Good read. Bump.
rate of income change
Saez is a lier. Anything with his name on it is pure bs
Pretty good article, It is almost as if Forbes now believes that Official Counterfeiting and Enslaving our Children and ourselves in perpetual DEBT that can NEVER BE PAID, As an acceptable Economic Policy is bad.
This chart doesn’t show the real story, I was born in 1944 and graduated from a public high school in 1962. By the time I turned 23 people were asking me to my face what was wrong with me because I did not have a wife AND CHILDREN already. I had an honorable discharge from the Navy, a Navy electronics diploma and was working in an engineering department at a bearing plant, driving a new car and earning an above average income but people were starting to consider me a failure or worse because I was single at 23. The “norm” for that time in this area would have been for a 23 year old white mail to have a job in a textile mill, be married and have at least one child and, if not owning a home, renting a single family home and making plans to buy one. How do you reconcile that with the current situation?
Imagine you won the lottery, and decided you would take $100,000 and donate it to help “the poor”.
And you hired someone to handle it.
And then at the end of 1 year you asked how he did- and he said “Well I gave away $30,000 to one family and I paid myself $70,000 to run the program”
You would be Furious.
Well that is EXACTLY what the government does with Welfare.
The next target for the global corporatists is white collar labor. Expanded guest worker visas and more educated permanent immigrants will reduce wages further.
Yeah, the nation had just endured 4 years of Johnson!
I'd like to see a chart showing the "percent change" in unearned income that the freeloading sector gained over those same years. I'll bet that welfare-type income has risen enormously since 1964.
I'd also like to see the "after tax" income rather than gross income. Money stolen by the government should not be considered income.
Part of the widening is due to a basis change in 1986. After the Tax Reform Act of ‘86, the figures include many S-corps filing individual returns. Also since then muni income has had to be reported - even if not taxable.
People like John Kerry (who holds hundreds of millions in munis) can really distort the figures.
Comparing pre and post ‘86 tax return data is bogus.
“....something bad happened to the U.S. economy in 1968....”
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The accumulating effects of the Johnson’s “Great Society” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (affirmative action, etc.) began to reach a “tipping point”. The number of non-productive (or minimally productive) members of the workforce began to increase as a percentage of that workforce. The Era of the Slacker/Entitled arrived.
Aw crap, by this chart I’m in the top 10 percent. Now I’ll have smelly OWS-ers on my lawn.
My guess is that the top ten percent of earners always do well, no matter what the overall economy is doing.
Consider two of the points in time the author identifies as important. First, what happened around 1968 that had implications for the average worker’s income? The introduction of large gov’t social programs around 1965 and spending on the Vietnam conflict were noteworthy. The unpleasant end of a popular trend toward stock market investing was coming at this point. There was a change in American culture toward more single parenthood and welfare dependency that changed the extent of self-reliance and began the two-income household trend. In addition, US economic strength following WW2 was beginning to face strong international competition from both Europe and Japan. All of those factors had economic implications. The international competition in labor costs would hit those workers whose labor was exposed to international competition—thus you see a divergence in income with the more educated people maintaining income growth at a rate higher than those whose (low tech manufacturing) jobs could be done elsewhere.
In 1983 you see the introduction of the microprocessor into broad technological development and the associated growth in educated tech labor wages. You also saw tax reforms and an increased interest in entrepreneurship. US manufacturing began to compete more directly with international competitors such as Japan. This favored the more educated workers.
We will never go back to a gold standard because Obama’s low brain cell voters will never be able to afford buying it nor will they ever want to have to work again when they can stay on the dole for generations.
I was essentially apolitical when my adulthood began, and my formal education consisted of math, engineering subjects, the pure sciences and a couple of foreign languages. The only economics related training dealt with engineering economics. But my self-education continued uninterrupted to this day, with the possible exception of politics; I was too busy working, supporting my family and raising three children, successfully. If the measure of succes is total independence, and education which allowed them to choose their individual lifestyle, and continuous good employment.
But there were a few unplanned lessons along the voyage to old age. I commuted for several years with a real communist (not one with just a mouth and picket signs.) He lived his beliefs and I recall early on getting an education about the Federal Reserve which, at that time was rarely mentioned among normal folk. My real involvement in politics and its handmaiden, economics, occured decades later when retirement was on the near horizon. Free Republic has been an important part of that education, since 1998. A relative newcomer. But it all falls into place once we step back and look at everything.
The chart is informative and useful, from the standpoint of econmists, where, like the man with a hammer, everything he sees is a nail
Useful as this artcle is, it is a discussion of economics divorced from everything else which happened since 1948, which is just as important, perhaps more so, in the social arena and politics. I was not aware of their importance at the time (few of us 'youngsters' were) but in retrospect those events can't be examined in isolation, either. Among them :
The Marshal Plan
The Korean War.
The construction of the interstate highway system
The Space Program.
The start of the totally unexpected nuclear destruction of the "War on Poverty."
The nascent mass transformation from a manufacturing to a service society.
The Vietnam War.
The birth of the gigantic computer revolution.
The birth of and unjustified accumulation of power by the unproductive "enviromental" movement.
The explosion of expropriation of American assets and investments worldwide.
The restructuring of the vital power attached to the worldwide sources of energy.
The wholesale exportation of heavy industry and manufacturing jobs "overseas."
The birth and rapid spread of the internet followed by the World Wide Web.
The rise and accumulation of raw, naked political power by undisguised and unproductive Socialism. The Black Swan of the economic collapse of 2007-2008.
The tranformation of "Power of the People, by the People for the People" into its direct opposite.
The discovery, suddenly, that the Constitution has become a useless outdated dusty document created by "dead white men," and ignored with impunity by the three branches of the Constitutional, Representative Republic.
All those events can be tracked on the same graph, and their influence, vis a vis economics is certainly open to debate. Certainly a subject deserving tens of thousands of words and much gnashing of teeth, to say nothing of unrealized prison time for many of the perps.
img src="http://b-i.forbesimg.com/louiswoodhill/files/2013/03/Income-Inequality-Chart-032713.jpg" height=200 width=300
There is no income inequality.
There is only human inequality