Economic inequality and the lack of a (real) progressive party in the United States

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Last Friday, Chris Rock was interviewed on Bill Maher's show Real Time, and the subject of health care reform came up.

When Maher asked if he saw health care reform the prism of race and as a civil rights issue, Rock said no. He sees health reform as a “people rights issue.” Rock also recounted his family’s experience with the health care system – first when he was poor compared to when he was rich. “I had my father get sick when I was 22. And I was poor, alright. And my father had an ulcer, and it exploded and you know all these toxins get in your blood. And basically, my father died, whatever, 50 days after his ulcer. So I had a father get sick while I was poor,” the comedian recalled.

“My mother got sick when I was rich. And my mother, you know… I don’t really want to get into it, but my mother was sicker than my father. And my mother’s alive. My mother’s fine, OK? I remember going to the hospital to see my mother and wondering, ‘Was I in the right place?’ Like, this was a hotel, like it had a concierge, man. “… if the average person really knew the discrepancy in the health care system, there would be riots in the streets, OK? They would burn this motherf**ker down!”

(source)

But health care isn't the only arena where inequality exists in the United States, and frankly what's puzzling is why the average person doesn't understand this or isn't angered about it. American workers are responsible for higher productivity over the last 30 years, and are some of the most productive in the world, but their salaries have been essentially stagnant. Why the indifference? Case in point, nearly two years since the near collapse of the United States economy in October 2008, there **still** hasn't been a single law written by Congress to prevent this from happening again, with some of the firms responsible STILL giving out bonuses. Of course, both political parties are responsible for what has happened: the large infusion of money and lobbyists into the legislative process has prevented any real concrete action to prevent it. Democrats became the 2nd Republican party in a rush to the right after Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, for a variety of issues (that's another post). Bill Maher has stated it essentially correct "Over the last thirty years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital." There really isn't a progressive party even with the Democrats, and Mr. Maher chastises the President and the party pretty harshly for that:

Here's some specific information in the form of charts on some of the worst cases of economic inequality in the United States. Be warned, it's very bandwidth intensive.

The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the "Roaring Twenties"

One half of Americans owns only 2.5 percent of the total wealth:

Half of America has 0.5% of the stocks and bonds:

Look at that gap grow!

The last two decades have been great, unless you're a typical American worker!

Real earnings have not increased (for the typical worker) for 50 years:

And with that, any real chance of upward economic mobility:

Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the wealth gap in the United States:

While the richest households' income taxes are getting lower and lower:

If you're not in the top 1 percent, you're getting a bum deal!

Source with citations on where the information was gathered is also listed. I want to thank wes_wilson for his post in another community about this information!

Comments

Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

America makes much more sense once you realize that, in all of our national self-mythologizing, both the left and the right have fostered the notion that we are essentially all destined to win the lottery.

Every account of our history makes it sound like the founding of our colonies, our War for Independence, our Civil War, our World Wars and our Cold War SHOULD have resulted in our inevitable deaths and defeat, but somehow, against all possible odds, DIDN'T.

What this basically means is that most Americans - and yes, even many Americans who HAVEN'T succeeded - regard success not as a POSSIBILITY that should be protected (see also: "The pursuit of happiness"), but instead as a God-given RIGHT.

If you play the lottery enough times, this mentality, says, then you HAVE to win eventually, and when your perception of your own nation's history presents it as an endless series of Disney-worthy come-from-behind victories, it's hard for even the more sober members of our citizenry not to get caught up in the hype.

The other aspect of the American character is how much we've mythologized ourselves as completely self-made and beholden to no one. The fact that early settlers barely survived their first years here gets played up to the hilt, and yet, the fact that Native Americans essentially saved their lives gets totally downplayed. Likewise, to watch most American movies about WWII, you'd think that the Axis was defeated by America the Hiro Protagonist, with some minor support from its Widdle Sidekicks in Europe, with nary a mention of the role that Stalin played in royally fucking over Hitler on the East.

So, as far as we're concerned, we're all destined to be the ONLY ones who win the one-in-a-million jackpot, and we all believe that we thoroughly deserve that fortune and don't owe it to anyone else.

And that's why so many working-class people vote against their own interests, because they'd rather be poor for the rest of their lives than share even the smallest amount of their wealth on the SMALLEST, MOST UNLIKELY OFF-CHANCE that they themselves ever become fabulously wealthy.

At its worst, America is a nation of people who would rather be shat upon by those higher than them than relinquish the right to shit all over those lower than them.

or, putting it another way...............

[op-tech-glitch.livejournal.com]

http://www.namebase.org/richnote.html

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[merig00.livejournal.com]

or maybe people just don't want to go down the road of Greece where people riot in the streets each time they don't get their entitlements

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

This makes the objectively untrue assumption that a majority of these people are aware of or care about anything that's being done in any country other than America.

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Maybe they should.

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[rev-proffessor.livejournal.com]

Do you honestly think that everyone in poverty has no one but themselves to blame? Do you REALLY???

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that there's some irony in that the early misadventures of the USA really *should* have resulted in utter defeat. The only reason the UK lost the war was that it had a string of incompetent generals and prove unable to protect its allies. The War of 1812 would have been an utter curbstomp without the tiny matter of the French would-be world conqueror and his invasion of Russia.

Agreed on the solipsistic view of WWII, albeit the Brits tend to do the same thing themselves and *also* forget the USSR was the one that did most of the actual Nazi-killing.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Except that there's some irony in that the early misadventures of the USA really *should* have resulted in utter defeat.

Which actually makes it even WORSE, because we arguably got REWARDED for doing THE WRONG THINGS.

It'd be like, say, your mom telling you to wear your helmet when you go bike riding, and then, when you don't, the resultant bump on your head results in doctors detecting a brain tumor that would have killed you otherwise.

If you, as a kid, understood what had just happened, it would pretty much guarantee that you did the opposite of what your mom told you for the rest of your life.

The only reason the UK lost the war was that it had a string of incompetent generals and prove unable to protect its allies.

Well, THAT, plus the fact that India was just SITTING there, waiting to be plundered.

What about the Pacific?

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

While it's fairly obvious to even a minor student of History that you are correct about the USSR being the reason the Allies won in Europe, that wasn't the only theater of the war, and even tho they managed to declare war on Japan at the last minute, they weren't a whole lot of help to us there.

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Come on old thing, most Brits over forty know that both Russia and the US were essential to winning WWII. However we have never forgotten that though we started in Sept '39, you guys joined in in Dec '41, six months after Germany invaded Russia in operation Barbarossa, and trampling over the Nazi-Soviet pact.

In fact you chaps didn't even declare War on Hitler's Germany then. Germany decalred war on you.

Just giving historical context. :)

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[verytwistedmind.livejournal.com]

I think your mistake is that you believe Americans expect to win the lottery. I believe most Americans expect to become rich through a more capitalistic means. Such as starting their own business.

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I think the poor expect to win the lottery. The middle class expect to make it rich on their own.

Re: Why the "average person" (and even many poor people) aren't outraged:

[rev-proffessor.livejournal.com]

It may one be a movie quote but, "Most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." In other words, rank has it's privilege and, as you have said, someday I will have the rank and I will get the privileges.

Those who would work hard for nothing have at least their pride and the joy of sneering at the "entitlement class". We all want to have someone to deride, someone to feel superior to, so we make up stories about who is entitled and who is just lazy and who is better than whom. No one wants to acknowledge that those on the dole would rather be working or that they may need to be on the dole themselves some time. Again, American culture provides for American Exceptionalism so, it's never OUR fault when we loose a job, need food stamps, or Medicare. We blame other people who need those things as being lazy and entitled but when it's us with the hand out, that's acceptable.

In the end, Democracy ensures the people get the society they deserve.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that in the United States of the present day, anything to the Left of Genghis Khan is bloody red Bolshevism about to execute anyone making more than 150,000 and leave piles of chopped-off heads and hands as a warning to other would-be Kulaks. Americans choose to forget that Class is both far from a new issue and that the Founders responded to Tea Bagger wannabes by pouring volleys of musketfire into them.

[politikitty.livejournal.com]

While income inequality is certainly an issue (though I think those graphs all over-estimate the issue by ignoring income mobility, which while modest, does exist), it's important to note that increasing the progressivity of the income tax is not going to help us with our unsustainable safety nets we currently have. And really, the underlying issue with income inequality is not that the rich make too much money, it's that the poor make so little.

(image ganked from most recent Ezra Klein column here (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/can_we_close_the_budget_defici.html))

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

I assume the unsustainable safety net you're talking about is Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security? Because food stamps, etc. are a tiny portion of our spending.

[politikitty.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I think Social Security is fairly fixable if we simply readjust our expectations to expect that an older population should work longer. I understand that people like to go "grawr! defense!" but like adding progressivity to our income tax, it doesn't go far in addressing the problem.

The fundamental problem in our budget really does boil down to Medicare. It's the main budget concern that trends so far out of line with inflation. Hell, I was shocked when I looked at the numbers of what we spend on Medicaid, which should be included as a safety net. We don't have a handle on health care costs, and while there are great aspects to recent legislation, I fail to see that cost is one of them.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Isn't it possible that there's no real progressive movement because the power disparity between rich and poor is so great? People draw up comparisons to turn of the century industrialization, but if you draw a broader net and look at, say, incidence of peasant uprisings in the Dark Ages, or slave rebellions in pre-Civil War America, you see pretty similar trends. Small, undirected individual outbursts of violence, crime by the poor and desparate preying on the poor and desperate, extremely rare general revolts that are typically put down brutally and successfully, great sections of the population comprising an invisible underclass so little acknowledged by the media and intelligentsia of the time that to this day we've got very little idea what their actual lives were like, outside a mythologizing narrative crafted by masters concerned only with themselves.

This isn't exceptional (ha) to America in any way, nor do I think it's really surprising. Those with the money control the halls of political power, the media narrative, the police and military, the schools rich and poor alike learn to understand the world around them in - and the power of the oligarchy is strengthening, not weakening. What's in it for them, that they should pander to the issues of the slovenly ill-spoken poorly educated unskilled tractable lumpen masses? Just look at how much sneering at the cultural trappings of poverty goes on in liberal circles around here. The only people with a potential interest in 'class issues' are members of the underclass themselves and those on the edge of being lower-class, and to actually organize to a meaningful extent requires manpower, resources, regimentation, ability to disseminate information, exceptional leadership in the face of the active hostility of the existing system, all of which take money and influence to achieve that they by definition don't have. The right circumstances might come together for a genuinely proletarian movement, time to time, but it'd be a freak occurrence as it always is, ever less likely the poorer the poor get and the more the actual middle class shrinks.

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

Isn't it possible that there's no real progressive movement because the power disparity between rich and poor is so great?

Probably. I'm sure there's some argument to be made about systematic disenfranchisement, too.

It's funny that today's "silent majority" is generally poor and a minority. I wonder how Nixon would feel about that.

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

I saw these graphs the other day, and I'm still appalled.

That said, a few mitigating factors:

Most households 40-50 years ago were single-income. It's much more common now for wives, even kids to work.

It used to be that you could get a job at an assembly line out of high school, work for 20-30 years at a good salary, and retire with a strong pension. That obviously isn't the case anymore; the U.S. economy relies on higher education and services now, but we're still going through growing pains on that front.

The cost of housing and food has generally decreased over the last 40-50 years. Health care and higher education, notably, have risen faster than inflation, but the point is just that cost of living has to be considered here.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

There was a study not that long time ago - even poor in USA live on large square footage then middle class in Europe.

[politikitty.livejournal.com]

I think the main mitigating factor is that while inequality has increased, the poor today are better off than the poor fifty years ago. Real wages have gone up. From what I've read, they're less likely to have suffered periods of hunger, less likely to go without shelter, more likely to own a vehicle and television and have access to the internet. So long as that is true, increased inequality isn't a bad thing, it's simply a thing.

caveat: I can't quite suss out that information from the BLS, I'm running off memory of stats I've once read and can't verify, and might be remembering them completely wrong. So I'm a long way from advocating any course of action. But my point is that while these statistics are shocking, they aren't the statistics that we should concern ourselves with when discussing the plight of the poor. Historical real wages of various quintiles should be at the forefront, but it's noticeably absent and annoyingly hard to find.

[rev-proffessor.livejournal.com]

Alright, Seriously, Who here can stand forth and state emphatically that everyone living in poverty has no one to blame but them selves? Who here can honestly say, and fully believe, that anyone, literally ANYONE, can overcome poverty and retire in middle class style, if only they embrace a puritan work ethic and abandon their feelings of entitlement?

[merig00.livejournal.com]

probably a shitload of immigrants that still arrive to this country without their pockets full of dollars.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Who here can honestly say, and fully believe, that anyone, literally ANYONE, can overcome poverty and retire in middle class style, if only they embrace a puritan work ethic and abandon their feelings of entitlement?

I can say it.