A Quote by Nicholas Kristof
Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.
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Since 1994, unemployment rates are lower. Median household income is higher. A greater percentage of Americans are graduating from college. Home ownership rates are higher. And the violent crime rate has decreased.
Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.
Incarceration rates - especially black incarceration rates - have soared regardless of whether crime has been going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.
The average household income has really stagnated since 1971.
While easy to understand, the income-based poverty line has limitations. Specifically, the median monthly household income measures only income without considering assets.
Since 1978 for the bottom half of the wealth distribution male median wages have actually gone down. And I think that's a crucial reason. If you are a male worker, your median wage since 1979 has gone down.
If you are born into a family below the national median income, we provide you with an additional $500, and for every contribution made to a child's account below the national median income, we match it dollar for dollar - the federal government will.
Hillary Clinton, income inequality, it's richest damn woman next to the Kennedy family, and you're trying to tell me she cares about income inequality?
No kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what's happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It's the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies.
Numerous studies have shown income inequality growing since the late 1970s. Real earnings have fallen for many families, with globalization, the decline of unions and technological innovations eroding workers' wages.
There have always been two theories about inequality. One is that it reflects just deserts. The other is that there are large elements of exploitation and inequality of opportunities. The evidence is overwhelmingly that the increase in inequality is associated with those negative factors. If it were all social contribution, then when the top did better, they would be contributing to everybody's well-being. That trickle-down hasn't happened. We've seen median income, people in the middle, actually worse off than they were 25 years ago.
If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.
The major economic policy challenges facing the nation today - pick your favorites among the usual suspects of low public and household savings, concerns about educational quality and achievement, high and rising income inequality, the large imbalances between our social insurance commitments and resources - are not about monetary policy.
Arthur Laffer's idea, that lowering taxes could increase revenues, was logically correct. If tax rates are high enough, then people will go to such lengths to avoid them that cutting taxes can increase revenues. What he was wrong about was in thinking that income tax rates were already so high in the 1970s that cutting them would raise revenues.
And wages - we'll see the end of this decline we're having. The median income in America is down 10% in just the last four years. That's got to stop. We've got to start seeing rising wages and job growth.
Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
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