Income Inequality
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." - Louis Brandeis
"The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Guyana. " Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times 11/7/2010
Economists who say we should relegate questions about inequality to philosophers often advocate policies, like tax cuts for the wealthy, that increase inequality substantially. That greater inequality causes real harm is beyond doubt. Robert H. Frank, New York Times, 10/17/2010
"... high levels of inequality strain the bonds that hold us together as a society. There has been a long-term downward trend in the extent to which Americans trust either the government or one another. In the sixties, most Americans agreed with the proposition that “most people can be trusted”; today most disagree.’ In the sixties, most Americans believed that the government is run “for the benefit of all”; today, most believe that it’s run for “a few big interests.” And there’s convincing evidence that growing inequality is behind our growing cynicism, which is making the United States seem increasingly like a Latin American country. As the political scientists Eric Uslaner and Mitchell Brown point out (and support with extensive data), “In a world of haves and have-nots, those at either end of the economic spectrum have little reason to believe that ‘most people can be trusted’ . ..social trust rests on a foundation of economic equality.” Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal pg 251
The
United States of Inequality (Bill Moyers 4/12/2013)
The Price of Inequality: Joseph Stiglitz (6/20/2012) See his Video (about an hour)
Free
Market Outcomes are Not Fair and Not Free (12/2012)
Why
The Economy can't get out of first gear: The Rich have sucked it dry
: Reich (6/13/2012)
The
American Dream is a myth: Stiglitz (6/5/2012)
Plutonomy and the Precariat
Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness
Concentration of wealth is a major cause of our difficulties
and as it
increased, which it undoubtedly has, we become less able to deal with
our problems: Demand weakens, volatility increases,
large amounts of money game the system, government becomes
dysfunctional because it is hooked on campaign money. Democracy withers away. Plutocracy rules.
Large disparities in income are bad for democracy, bad for the general welfare, bad for the economy. They lead to social pathologies, inequity in the Courts, destroy domestic tranquility, suppress economic activity, and because we have ignored it, we are experiencing yet another economic collapse.
The US is now run by oligarchs. Media
moguls control pretty much everything
broadcast. Bankers get unlimited amounts of taxpayer money without
strings. The Congress often gets it wrong
because it is money driven. Democracy
withers when income disparities are extreme. We have a strong-man Presidency, but, thanks to the Supreme Court, Corporations
rule, not the people.
Republicans ignore this problem because they are on the wealthy side of the class struggle. The result of all this inequality is financial collapse, in which everyone is a loser.
There is
evidence that high levels of income inequality, as in the US, are
highly correlated with corruption. (1, 2)
Republicans brought on the financial crisis with deregulation that allowed markets to go out of control, privatization that removed the public from the process, tax cuts that in effect directed massive public debt into deep private pockets (banana republic), civil service destruction and cronyism placed incompetents in public office; regressive, anti-labor policies led to a general decline in consumption; a determination to build an empire for world domination requires unlimited budget for the military; a contempt for international law covered up illegal activities including torture, renditions, secret prisons; Congress did no oversight during the Bush years; regulatory agencies were captives of the industries they were supposed to regulate; industry migrated to low wage countries and not much was done to mitigate the damage; but there was war enough for everyone. War is profitable, and in its chaos pallet loads of shrink wrapped money just disappeared. Civil liberties here in the good old US of A were cut down to size by chicken hawks who built the profitable national security state. PayGo left.
There is a relatively simple way damp down obscene
compensation, to pay our bills (which we are not), to reduce inequality
and to keep up our infrastructure, and that is to re-implement a stiff
graduated income tax. Continue the estate tax to be sure that we do
not create an aristocracy, and to break
up extreme concentrations of wealth with a renewal of anti-trust
oversight. Anti-trust should preserve competition.
The Constitution has an inherent warning about concentrated power, but it has little to say about private power. Anti-trust efforts faded away. We are seeing media that is too concentrated, banks that should be broken up, insurance companies that can kill health care reforms, oil companies that successfully deny climate change. We have allowed the military to become too large and it now threatens our civil liberties. You no longer have fourth or sixth amendment rights. When corporations run government, that is the very definition of fascism. Do we not have that ?
In 1929 inequality reached new heights, the market crashed, and there was widespread misery. It has happened again and we have not yet recovered. Worse, those banks that were too big to fail got bailed out by taxpayers. As Larry Lessig pointed out, this is the stupidest form of socialism ever invented.
Wide income inequality leads to market volatility, lack of demand, little competition among big corporations, widespread misery, anti-social behavior, environment devastating, corporate behavior.
Concentrated wealth becomes aristocracy when there is low social mobility. Wages go down, necessities become more expensive, education out of reach for most, and Republican policy is hastening the process.
Many of the social pathologies are identified in The
Spirit Level, Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger:Â Richard Wilkinson and Kate
Pickett.
Through history, economic cycles are strongly correlated with levels of
concentrated wealth. Economic turmoil can easily
produce a fascist state as the Germans
learned. The Bush family helped
finance the Nazis.
At the extreme, like Rome, we become an empire.
We then need a standing
military that is the direct cause of the loss of civil liberties, and
ultimately results in a dictatorship...because
representative government cannot
deal with an empire.
Since empire is ruinously expensive, people's
standard of living must necessarily fall. Official activity must be
carried out in secret. Media cannot reveal
the truth.
In history, every empire collapses.
Why
Greater Equality Makes Us Stronger
Residential
Income Segregation in America (11/16/2011)
Ten
Reasons to Care About Economic Inequality (10/24/2011)
New Study of
Income Inequality (10/2011)
The
More Inequality, the Less the Sustained Growth (9/16/2011)
Inequality
Has Wrecked The Economy (9/5/2011)
Look
Out, Are You About to Join the White Underclass?
By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com
"We're starting to hear a little discussion about the white
underclass... Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified
of falling into it." Read more »
“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not
Economic Recovery for the Few (8/1/2010)
The Impact of Income Inequality
Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality
Inequality.org
From Too Much: Most Popular Articles
Tracking Inequality
How Inequality Hurts
Executive Pay
Defective Enterprises
Taxing Progressively
Alternate Approaches
We are not in this together (4/11/2009)
This Is What the Class War Looks Like (3/24/2009)
Distributing
Our Technological Inheritance: Gar Alperovitz
UN: Financial Inequality Rapidly Grows in US
A United Nations report has revealed major US cities, including New York, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans, have levels of economic inequality that rival cities in Africa. The report found that the United States had the highest inequality and poverty after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000. The life expectancy of African Americans in the United States is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India. http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/27/headlines#16
Steve Kangas on inequality in the Reagan Years
Video
Joseph Stiglitz: The
Price of Inequality (video ) 2012
The End of Poverty ? 2008. 105 minutes narrated by Martin Sheen. View it on-line.
Bibliography
"There are many other ways in which the government structures the market to redistribute income upward. Read my non-copyright protected book, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer to get more of the picture." Dean Baker (read it on line.)
The
Price of Inequality: Joseph E.Stiglitz
The
Great Divergence: Timothy Noah
The Spirit Level, Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
With Liberty and Justice for Some: Glenn Greenwald
Winner Take All Politics: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
Pinched:
Don Peck
Ill Fares the Land: Tony Judt
Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War: Joe Bageant (an excerpt)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America: Barbara Ehrenreich
A People's History of the United States: Howard Zinn
THE WORKING CLASS MAJORITY America's Best Kept Secret: Michael Zweig
Unjust Deserts: Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly
Retirement Insecurity: Edward N. Wolff
Politics of Rich and Poor: Kevin Phillips
Winner Take All Society: Robert Frank and Philip Cook
Boiling Point, Democrats, Republicans and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity: Kevin Phillips
Obamanomics, How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics: John R. Talbott
Links
Agenda For a Shared Prosperity (Download a PDF copy of the entire book)
Toward an Economic Justice Agenda