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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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One thing to keep in mind is that you may not be in the bottom quintile. And if you're not, then you may have a very different view of the economy.
Income inequality is decreasing right now, but many people don't understand that this necessarily involves some zero-sum adjustments. You cannot reduce inequality if everyone grows at the same rate, something must be transferred from the upper X% to the lower X%. And if you're in the upper X%, then the economy might feel worse to you than it really is.
I’d be interested to see a source on if income inequality is decreasing because I haven’t seen any articles about that tbh. In fact, since 2020 when I last looked at graphs on it, it’s seemed like the gap is just getting wider and wider every year.
And if I was told things would get harder for me and other people in my bracket to make it easier for people making less than me, I’d be fine with it, but I’m not seeing an indication that that is what’s happening. But to be honest, so long as I’m seeing record profits for corporations and billionaires continuing to breathe, I’ll continue to think income inequality is continuing to get worse regardless of a study that states the contrary.
Reduction in income inequality started under Biden, after 2020
Looking at the Realtime Inequality source, I think the picture is a bit less rosy than the article gives it, if I’m reading the graphs correctly. It looks like the bottom 50% were absolutely financially destroyed during 2020 (as was everyone else) and measures have been taken to place them relatively close to where they were before the pandemic. But the upper class not only didn’t fall as hard as the bottom 50%, but they recovered to a higher level than they were previous.
To me, this seems like “the income inequality train is slowing down” rather than “the income inequality train is going in reverse”. That being said, I’m a dummy when it comes to economics, so I might not know how to read this correctly.
Note that the y-axis is income growth. Staying at zero means "no change". So it's more accurate to say that before late 2021 the bottom 90% stagnated (or slightly lost income) while the upper 10% grew, seemingly oblivious to hardship.
After late 2021, the income of the bottom 50% grew faster than the top 50% (or top 10%). That is exactly what is meant by "inequality is finally decreasing", because the only way for two extremes to get closer together is for the bottom extreme to grow faster than the top extreme.
Faster growth among the highest incomes is a longstanding feature in our economy, and this differential growth means that income inequality has almost always been increasing. Faster growth among the lowest incomes, ie any period of decreasing inequality, is practically unheard of in recent American history.
I do think it’s possible to make statistics claim anything you want if you categorize the positions you’re comparing in a way that supports what you want to claim. All I know is people generally don’t feel like they’re doing better economically whether it’s the honest fact or not. And if I’m having issues with groceries, those who make less than me must be struggling more.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-income-inequality-rose-3-years-through-2022-fed-data-shows-2023-10-18/
If feelings are more important than statistics, then government should make less effort to reduce inequality and more effort to get people to feel good about the status quo. In other words, do what the GOP does when they are in power.
The thing is statistics can say anything so they’re nearly meaningless if someone has a motive for presenting the statistics in a particular way. But so long as we’re making comparisons, going to bat for the party in power and refusing to listen to valid complaints from people is also pretty similar to the GOP and Republican voters.
Considering the article I posted contradicts yours, I find it hard to believe either 100%. I trust the people who are having trouble buying medicine, rent, or groceries over some article telling me some carefully crafted statistic on why things really are good and we should just stop complaining or protesting about anything and everything. Essentially, it’s just an appeal to status quo to present specific statistics in a way that makes things seem rosy to contradict those who think otherwise.
The article you posted does not contradict mine. Yours says that inequality is higher in 2022 than in 2019. The one I posted said inequality began to decrease in late 2021. Both can be true. Inequality may finally be decreasing after decades of relentless increase, yet remain higher than it was in 2019.
People can certainly misinterpret statistics. If you think that's the case, then you should examine the methods and data and propose a better interpretation.
Dismissing data that do not match personal experience is how you end up with science deniers (e.g. "It's 20 below in Chicago, so much for global warming!", "Nobody I know has died of covid so I don't need a vaccine!")
Nobody said you should stop complaining. But complaining without a solution in mind is pointless. And data suggest that Biden has made more progress towards a solution than previous presidents, or his opponent.
When your link says when the bottom 50% has increased faster than every other group except the top 1%, the fact still stands that income inequality is getting worse. And a misleading title on top of that. All of us in the middle are just stagnating and you’re seeing that as a win because the poorest and most vulnerable were given crumbs? Also the article mentions that the gains of the lower class might not last long because that gain is due to covid stimulus programs.
Corporate profits have risen 25%-30% and the value of the dollar has lost 18% of its value since 2020. Something is wrong.
Not necessarily. Inequality is not just about the top 1%, it reflects the entire distribution of income. For example, suppose that the bottom 50% and the top 10% were stagnant, but the 51st to 90th percentiles all experienced rapid growth. The range of incomes would be the same, but inequality would nevertheless have increased.
Mathematically, inequality is expressed using the Gini coefficient. It is quite possible for inequality to decrease even if the top 1% grows faster than the bottom 50%.
Income growth of 6% is not crumbs.
True, there are no guarantees because we don't know what the future will bring. If Trump wins the election, I suspect the gains won't last long at all.
Yes yes, many different methods to try to convince people that the Matthew effect isn’t real and the top 1% isn’t gaining wealth at an ungodly rate to the detriment of the planet and everyone living on it. Ignoring the richest people when comparing the gap between the richest to the poorest income growth is such a dishonest way of making statistics work.
Income growth of 6% when your income is near nothing is crumbs. Surviving on less than $38 a day and getting a bump of a couple dollars might be greatly needed to those people, but it’s really absolutely nothing compared to the rate of wealth accumulated by the rich in this country. How much material change to one’s life will a couple dollars make? The difference between starving on the street or starving on someone’s couch? All while the richest are suddenly making enough money to buy entire countries, let alone their impact on governing policies to keep those who are poor poor enough to always be gasping for air, too tired to fight back.
So long as capitalism is functioning as intended, every president will feel worse and worse unless you’re comfortable. Comfortable people are willing to believe any article they read on the internet to not feel guilty that the system they feel comfortable in exploits their fellow countrymen as well as those in the global south. I’m not playing political team sports and I have no incentive to try to convince people “my guy” really isn’t that bad. I have no reason to parrot other people who have a material incentive on writing articles that are trying to convince people who are hurting that they aren’t really hurting. If you want Biden to win, you’re better off trying to convince him to pull an FDR with a New Deal than trying to convince me to vote for someone who is perpetuating genocide.
[edit] forgive me for not giving any sort of credit to the Gini method, created by someone who defended fascism and the nazis. (I’ll ignore his eugenics stance since it seems everyone around then was big into eugenics). From Robert H Wade, professor of economy: “it has long been accepted that the Gini coefficient is the workhorse measure of inequality. But it is not generally recognized that the coefficient is normally defined in a way which biases the measure in a downward direction, making inequality seem less large than another version of the coefficient would suggest. By this alternative measure inequality is much higher than is generally thought. The standard measure is misleading us into thinking that economic growth is more “inclusive’ than it is.”
It seems to me like the Gini index is just as bad as the GDP for being an oversimplification of something complex (be that income inequality or economic health). Hey, but it’s a single number and that number is easy to understand at the detriment of its accuracy.
I don't need to convince him, he already passed the IRA.
Anyway, I'm still not sure what your plan is to solve the problems you describe, but I don't think it's going to work
If you think the IRA comes even close to touching the 75% taxed income of the highest earners of the New Deal, you’ve been brainwashed. Also, as far as I understand IRA was mainly the push for subsidizing more green energy production, not actually fighting inflation. And that also falls flat because biden has been approving more oil drilling than trump as well as the US now being the worlds largest exporter of liquified natural gas (diet fossil fuels), surpassing Australia and Qatar.
“Well what’s your plan??” as if exploiting everyone we can is the only possible option. Do you also ask starving people how they would combat world hunger? Do you ask homeless people how they would combat the housing crisis? Go gather some empathy and realize that your comfort comes at the cost of others. How much are you willing to fight for a system that says it’s okay if “the undesirable” dies, so long as the voting population are comfortable?
The IRA, like the New Deal, is a massive spending program aimed at economic recovery. It doesn't really matter to me whether it's funded by increased personal income tax (New Deal) or increased corporate income tax (IRA). It will also double the rate at which the US reduces its CO2 emissions and is highly praised by climate scientists.
US oil production has increased, but that is of less concern because CO2 emissions targets will not be achieved by artificially limiting oil supply. They will be achieved by reducing oil demand, which means replacing cars with EVs and power plants with renewables and nuclear. The goal is not to make oil scarce, the goal is to make oil worthless.
And yes, if someone thinks we need to do more about the hungry or homeless then I ask what their plan is. There are many good plans out there. If someone thinks those plans will fail but cannot offer a better one of their own, then that amounts to defeatism which I think is part of the problem.
Incentivizing companies to convert to green energy rather than punishing companies who poison our planet shouldn’t be praised. Yet again, tax payers are “bailing out” companies that introduce life threatening issues to our world caused by metastasized capitalism.
And I fully understand than any bumps in our energy production along a transition cause hundreds of thousands of people to die. It’s a big deal and requires a steady hand. That isn’t lost on me. But people are currently dying and enslaved to keep this system propped up, and that can’t be ignored. Treating our abusers with kid gloves when it comes to punishment isn’t something I’m going to celebrate. We somehow got VW to fund Electrify America due to their emissions scandal, but the issue is that polluting the world within the legal parameters is fine. It means we need to keep tightening parameters until every single mega corporation is paying for a functional and emergent technology for society to help reverse the harm they’ve caused.
If we’re going to keep going with this failed and exploitative system, we’ve got to create better standards of living for everyone. That means everyone has the ability to live a dignified life in a house they could afford with no food or job or healthcare insecurity. We’ve got to remove the legal act of prison to table labor. We’ve got to stop trading with countries and companies that use slave labor or labor under a living wage. We've got to ban for-profit prisons and for-profit public services. We've got to hold companies accountable in a real way. We've got to stop instigating insurrection across the world so we can sell weapons of war. We've got to stop funding genocides. We've got to bar lobbying from being legal. These are non-negotiable. If our politicians continue to side with our abusers and continue to be okay with murder, so long as it takes 20 years for the murder to reach its end, we do what America was founded on- revolution.
If there were a magic wand that could reward the pure and punish the guilty, I would wave it. But there isn't.
As a direct result of previous elections, it is currently impossible to accomplish most of your goals. At a federal level, prison reform is not on the table. Nor are wide-ranging trade bans. Nor is a lobbying ban. Even small attempts to punish bad behavior, like tightening EPA standards, are generally reversed in the courts. All of this because according to roughly 50% of American voters, it's actually the status quo that is "non-negotiable".
The system does provide one useful lever, however, which is to incentivize steps towards a solution. So that's the lever that should be pulled. It's not about "being okay" with the status quo, it's about making a positive change using the most effective means at our disposal. You can celebrate incremental progress or not, but it's the only way forward.
Trump is an effect of this system, not an anomaly. Thinking that we can vote our way into a healthier system when this one works perfectly and increasingly well for billionaires and corporations who control how and what congress votes on is naive. If the system of law is so flawed that a person who tried to foment an insurrection ACTUALLY has a shot at being president again, it's clear to me that we're just living in some clown world where nothing we actually need to happen will actually happen without direct action.
Positive change is relative dependent on your status in society. Trans people are still afraid of their lives under Biden. Marginalized communities are still seeing their towns become polluted under Biden. Women's rights are still being taken away under Biden. People are still electively dying because they can't afford medical care without ruining their family. We have an issue in this country where a large number people are hurting so bad that they'd rather make someone else hurt than fix anything because they feel defeated. I assume a lot of them see trump as a sort of "well, my life isn't going to get too much better regardless, but it's fun making those people in that gated community squirm for a bit". Do you think this issue goes away if trump can't run for president? Do you think this problem goes away if Biden wins? We need more of a sense of community and we can't get that if everyone is competing for table scraps and playing team sports with politics.
If half of the voters in this country are seen as enemies to the survival of democracy, what's the end goal in solving it? Mass de-programming? If the shoe was on the other foot and they wanted to do a mass-deprogramming of you (or worse considering gun ownership) and everyone who thought like you, what sort of impact would that have on your opinion of them? They're our neighbors who are hurting and unfortunately they're getting all their outside perspective from propagandists on Fox News and OANN instead of actual people. And it's not like liberals are without their propaganda either. No one is faultless. Instead of acting with kindness and understanding when the working class are having difficulties, there's so much of "well, those stupid rednecks should've tried not being so stupid by getting into a coal career if they didn't want their jobs and livelihoods to be ruined. Sucks for them. The world will breathe better without them in it". And we wonder why they're angry enough to vote for trump. Presenting Biden as the knight in shining armor so much that all the responsibility is removed from ourselves and any blowback from our political negligence can be waved away in a sort of plausible deniability is not the right way to incrementally fix things. It's just a way to distance ourselves from the problems we have created.
Again, you've listed a lot of problems without proposing any solutions apart from vaguely hinting at "direct action". And if you think voting is unlikely to have an effect, then whatever direct action you have in mind is absolutely doomed.
We've already seen various "direct" efforts from both sides over the years from the Million Man March to the Ammon Bundy standoff to Occupy Wall Street, and none made the slightest difference. So I'll stick with voting, which at least has a track record of producing incremental improvement.
You seemed to have not read my previous message where I explicitly said revolution. Protests, unless they stop the beating financial heart of a city by blocking highways (which quite a few states have passed bills considering this domestic terrorism), are largely ineffective.
Voting is also pretty ineffective at actually being democratic. Everyone seems to be voting against the worse option than an actual thing they want. Hell, Biden's approval rating is worse than Trump's. He's either not doing a good enough job or isn't good enough about lying about how good of a job he's doing. Biden acted fast when it came to the rail worker's union cutting off profits and he also moved fast when it came to Yemeni Houthis who interrupted a profitable trade route. He also acted fast when Silicon Valley banks were failing. On everything else, it's "ho hum, the republicans won't let me" or "I worked with the republicans on a climate bill which was named as if it took care of inflation, with the help of a ton of provisions that the republicans wanted on there". If making surface level gains to the benefit of republicans is democrat's goal, it seems like what's "incrementing" is actually just democrats becoming more and more like yesterday's republican but under a more pinkwashed flavor.
The US desperately needs a mass labor strike, but I fear that people are too amused with the increasingly-out-of-reach bread and circuses to act before it's too late. Will we enter an era of fascism? Probably. And that'll probably be the case even if Biden is re-elected. Voting isn't enough if you actually care about how things are going. But it seems you've chosen your side in all of this, so I doubt I'll ever be able to convince you that things desperately need to change- more than Biden would ever be able to accomplish.
I did read that, but I don't think it's going to work. Waiting for a revolution to solve your problems is like waiting for your fairy godmother to solve your problems.
Voting hasn't solved all our problems, not even close. But in the past 20 years voting has accelerated our path to carbon neutrality, stopped health insurance companies from dropping patients when they get sick, and legalized gay marriage (the last via SCOTUS appointments).
Maybe Republicans got things they wanted in exchange, but so what? If Republicans were willing to pass M4A in exchange for a big corporate tax cut, I would not hesitate to take that deal. My goals do not include making political opponents cry, I leave that childish pettiness for the GOP.
And those three things may not seem like much, but I'll take them any day over the empty promises of a glorious revolution.
If you’re sitting around waiting for a Revolution, you’re still doing nothing but voting. You obviously think we have more time than we do. I don’t have much more time to spend on people who would happily vote for our extinction, so long as it’s a more comfortable ride.
People have been planning a revolution since boomers were children. It didn't happen then when people actually took to the streets, and it certainly won't happen now that people prefer to grumble on social media. You might as well propose solving our problems by moving to Musk's colony on Mars.
In truth we are stuck on planet Earth and stuck with our current political system. So I prefer more realistic options.