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Posted on 08/20/2025 1:56:29 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Government benefits make nonwork pay more than work, while inflated housing costs trap younger generations—proof that America’s inequality crisis is built by policy, not fate.
A few years ago, former US Senator Phil Gramm published a book that offers important insights into the status of low-income communities in the United States. Titled “The Myth of American Inequality” and scrupulously researched, the book evaluates U.S. household income by quintiles. It concludes that the bottom quintile (the lowest 20 percent) actually has income virtually equal to that of the second-lowest quintile (21-40 percent), when adjusting for the value of government benefits.
The implications of this explain a lot. America’s working poor, those living in households in the second-to-lowest of the five income groups evaluated, have no motivation to work apart from character and pride. If they did not work or performed minimal work, they would fall down to what is ostensibly the lowest category of household income, but once you count the value of the benefits they receive, they would be better off.
The numbers are not subtle. When only considering earned income, household earnings for the bottom quintile are discouragingly low, only $4,908 per year (2017 data). The second lowest jumps to $30,931, far higher, followed by the middle at $66,148, the second from the top at $112,563, and the top at $295,904.
These are the numbers that stimulate outrage and provide fodder for the rhetoric of resentment; they are used to justify calls for redistribution. But they hardly tell the whole story.
Mostly making use of data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, Gramm went on to add the value of government benefits and private charity and deducted the value of federal, state, and local taxes. The results were decisively different from the above. Taking all of these factors...
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
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in a world of supply and demand, when you have unlimited cheap supply and a relatively fixed demand, the price per unit paid for that supply drops to bare minimums.
such is the case in America.
How you say?
when you have the blue collar getting hosed by unrelenting and unchecked illegal immigration who work ‘off the books’, American labor gets paid much less.
Then when you consider the ‘educated class’ that went to school to learn their trade... only to be replaced by cheap froeign imports via H1-bs or legal immigration. this has crushed the STEM fields.
today, STEM jobs going to American residents of a certain racial group (indian) are the primary earners in the STEM field now.
beyond that will be the financial sector (basically gamblers) and business owners (who are taking advantage of the cheap labor and pocketing the profits)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO2xuucd4HM
Very short YouTube clip looking at economic inequality. Food for thought.
“illegal immigration who work ‘off the books’ “
When I did workers comp audits in IL, I observed that more Blacks worked off the books than immigrants. More legal immigrants worked off the books than illegal immigrants.
Now in GA with knowledge of Medicaid, GA seems to be similar to IL in this respect.
People work off the books for many reasons. But the primary reason is they get more take home pay. On-the-books take home pay is less as so much is taken out for state and local taxes, social security, workers comp and unemployment comp.
a) Dems and the left, who have been seeking a one-party state by reducing the white population, granting legal privileges to ethnic minorities and illegal immigrants like exemption from prosecution and buying votes through expanded benefit programs, which has included massively ignoring legal restrictions on providing benefits to illegals;
b) the business class, which has sought to remove American labor as much as possible through outsourcing,, scam visa programs and hiring illegals as much as possible;
The end goal is the creation of a vast, poetically compliant army of reserve labor living on the dole (otherwise known as a minimum basic income) and a fascist, one-party corporatist state.
LOL “politically compliant”. Done in by the spell checker again.
illegals cannot work ‘on the books’ because they do not have a social security number.
unless they do... which happens... because they’re all using someone else’s ssno
In Chicago illegals can easily get a SSN....just pass a few bucks.
that would be someone else’s ssno issued by fedgov sometime in the past
like 0bama’s ssno... all of them
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