Income Inequality
From WikiDemocracy
‘Socialism for the rich’: the evils of bad economics
In both the US and the UK, from 1980 to 2016, the share of total income going to the top 1% has more than doubled. After allowing for inflation, the earnings of the bottom 90% in the US and UK have barely risen at all over the past 25 years. More generally, 50 years ago, a US CEO earned on average about 20 times as much as the typical worker. Today, the CEO earns 354 times as much. We adopt narratives to justify inequality because society is highly unequal, not the other way round. So inequality may be self-perpetuating in a surprising way. Rather than resist and revolt, we just cope with it. Less Communist Manifesto, more self-help manual.
The income tax cuts for the rich of the past 40 years were originally justified by economic arguments: Laffer’s rhetoric was seized upon by politicians. But to economists, his ideas were both familiar and trivial. Modern economics provides neither theory nor evidence proving the merit of these tax cuts. Both are ambiguous. Although politicians can ignore this truth for a while, it suggests that widespread opposition to higher taxes on the rich is ultimately based on reasons beyond economics.
Resources
Income Inequality in the US.org
CBO Confirms With Trump-GOP 'Big, Ugly Law,' Working Families Lose 'And Billionaires Win'
by Jessica Corbett 11/8/25 Common Dreams
"This isn't shared sacrifice—it's class warfare," said one policy expert.
Democracy Cannot Thrive Without Thriving Labor Unions
by Adam Dean Jamie McCallum 27/1/24 Common Dreams
On Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that the share of workers represented by unions was 11.2% in 2023, down slightly from 11.3% in 2022. This news of stagnation is especially sobering for the American labor movement because the past year was full of major victories and growing momentum. The UAW’s ‘stand up’ strike led to record contracts for autoworkers, graduate students around the country won union elections, and public support for labor unions reached near-record highs—especially among young Americans.
Rock, Economics and Rebuilding the Middle Class
by Simone Pathe 12/7/13 PBS NEWS
Alan Krueger, outgoing chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, spoke at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, last month about inequality in America and ways that the president’s economic policies are supposedly strengthening the middle class.
=====Studies Reveal Consensus: Trade Flows during “Free Trade” Era Have Exacerbated U.S. Income Inequality===== by PUBLICCITIZEN
U.S. income inequality has jumped to levels not seen since the pre-depression 1920s, as middleclass wages have stagnated while the incomes of the rich have surged.
In 1979, the median weekly wage for U.S. workers in today’s dollars was about $749. In 2014, it had increased just four dollars to $753 per week.
Wage Inequality Continued to Increase in 2020
by Lawrence Mishel,Jori Kandra 13/12/21 Common Dreams
Newly available wage data from the Social Security Administration allow us to analyze wage trends for the top 1.0% and other very high earners as well as for the bottom 90% during 2020. The upward distribution of wages from the bottom 90% to the top 1.0% that was evident over the period from 1979 to 2019 was especially strong in the 2020 pandemic year, yielding historically high wage levels and shares of all wages for the top 1.0% and 0.1%. Correspondingly, the share of wages earned by the bottom 95% fell in 2020.
For Equal Pay Day, Let’s Finally Close the Gender Pay Gap
by Elise Gould 12/3/24 Common Dreams
March 12 is Equal Pay Day, a reminder that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country. The date represents how far into 2024 women would have to work on top of the hours they worked in 2023 simply to match what men were paid in 2023. Women were paid 21.8% less on average than men in 2023, after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, and geographic division.
Column: When corporations were a source of greater equality
by Gerald Davis 16/9/16 PBS NEWS
The postwar era of corporate dominance corresponded to a period of remarkable economic growth, social mobility and relative income equality in the United States. GDP, productivity and household income grew at a remarkable rate during this period, which is now widely regarded as a golden era for the American economy. It was not just in the U.S.: the period from 1945 to 1975 is called the “glorious thirty” (“les trente glorieuses”) in France, and both Western Europe and East Asia saw similar periods of growing prosperity. But in the U.S. this era is distinctively associated with the corporate economy.
85 Years Later, Make the Minimum Wage Truly Equitable
by Jasmine Payne- Patterson 1/9/23 Common Dreams
The concept behind the FLSA began in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, a time when about 25% of workers were unemployed, people lost their life savings due to bank failures, and many struggled to secure housing and food. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and establishing the National Recovery Administration (NRA).
More Job Outsourcing, More Income Inequality
Negotiated in secret with hundreds of industry advisors, corporate-driven trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) include protections for corporations to outsource American jobs, pushing down wages for everyone in the U.S. After the 2000 U.S. trade deal with China, millions of middle-class jobs were outsourced. The result is lower wages for all of us, not just manufacturing workers. Contrary to the theory of free trade, broad losses in income caused by our trade policies outweigh the gains consumers get from cheaper imported products.
Breaking with Capitalist Orthodoxy
The capitalist economies of the developed world have, over the last decade, proven to be profoundly dysfunctional. Not only did the 2008 financial crash lead to the deepest and longest recession in modern history, but nearly a decade later, few advanced economies have returned to anything resembling stability. Prospects for growth remain uncertain. Even during the pre-crash period when economic growth was strong, living standards for the majority of workers in developed countries barely rose. Inequality between the richest and the rest of society has now grown to levels not seen since the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, continued environmental pressures, especially climate change, threaten global prosperity.
Wage gap between white and black Americans is worse today than in 1979
by Molly Redden 20/9/16 The Guardian
Black Americans today earn even less relative to their white counterparts than they did in 1979, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
