A Quote by Moshe Vardi
People at the very top of the income scale also benefited from globalization and automation. But the income of working- and middle-class people in the developed world has stagnated.
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I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.
When people ask, "Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?" - my answer is not an answer most people get: It's because their power developed from laws that enriched them.
The people who are having the hard time right now are middle-income Americans. Under the president's policies, middle-income Americans have been buried. They're just being crushed. Middle-income Americans have seen their income come down by $4,300. This is a tax in and of itself. I'll call it the economy tax. It's been crushing.
The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.
People in the rich countries who have done very well, who are at the top of the income pyramid, try to steamroll over the opposition of the middle without changing anything in social programs, or any redistribution. And they take their votes for a given. They have rich people that bankroll them. And the globalization would continue, but it would continue with permanent dissatisfaction among large segments of the people.
This is a very important issue that the corporate media chooses not to talk about a whole lot, that we have an economic system which is rigged, which means that at the same time as the middle class of this country is disappearing, almost all of the new income and wealth in America is going to the top 1 percent. You have the top one-tenth of 1 percent owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent - 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.
The decision is I'm going to do everything I can to fight for the working class of this country, the low-income people against income and wealth inequality, do everything we can about climate change.
Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.
They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?
Income tax in particular in the United States is concentrated on the top half of the income distribution, and very heavily skewed towards the top 10 or even top 1 percent.
Income taxes are very poor at generating income from automation because the gains are realized by technology companies that are experts at not paying taxes.
The confidence is really driven by the woman - whether she can have the confidence that there will be enough earning or income to finance all the domestic spending - but also by the middle-income class, which for many Asian countries has become the growth power for the economy.
How about no income tax at all on people over 65? People would continue working, remain healthier, not be an economic and social drain on society. Then the elderly would also have more disposable income to help charitable activities.
If you're going to compare a middle-income black kid with a middle- income white kid, and, say, you control for family background, family education, and family income, and if this middle-income black kid doesn't score as well as the white kid on the test, then I say, look, you haven't taken into consideration the cumulative effect of living in a segregated neighborhood and going to a de facto segregated school. You're denying a position at Harvard or some other place to a kid that really could make it. That's why I support affirmative action that's based on both class and race.
The structural changes of globalization and automation that has created concentrated wealth among some people who have had the right skills and the right opportunities has also created extraordinary disruption and havoc among the American middle-class.
The tax relief that this Congress has given now in terms of four tax cuts has overwhelmingly gone to the people at the very top of the income scale in America.
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