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Re: Wealth in America

Posted: Tue May 20, 2014 6:06 pm
by sunnyside
Huh. I guess the forum didn't update my last post. I guess it didn't like the picture, so I'll leave that out.
IMO America is starting to look like what it was a hundred years ago in terms of the wealth distribution. It took an incredibly strong and powerful President who was practically independent of it all to fix it or at least tried to fix it. This is just my observation though.
So I read the CBO report that a lot of the income inequality stuff comes from. It's actually a bit of an odd thing in that "income" isn't income, it's adjusted by family size. Specifically by dividing by the square root of the number of households. And nowhere is any consideratrion given to the number of earners per household. Now I could get doing that for some analysis in order to try and paint a picture of expected living conditions. But that's in the definitions for everything they have in the report.

Also they at least admit that they didn't even make an effort to factor in state and local taxes, that they under-report government transfers especially at the state and local level, that they're aware that their analysis of government or employeer provided healthcare is innacurate, and that as a result they over estimate the inequality. But couldn't they at least have taken a crack at it? Maybe thrown on some error bars or something instead of acting like their results are gospel?

Although regardless of all that, even after inflation it looks like every group was better off even adjusting for inflation (NOTE: that was for 2007) it's just that the top one percent gained faster than the other groups.

Though again I'm suspicious how much that has to do with career chasing DINKs out there (Double income no kids). That would give them a very high income and they'd dodge the square root of size division for having kids. The report does indicated that increases in household salaries/wages is the main driver of the increase among the one percent, and that there has been a dramatic increase in women's place in the workforce since 1979. They just didn't consider it in regards to the 1%.

Though I suppose maybe there is something to their conclusion that it's due to changes in technology producing more and better paid "superstars" of sports, film, finance, business, etc.