Study on effects of "inequality"

[Terry Oxandale]

As I watch "Occupy (this or that)", I seem to sympathize with the situation, but ultimately, I ask myself; "So what, people have the freedom to make what they want of themselves, and we shouldn't blame those that do". But, as with any social debate on this forum, or anywhere else, it seems the simple black and white answer is the one that surfaces to the top. This is obviously a much more complicated social issue compared to the naive question I ask. So, I wanted to look at why inequality is bad in the first place, and came upon this interesting video that appears to have no slant, and based solely on statistics and what appears to be a reasonable analylsis by the author. In the end, it really doesn't explain "why", but it does identify some frightening relationships.


Why inequality is bad for you -- and everyone else - CNN.com

 

[Maurice Butler]

thank you for sharing that - v.good

 

[Al Wohlstrom]

I wonder how many of the college kids without jobs actually had a goal when they chose their major. (not basket weaving) How many applied themselves without partying. How many worked with potential employers on their summer break. Probably none. My nephew just graduated and did all of the above, he now works for a great company, no time to protest, not that he would. He received the reward for the effort he put out, geez what a concept! He never thought anyone owed him anything!

 

[Bob Fechter]

UN data, mix in a little CNN, numbers don't lie,,,,,,,

 

[Jim Craik]

I wonder how many of the college kids without jobs actually had a goal when they chose their major. (not basket weaving) How many applied themselves without partying. How many worked with potential employers on their summer break. Probably none. My nephew just graduated and did all of the above, he now works for a great company, no time to protest, not that he would. He received the reward for the effort he put out, geez what a concept! He never thought anyone owed him anything!

Thats right Al, you have this figured out.

Absolutly no one applied themselves, except your nephew!

You must be the luckiest person in the world.

What are the chances that the only student to apply themselves would be your relative?

 

[Bob Fechter]

Thats right Al, you have this figured out.

Absolutly no one applied themselves, except your nephew!

You must be the luckiest person in the world.

What are the chances that the only student to apply themselves would be your relative?

Maybe the kids that were raised to love this country and believe that the opportunities for someone who is willing to show up on time and put in a decent amount of work are doing better than the ones pissing away their time at OWS.

 

[Terry Oxandale]

My hopes in presenting this information was that the 'problem' impacts everybody, even those that "always" succeed simply because they applied themselves appropriately. I felt somewhat embarrassed in the fact that the most powerful county in the world (at least for a short time) cannot muster enough drive from within to find a solution that benefits our country as a whole, and instead is steadfast in watching its decline amid constant self-centered, self-righteous whining. It hurt even more to see the US as nothing more than an "also ran" in important social-economic conditions.

 

[Doug S.]

I was watching a commentator on the news last night and he had a slant on this issue that really struck me. His position was than nobody in the USA is mad at people who are rich (seemed logical to me), that anyone who struck it rich was just living the same American dream we all have. What the "Occupy" movements are all about is being shut out of that very American dream by those who have achieved it.

At first I thought that was crap, but then I thought about the recent developments in our country, the widening schism between the "haves" and the "have nots", and the declining belief in our youth population that their lives will be "better" than the lives of their parents. I know that is what motivated me to go to college, I wanted more than my parents managed without a college education and in my case the two degrees I earned were the ticket (not so much the Bachelor's degree, but certainly the Master's degree). My daughter, on the other hand, appears to be stuck in poverty regardless of her motivations (which, IMHO, seem sincere but somewhat limited in intensity due to the "Party, Party, Party" lifestyle in which she and most of her friends engage).

We, the "greatest generation" did this to our kids....we convinced them that they didn't have to wait, didn't have to prevail in the face of difficulty or adversity, and didn't let them see us suffer when we had to, b/c we hid from them how hard we were working to give our kids all those benefits we never had as kids and young adults. As a result, they haven't ever known life without answering machines/cordless telephones/cell-phones, microwaves, fast food restaurants, DVD's and cable TV and the internet...they've never had to wait for dinner to be warmed up in the oven or on the stove top, never had to wait for a movie they wanted to see to make it to their local theater, etc. We convinced them that life was going to be easy, b/c we made theirs that way as much as we could, and now we have a younger generation that believes that they should start out on a new job making the same $$ we have worked for 40 years to achieve and that the job should be easy and that they should not have to endure the indignities of a demanding/demeaning supervisor or boss who has made their job miserable....there's this "I don't have to put up with no $h1+" attitude that rears up and bites them in the a$$ every time they turn around.

We're gonna pay for that....the decimation of the middle class will become the death knell for those very "fail-safe" programs we were forced to participate in, with promises that we would be taken care of in retirement, even if it were not a lavish lifestyle. The 99% who are feeling "disenfranchised" will not be able to bear the burden and the 1% WILL NOT bear the burden, nor do they even seem interested in sharing in it to the degree they can afford.

We've really gotten ourselves into a fine mess this time, haven't we:

Laurel & Hardy - Another Fine Mess - YouTube

That "crashing" sound you heard is the sound of our society, and, yes, our greed-encouraging capatilist system, self-destructing.

Even Laurel & Hardy knew that "United we stand, Divided we fall".....and we're certainly a divided society now!!

Cheers????

Doug

 

[Chris P.]

I was watching a commentator on the news last night and he had a slant on this issue that really struck me. His position was than nobody in the USA is mad at people who are rich (seemed logical to me), that anyone who struck it rich was just living the same American dream we all have. What the "Occupy" movements are all about is being shut out of that very American dream by those who have achieved it.

At first I thought that was crap, but then I thought about the recent developments in our country, the widening schism between the "haves" and the "have nots", and the declining belief in our youth population that their lives will be "better" than the lives of their parents. I know that is what motivated me to go to college, I wanted more than my parents managed without a college education and in my case the two degrees I earned were the ticket (not so much the Bachelor's degree, but certainly the Master's degree). My daughter, on the other hand, appears to be stuck in poverty regardless of her motivations (which, IMHO, seem sincere but somewhat limited in intensity due to the "Party, Party, Party" lifestyle in which she and most of her friends engage).

We, the "greatest generation" did this to our kids....we convinced them that they didn't have to wait, didn't have to prevail in the face of difficulty or adversity, and didn't let them see us suffer when we had to, b/c we hid from them how hard we were working to give our kids all those benefits we never had as kids and young adults. As a result, they haven't ever known life without answering machines/cordless telephones/cell-phones, microwaves, fast food restaurants, DVD's and cable TV and the internet...they've never had to wait for dinner to be warmed up in the oven or on the stove top, never had to wait for a movie they wanted to see to make it to their local theater, etc. We convinced them that life was going to be easy, b/c we made theirs that way as much as we could, and now we have a younger generation that believes that they should start out on a new job making the same $$ we have worked for 40 years to achieve and that the job should be easy and that they should not have to endure the indignities of a demanding/demeaning supervisor or boss who has made their job miserable....there's this "I don't have to put up with no $h1+" attitude that rears up and bites them in the a$$ every time they turn around.

We're gonna pay for that....the decimation of the middle class will become the death knell for those very "fail-safe" programs we were forced to participate in, with promises that we would be taken care of in retirement, even if it were not a lavish lifestyle. The 99% who are feeling "disenfranchised" will not be able to bear the burden and the 1% WILL NOT bear the burden, nor do they even seem interested in sharing in it to the degree they can afford.

We've really gotten ourselves into a fine mess this time, haven't we:

Laurel & Hardy - Another Fine Mess - YouTube

That "crashing" sound you heard is the sound of our society, and, yes, our greed-encouraging capatilist system, self-destructing.

Even Laurel & Hardy knew that "United we stand, Divided we fall".....and we're certainly a divided society now!!

Cheers????

Doug

That's pretty much the same conversation I had the other day with my father in law. I find myself blaming the lazy portion of our society just as much as the next guy, but if you step back and think about it, there are more things at work than solely an individual's personal make-up. I was posing the very same scenario to my father in law about growing up in a society where things are easier to obtain. It makes perfect sense that the degree to which people expect some things in life will change from generation to generation, as a function of what the previous generation achieved. When I was growing, nobody owned a BMW, rarely even a used one, unless you were making good money. By good money I mean above middle class, or at least the very pinnacle of middle class for the used cars anyway. Now everyone and his brother buys a BMW or an Audi or some equivalent. People have grown into expecting that. Obviously common sense still needs to exist, and that is part of what is missing, but my feeling is that common is generally missing in most cases at any point in history...

Isn't this same basic idea how the great civilizations have fallen? They became too lax and expectant of certain things and became weak and vulnerable.

I think the Occupy protestors, at least the ones who know what they're doing out there on the streets, have a valid point. Problem is, they're probably the wrong the group to be voicing those complaints by virtue of the ridicule they continually sustain. Having said that, who else has so little to lose by spending all that time on the streets to voice these concerns?

 

[Pat]

I guess Thomas Sowell's column hit home given my being "middle aged" - if I live to be 130... And also remember that certainly I'm tainted by my experience as one of those that was involuntarily selected by my friends and neighbors to go into the military back in the day when our government did such things. It was something I was legally obligated to do.

Sowell writes:
"... The shrill rhetoric about differences in income proceeds as if they (OWS) are talking about income inequalities between different classes of people. It would be hard to get the public all worked up over the fact that young people just starting out in their careers are not making nearly as much money as their parents or grandparents make. Differences in wealth between the young and the old are even greater than differences in income. Households headed by someone 65 years old and older have more than 15 times as much wealth as households headed by someone under 35 years of age.
But these are not different classes of people, as so often insinuated in runaway political rhetoric. Everybody who is 65 years old was once under 35 years of age. And most people under 35 years of age will someday be 65 years old.
Differences in age are just one of the reasons why the insinuations about income and wealth that are thrown around in the media and in politics are often remote from reality. While the rhetoric is about people, the statistics are almost invariably about abstract income brackets. ... Currently we are hearing a lot in the media and in politics about the “top one percent” of income earners who are supposedly getting an ever-increasing share of the nation’s income. That is absolutely true if you are talking about income brackets. It is totally untrue if you are talking about actual flesh and blood people.
The Internal Revenue Service can follow individual people over the years because they can identify individuals from their Social Security numbers. During recent years, when “the top one percent” as an income category has been getting a growing share of the nation’s income, IRS data show that actual flesh and blood people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes go down — repeat, DOWN — by a whopping 26 percent by 2005.
A University of Michigan study showed that most of the working people who were in the bottom 20 percent of income earners in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent at some point by 1991. Only 5 percent of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 were still there in 1991, while 29 percent of them were now in the top quintile.

People in the media (and some here) choose statistics that seem to prove what they want to prove. But the rest of us should become aware of what games are being played with numbers."

I've heard a lot about society's obligation to the inner city teenage unwed mother and certainly there is one. But you never hear of the obligation she has to society. I now hear about what the rich (whoever they may be at the time) owe the protesters but I never hear what the protesters have as an obligation for the rest of us.
What did John Kennedy say? "As not what your country can do for you but...."

 

[Jeff Young]

Except.....the wealth gap between those who are 65 and those who are 35 has increased exponentially over the last few decades. To deny the income and wealth inequality we are seeing right now is a mistake.

U.S. young-old wealth gap worse than ever - CBS News

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November 7, 2011 7:00 AM PrintText U.S. young-old wealth gap worse than ever
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(AP) WASHINGTON - The wealth gap between younger and older Americans has stretched to the widest on record, worsened by a prolonged economic downturn that has wiped out job opportunities for young adults and saddled them with housing and college debt.


The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday.


While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this wealth gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation.

 

[Chris P.]

Here's an interesting chart that shows a little of what people are talking about here: File:United States Income Distribution 1967-2003.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Someone took Census Bureau data and graphed it. Simple way of showing the spreading income gap. This is what gets some people upset, and rightly so. Even if I made over a million a year, I'd still be upset by the same information. THAT is what sets people apart.

It costs a lot more today to get what my parents bought when they built their house 40 years ago. (I'm talking in relation to a lower middle class salary - not absolute numbers.) If nobody stands in the streets and yells, then it will be assumed that things aren't really all that bad. We're in a big mess right now and the super rich that got us here are still super rich but the bottom is far worse off. Some of us would still be upset by that even if we were super rich. That is what sets people apart.

 

[Chris P.]

The Internal Revenue Service can follow individual people over the years because they can identify individuals from their Social Security numbers. During recent years, when “the top one percent” as an income category has been getting a growing share of the nation’s income, IRS data show that actual flesh and blood people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes go down — repeat, DOWN — by a whopping 26 percent by 2005.

Well, interesting choice of time frame with the .com crash and all... but still, what is that supposed to mean? Let's reverse the order of information in that: The top 1% lost a whopping 26% of their income BUT THEY STILL RAKED IN A GREATER SHARE OF THE NATION'S INCOME. How does that sound? That's what the protestors are screaming about. Look at the chart above. The bottom goes nowhere. The top gets better. You know what? The top needs the bottom. We're all supposed to get better.

 

[Pete McCluskey.]

F.W.I.W. I am sick and tired of people whinging about the wealthy. Most of them work bloody hard and employ hundreds of thousands of the very people who are trying to tear them down.
Sure there are corporations who have done the wrong thing and IMHO they should not have been bailed out. But Greece and Italy and the U.S. are in the shit because the so called "Poor people" are all looking for a hand out and not a hand up.
Oh and if you read history at all, you will see that there always has been and always will be inequality!
I say to those demonstrating, get a job, work hard and you too may end up wealthy.

 

[Bob Fechter]

Yes sir, Pete. This is all a bunch of bleeding heart liberal jive, driven by the socialist one worlders who want everyone to be equal. Well the problem is always that for the government to have the power to make everyone "equal," has very dire consequences, as we know through previous social experiments.

I have to admire the left for their tireless efforts to have their way. They never give up when faced with setbacks, and are happy with tiny advances so that seventy years later, we have the debt monstrosity and the planned destruction of the social infrastructure of the Western world to the point that people are ready to be enslaved by a one world dictatorship. And, its right around the corner.

 

[Jeff Young]

Pete: Those are "feelings"

Here are numbers. In 1975, the disparity in wealth between someone aged 65 (regardless of class) and someone aged 35 was 10:1. In 2011, it is FORTY SEVEN TO ONE.

Looks at Chris's chart.

Creating a permanent, locked in underclass is what causes social unrest, and revolution. It's not good.

P.S. This is from someone who was in the "1%" last year.

F.W.I.W. I am sick and tired of people whinging about the wealthy. Most of them work bloody hard and employ hundreds of thousands of the very people who are trying to tear them down.
Sure there are corporations who have done the wrong thing and IMHO they should not have been bailed out. But Greece and Italy and the U.S. are in the shit because the so called "Poor people" are all looking for a hand out and not a hand up.
Oh and if you read history at all, you will see that there always has been and always will be inequality!
I say to those demonstrating, get a job, work hard and you too may end up wealthy.

 

[Jeff Young]

It's amazing that you can say so much, while basically saying nothing.

Yes sir, Pete. This is all a bunch of bleeding heart liberal jive, driven by the socialist one worlders who want everyone to be equal. Well the problem is always that for the government to have the power to make everyone "equal," has very dire consequences, as we know through previous social experiments.

I have to admire the left for their tireless efforts to have their way. They never give up when faced with setbacks, and are happy with tiny advances so that seventy years later, we have the debt monstrosity and the planned destruction of the social infrastructure of the Western world to the point that people are ready to be enslaved by a one world dictatorship. And, its right around the corner.

 

[Nick]

Yes sir, Pete. This is all a bunch of bleeding heart liberal jive, driven by the socialist one worlders who want everyone to be equal. Well the problem is always that for the government to have the power to make everyone "equal," has very dire consequences, as we know through previous social experiments.

I have to admire the left for their tireless efforts to have their way. They never give up when faced with setbacks, and are happy with tiny advances so that seventy years later, we have the debt monstrosity and the planned destruction of the social infrastructure of the Western world to the point that people are ready to be enslaved by a one world dictatorship. And, its right around the corner.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

 

[Al Wohlstrom]

Thats right Al, you have this figured out.

Absolutly no one applied themselves, except your nephew!

You must be the luckiest person in the world.

What are the chances that the only student to apply themselves would be your relative?

Jim, You are a twit! I'm saying that the people that applied themselves, didn't party, and had a goal are most likely not among the protesters.

 

[Jim Craik]

Gee Al,

You said in so many words that the number of students who applied themselves was "PROBABLY ZERO". Al, were I come from "ZERO" means "ZERO".

You then went on to say that the one exception to your "ZERO" was your nephew. I think that is an incredable bit of luck!

You made a blatant attack against not just the youth of our country, but the best of our youth. You know, the ones who are going to college! You said that "probably zero" apply themselves, then commented on "basket weaving".

So after condeming our best and brightest, you make one exception, your relative!

Mr hypocracy strikes again.

You then go on to call me a twit?