestyles of the rich and fatuous? Yes, but that’s celebrity culture, and it doesn’t mean that the public has a good sense either of who the rich are or of how much money they make. In fact, most Americans have no idea just how unequal our society has become.
  
  The latest piece of evidence to that effect is a survey asking people in various countries how much they thought top executives of major companies make relative to unskilled workers. In the United States the median respondent believed that chief executives make about 30 times as much as their employees, which was roughly true in the 1960s — but since then the gap has soared, so that today chief executives earn something like 300 times as much as ordinary workers.
  
  So Americans have no idea how much the Masters of the Universe are paid, a finding very much in line with evidence that Americans vastlyunderestimate the concentration of wealth at the top.
  
  Is this just a reflection of the innumeracy of hoi polloi? No — the supposedly well informed often seem comparably out of touch. Until the Occupy movement turned the “1 percent” into a catchphrase, it was all too common to hear prominent pundits and politicians speak about inequality as if it were mainly about college graduates versus the less educated, or the top fifth of the population versus the bottom 80 percent.
  
  And even the 1 percent is too broad a category; the really big gains have gone to an even tinier elite. For example, recent estimates indicate not only that the wealth of the top percent has surged relative to everyone else — rising from 25 percent of total wealth in 1973 to 40 percent now — but that the great bulk of that rise has taken place among the top 0.1 percent, the richest one-thousandth of Americans.
  
  Continue reading the main story
  RECENT COMMENTS
  josh
  7 hours ago
  i wonder if krugman even remembers when he sold out. for his nobel prize's sake, i hope he at least got fair market value.
  
  X New Yorker
  7 hours ago
  political science scholars Hacker & Pierson wrote Winner-Take-All Politics a few years back (which I heard about on Bill Moyers), this very...
  
  movie and sports stars. But celebrities make up only a tiny fraction of the wealthy, and even the biggest stars earn far less than the financial barons who really dominate the upper strata. For example, according to Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. is the highest-paid actor in America, making $75 million last year. According to the same publication, in 2013 the top 25 hedge fund managers took home, on average, almost a billion dollars each.
  
  Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.
  
  Most Americans say, if asked, that inequality is too high and something should be done about it — there is overwhelming support for higher minimum wages, and a majority favors higher taxes at the top. But at least so far confronting extreme inequality hasn’t been an election-winning issue. Maybe that would be true even if Americans knew the facts about our new Gilded Age. But we don’t know that. Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/o..._id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000

 

[Wild self]

Better equip people in the bottom and middle to generate their own wealth, and protect them from having their wealth eroded by things like

- artificially expensive housing
- a goofy and unnecessarily expensive healthcare system
- free higher education
- more flexible/free childcare
- education and help for financial literacy and planning

Etc etc

If u asked 100 average people what kinds of things were keeping them from building wealth on a day to day basis, how many of them do u think would say 'the fact that someone else has more money than me'

Yeah, rent and mortgage pricing is outrageous in this day and age. I mean to the point where real estate owners are hoarding the progress of wealth building amongst the masses.

 

[Wild self]

If you believe Americans dont know there is inequality, you must be a proud American. They are aware, the rich is daring you to do something about it.

So the wealthy gonna kill me if I try to enlighten the masses and change the status quo?

 

[Wild self]

You're the pharmacist right
Who loves bad economies, because you and your husband make a lot of money right.?

Join in on the conversation

You talking about that other chick that shyts on her fellow black people and golddigs her husband by saying that tricking is "what real men do."

 

[Serious]

You talking about that other chick that shyts on her fellow black people and golddigs her husband by saying that tricking is "what real men do."

yeah can't remember her name, but i'd be interesting hearing opinion on this topic; for research purposes

 

[Wild self]

@MurderSheWrote is her name

yeah can't remember her name, but i'd be interesting hearing opinion on this topic; for research purposes

 

[Serious]

@MurderSheWrote is her name