They’re doing this why?
The Republicans are doing tax deform so that they can shunt more money to the rich, because…what, the rich aren’t rich enough? The poor aren’t poor enough? We don’t have an extreme enough gap between the richest 1% and everyone else? Is that how things are?
Fortune interviewed Richard Florida on the subject last summer.
When did this wealth gap problem start?
Basically, this wealth gap that we see today is something that has really skyrocketed since about the 1980s and certainly in the past decade, decade and a half.How bad is the wealth inequality we’re seeing in the United States?
The income inequality in the United States, according to the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality where 0 is perfectly equal and 1 is perfectly unequal) is about 0.45, which is awful—worse than Iran.How about in cities specifically?
In cities that inequality is even greater. There’s a table in my book (The New Urban Crisis, Basic Books, $28) showing this. Inequality in New York City is like Swaziland. Miami’s is like Zimbabwe. Los Angeles is equivalent to Sri Lanka. I actually look at the difference between the 95th percentile of income earners in big cities and the lower 20%. In the New York metro area, the 95th percentile makes $282,000 and the 20th percentile makes $23,000. These gaps between the rich and the poor in income and wealth are vast across the country and even worse in our cities.
But the Republicans think that’s not good enough, and want to make the gap bigger. Why? Why do they want us to be more like Zimbabwe in terms of wealth inequality?
How has the wealth gap affected the American people?
This gap between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, is what produced the backlash that brought Donald Trump to power. Our country isn’t just divided by politics or class, it’s divided by where you live. The advantaged urban parts of the country by the coast—New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles—they’re the blue areas, but the rest of America is increasingly red. The wealth gap that’s occurring in places is behind the political backlash we’re seeing in our country.
And what they’re getting is even more money shunted to the rich while their wages continue to stagnate and oh by the way no more subsidized health insurance.
You know, when the stock market fails, it seems that the rich end up getting richer in the end. Because they have enough to stick it out, they don’t need their money to survive, so they can snatch up stocks dirt cheap and wait for the market to swing up, then unload them at an enormous profit.
It’s really not about growing the economy (but you knew that, didn’t you?). It’s about grabbing what little bit is not in their hands, and grinding everyone else into the dirt. I’ve always said these folks were not interested in going back to the 1950s (that’s sort of a Christian right obsession, but the pro-business right aren’t interested in a time when unions were strong and there was a strong middle class). They want to go back to the 1880s.
It is interesting that inequality is worse in cities, when cities and the states they’re in tend to lean more Democratic than average, and better in rural areas when rural states tend to lean more Republican than average.
Given that states can set their own taxes on top of the federal taxes that exist, I wonder why Democratic-controlled states don’t do more themselves to try and balance this out.
” I wonder why Democratic-controlled states don’t do more themselves to try and balance this out.”
To some extent, they do. But with the option of pursuing cheaper labor abroad, or in the Confederate States, Big Money will undo most of what states can do.
Meanwhile, the most impoverished states will vote to cut their own throats. For bathroom bills, school prayer and free access to handguns.
Karellen, that’s not because of Democrat vs Republican so much as it is the demographics of poverty, jobs, and places where you can get assistance. Although cities have a lot more jobs, there are also a lot more people trying for those jobs. And people from rural areas who can’t find work usually move to cities in hopes of finding work. Newly arrived immigrants typically gather in cities, as well. Plus, the corporate fat cats tend to live in cities or suburbs, not in the more agrarian areas. So your richest and your poorest congregate in cities.
Maybe that’s why they tend to lean Democrat – these are people who actually see the horrors of poverty first hand, so they are able to generate compassion for their fellow man. In the rural areas, the population is usually pressured into a bland conformity, and anything that is less than wholesome is hidden as deep as they can hide it, so they can pretend there is nothing in their community that would be so awful. So people like me, if unwilling to conform to a rigid mythos of morality and family-centric thinking, with a large helping of misogyny, racism, and homophobia, either live on the margins or leave. (I am currently very much on the margins; I suspect being fully accepted by this community would ultimately cause me to lose a lot of my self-respect). There is no large area of slums for the truly poor to survive even marginally, though the working poor have their section of town. The smiles in the rural midwest are warm and wide, but the moment you show that you are not “fit” to be among them, the shining teeth turn into fangs.
The tax ‘reform’ will also have a devastating effect on social mobility in the US which is already rather low by OECD standards. It’s easier to militarize the police than spend taxpayers’ money on social welfare.
iknklast @1
I agree completely with your comments, they apply to neoliberals everywhere in the world. As to why they (neoliberals) introduce policies that increase inequality, the answer is that they, unlike social democrats, really don’t care. The problem is that a significant proportion of the middle class support reactionary policies until there’s a recession and they find that their houses are worth half their mortagages. Then they’re all social democrats, it’s often too late.