Is the US system rigged for the rich?

[steve2470]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/David-R.-Francis/2010/1018/Is-the-US-system-rigged-for-the-rich

While the poor get social programs worth $365 billion, the rich get more. Subsidies to help the prosperous build wealth added up to $384 billion last year.

Everybody knows the rich are getting richer, but why they're getting richer remains something of a mystery. Is the system biased?

The shift of income to the top has occurred in the most prosperous English-speaking nations, such as Australia, Britain, and Canada. But it has been most pronounced in the United States. Thirty years ago, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 9 percent of total national income. By 2007, they had 23 percent. Last year, new census data show, the rich-poor income gap was the widest on record.

Wealth is more unevenly distributed. The top 20 percent of wealth-holders own 84 percent of America's wealth. What's causing it?

*end of excerpt. 2010 article but still worth reading imho*

[50000feet]

1. Yes.

[marmar]

2. Bear....woods.

nt

[MichiganVote]

3. Harder now to prove its not. Which no one tries..except Romney that is.

Who is wealthy..go figure.

[liberal N proud]

4. Silly question

[xtraxritical]

5. Do the Koch Bros. make campaign contributions because they're altruistic?

What a waste of typing this post seems to be.

[Igel]

6. "Americans"?

Or "American households"?

I was looking at my students earlier this week and it occurred to me their families were different from my high-school and college friends'.

My parents were odd. Both worked in decent blue-collar union jobs. Two-income families. At the time that put them in a fairly high tax bracket, much higher than my peers'. My family income was about 2x that of any of my peers' families. For most of my childhood there were my two parents and me in the house; for most of my peers there were their parents and at least one sibling in the house. Income inequality was mitigated only by having my parents pay down their house very quickly and then squirrel away money for retirement. The effects of inequality were delayed.

In college it was rare that my friends' parents were both high-earning. The higher the household income, the more likely it was that man would have a high-paying job and for the wife to have a (much) lower-paying hobby-job.

The next most common alternative was that both parents had low-paying jobs.

Single-parent families were the exception.

Now I look at my students and they break differently: If one parent has a low-paying job the other parent has a low-income job, household income under $50k/year. (That's if they're in a two-parent family--there are a lot of single-parent families). If one parent has a high-paying job, the other parent has a high-paying job, household income well over $100k and often nearing $200k. The distribution is much more bipolar, skewed by neighborhood and muddied a bit by single-parent families (with incomes <$30k/year or between $50-$80k/year).

IIRC, all the percentiles are based on tax returns, most of which cover households.

Of course, making the childhood poverty distribution even worse than household income are fertility rates. They're negatively correlated to household income in a kind of causal feedback loop. (Something we say loudly wrt other countries, not so much about the US.)