Income Inequality

Elle's Economy ^ | June 2016

[Ray76]

It’s always the same with socialists.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Great point! Are there any recent studies on the dollar value of welfare benefits actually being claimed by the low-income individual?

I’ve seen good data that full-time panhandlers can earn upwards of $40K a year, tax-free.

[cherry]

look, its a myth that education and hard work and training and general superiority and a sound work ethic gets you a superior income....

fact is, you can be a dog catcher in Chicago and make more than almost all teachers or nurses or cops in other states...

truth is, all you need is to be a govt lackey...

[untenured]

I think you put your finger on it. The rise of the cronyist/special-privilege state has done more to cement inequality than any other trend, including immigration, of the last 50 years. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the tearing down of aristocratic, guild and other barriers to free competition in much of the Western world, with a resultant history-changing explosion of innovation and the first major decrease in the inequality that had been around forever.The one place where that innovation is most salient now is in high technology, where cronyism is still most distant.

All of the hands-out pleading and palm greasing of recent decades, yielding occupational licensing, subsidies and other state-mandated limits on competition and the division of labor, is in the process of undoing a lot of that progress. It is cronyism that unites the phenomena of Elizabeth Warren’s securing a tenured position at Harvard while flipping houses, and the bailouts of 2008-9.

[Renkluaf]

Try these:

https://www.aei.org/publication/adjusting-transfers-federal-taxes-reduces-income-inequality-50/

http://www.economics21.org/html/myth-increasing-income-inequality-65.html

Sorry but I lost the original reference. Keep in mind that the headline BS is speaking about quintiles of income distribution not individual persons. There's plenty of research showing that individuals are highly mobile among those quintiles with most of the lowest moving up over time and many in the highest falling after retirement.