Free Republic

As we listen to President Obama, Occupy Wall Street, and much of the mainstream media working themselves into a lather over inequality in America, one thinks of “Harrison Bergeron,” the 1961 short story by Kurt Vonnegut that posited a society based on perfect equality, “not only equal before God and the law . . . equal every which way.” The government employed a “Handicapper General” to ensure that no one was smarter, more athletic, or more productive than anyone else. Beautiful people were forced to wear masks, athletic people had to carry weights, and intelligent people wore radios in their ears to interrupt...

New evidence suggests there’s a reason why this economic “recovery” hasn’t felt much like a recovery. Figures from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, compiled by Sentier Research, show that the “recovery” has actually been harder on most Americans than the recession from which they’ve allegedly been recovering. According to Sentier’s report, the median American household income has actually fallen during the “recovery.”  Not only that, but it has fallen even more than it did during the recession. Gordon Green, former chief of the Governments Division at the U.S. Census Bureau and co-author of the report (with fellow Census veteran John Coder), says,...

This roll the country has been on lately, where we burn brighter and brighter while our traditional lodestars, the United States and Europe, sink deeper into the western sky — and, moreover, the rest of the world seems to be noticing our ascent — has produced strangely unaccustomed feelings of self-confidence in many Canadians. It’s not that they aren’t nice feelings. But for a country more used to thinking of itself as not being terribly noticeable, superstar status — well, OK, let’s not get carried away — rising-star status takes getting used to. Not since Expo 67 or the early...

Unemployment and Educational Attainment - By: Larry Walker, Jr. -In a speech given on December 6, 2011, Barack Obama, the Debtor-In-Chief, called for a Level Economic Playing Field. “This isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and all of those who are fighting to get into the middle class,” he said. “At stake is whether this will be a country where people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.” Yeah whatever! His populist...

“No matter your thoughts about the Occupy Wall Street movement, the protesters were right in at least one respect: The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.” Variations on this statement were repeated in dozens of blogs, commentaries, and even news reports in the past months. The claim comes via a Congressional Budget Office analysis that shows incomes for the top 1 percent of Americans growing by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, while the lowest 20 percent saw their inflation-adjusted incomes grow by “only” 18 percent. The numbers from the report are correct, but the assertions...

Obama's Income Inequality SpeechAdam Clark Estes - 2:18 PM ET **SNIP** Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even...

With the ongoing conversation everyone has been having on income disparity, here's a Mint Blog infographic analyzing the phenomenon state by state. Unsurprisingly, smaller states with fancy New York City-like commuter neighborhoods are among the richest, while Southern regions are among the poorest. What's truly interesting are a few unexpected states in the second-to-poorest bracket, including Florida, Idaho, and Montana:

HOW DID YOUR CHILDHOOD INFLUENCE YOUR WORK ETHIC AND ATTITUDE TOWARDS MONEY? My older sister and I were raised by my mother, a district nurse, and stepfather, a fitter's mate [machinist] in a church hospital, so their wages weren't exactly astronomical. But we had the best they could afford. Mam would scrub pub floors just so she could make ends meet or send us on school holidays, so she definitely taught me the value of money. They did their best within their means without leaving themselves short. We both had chores around the house, Mam was fastidious. She never let...

Thirty companies paid no U.S. income tax 08-10: report Photo 12:52pm EDT By Kevin Drawbaugh (Reuters) - Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010, said a study released on Thursday that arrives as Congress faces rising demands for tax reform, but seems unable or unwilling to act. Pepco Holdings Inc, a Washington, D.C.-area power company, had the lowest effective tax rate, at negative 57.6 percent, among the 280 Fortune 500 companies studied. The statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, but over the 2008-2010...

In his weekend radio address, President Obama decried that "over the past three decades, the middle class has lost ground while the wealthiest few have become even wealthier." Although he was trying to leverage the Occupy Wall Street movement, the income gap has been a longstanding concern of his. During the 2008 campaign, Obama said, "The project of the next president is figuring out how do you create bottom-up economic growth, as opposed to the trickle-down economic growth that George Bush has been so enamored with." But it turns out that the rich actually got poorer under President Bush, and...

DES MOINES, Iowa - Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann is telling college students in politically important Iowa that all Americans should pay taxes since they all benefit from services such as roads and bridges, national defense and the courts. Her position, which she was outlining today at Iowa State University in Ames, is a direct challenge to rivals Rick Perry and Herman Cain, who are advocating plans that would allow low-wage earners to continue paying no taxes while implementing a form of a flat tax on all other workers. The Tax Policy Center estimates that some 46 percent of households...

The Personal Income and Outlays report for September covers individual income, consumption and savings. Overall the report shows bad news as once again, America's income is rising less than spending. Spending is up 2.2% while disposable income has only increased 0.2% from this time last year. Adjusted for inflation it's even worse, real disposable income dropped -0.1% while real spending increased +0.5% from August to September. Personal consumption expenditures, often called consumer spending, increased 0.6% and in real dollars, is up 0.5% for September. Real Personal Consumption Expenditures, or PCE, are about 70% of GDP. Real means chained to...

Personal income rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1% last month, while consumer spending jumped 0.6%, the Commerce Department reported. Americans paid for goods and services — autos were a big seller last month — largely by drawing on their savings or taking on more debt. The personal savings rate fell from 4.1% to 3.6%, marking the lowest level since December 2007... ...Inflation, meanwhile, rose 0.2% in September based on the latest reading from the personal consumption expenditure price index. The PCE index has increased 2.9% over the past 12 months

Perhaps the most common measure of income inequality in a nation is the Gini Coefficient (aka the "Gini Ratio"), which ranks the amount of inequality there is in a country on a scale from 0, which represents perfect equality, where everyone would have an equal share of the nation's income, to a value of 1, which represents perfect inequality, where one person would have all the income, but everyone else has none. So now, thanks to so much media attention being focused on the Occupy Wall Street "movement" (aka "politically-oriented publicity stunt"), where many activists (aka "not-too-bright people") appear to...

WASHINGTON - The richest 1 percent of Americans have been getting far richer over the last three decades while the middle class and poor have seen their after-tax household income only crawl up in comparison, according to a government study. After-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households almost tripled, up 275 percent, from 1979 to 2007, the Congressional Budget Office found. For people in the middle of the economic scale, after-tax income grew by just 40 percent. Those at the bottom experienced an 18 percent increase. "The distribution of after-tax income in the United States was substantially...

Why is income inequality rising for U.S. families and households, but not for individual Americans? Having now shown that there has been absolutely no significant change in the level of inequality among U.S. individual income earners from 1994 through 2010, we thought we'd take a step back and look at the data for U.S. families and for households to examine those trends over time. The chart below shows what we find for each grouping of Americans according to their Gini Coefficient, where a value of 0 indicates perfect equality (everyone has the same income) and a value of 1 indicates...

Washington, D.C., nosed out San Jose, Calif., as the nation's highest-income metropolitan region, fueled mainly by its army of attorneys, consultants, lobbyists and outside government contractors. Census data for 2010 show median household income was $84,523 in the D.C. area, compared with $83,944 for the San Jose region, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. Both numbers are well above the median income of about $50,000 for the nation as a whole. While Washington's incomes in 2010 were lower than in 2009, paychecks in the D.C. region have been more stable overall. About 5.6 million people live in the D.C. area, including...

Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show. The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046. The figures demonstrate how the nation’s political and financial classes are prospering as the economy struggles with unemployment above 9 percent and thousands of Americans protest in the streets against income disparity, said...

New Census Bureau data show that Washington, D.C., is the wealthiest metropolitan area in America. This is nothing to be proud of. The report shows that the National Capital Region edged out Silicon Valley to become the most affluent U.S. metropolitan areas. The typical Washington metro household earned $84,523 in 2010, compared to a national median income of $50,046. Income in the D.C. area registered a 0.8 percent drop, but that didn’t faze government bureaucrats, who kept getting automatic raises. For federal workers, total compensation with benefits jumped 3 percent in 2010 to an incredible $126,369. A separate study showed...

Income fell a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in August, which was the first decline since October 2009... Consumer spending increased a seasonally adjusted 0.2% in August, down from a revised 0.7% gain in July...Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expected a flat reading in income and a 0.1% gain in spending... The core personal consumption expenditure price index was up 0.1% in August, below economist expectations of a 0.2% gain