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Politics and Economics
A select group of Americans really did see their incomes rise spectacularly and not just on paper. These were executives, managers, financial professionals, and technology professionals - occupations that often come with wealth-based income streams, such as stock options.
Is that it? Is rising inequality mostly an illusion, a matter of how income is being categorized and counted? A shift in accounting practices? No. There's more to the story.
If you don't count the income of the top .1 percent, then the income share of the top 1 percent in the US has actually gone down over the past 30+ years.
... a lot of people want to grow their wealth, especially for retirement. That's where risky assets come in. Risky assets are where the big bucks are made and lost. Risky assets include volatile investments, real estate other than one's own home, or a business. Households heavily invested in risky assets tend to experience big swings in wealth.
...the rich often own businesses or are self-employed professionals, and many grow their money in the stock market - either directly invested or through mutual funds, annuities, trusts, and pension funds...
...something to the effect, “wealth matters much more than income anyway”. And then they point out the super-rich own the lion’s share of wealth in the US and the world...The implication being if we just redistributed a bunch of that wealth, the war on poverty would be over! Is that so?
Tell subjects they scored in the bottom 20% on some performance measure and they'll feel rotten. Expose women to a 15-minute video of gorgeous models and their self-esteem will take a beating. So, sure, you can make experimental subjects feel bad by exposing them to certain conditions in a lab, but do those conditions prevail in everyday life?
What stands out in this map is that Red States are less densely populated than Blue States. They're more rural with plenty of room for people to spread out. Since rural homes are bigger and traveling distances farther, it should come as no surprise that Red States consume more energy per capita than Blue States. This is a function of landscape and livelihood, not politics. If you're a farmer, you don't tootle around in a Prius - you've got a pick-up.
According to the Conference of State Legislatures, net metering policies "have facilitated the expansion of renewable energy through on-site, also known as distributed, generation." Common distributed generation sources include solar panels, natural gas, micro-turbines, methane digesters, and small wind power generators.
The hypothesis: many Republicans would like to see a reduction in Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, whether or not they believe in anthropogenic climate change. Please see Part I of this series for how I arrived at this hypothesis. ... Now, let's test the hypothesis.
Here in a glance are the politics of each state, the most popular governors and the best performing states in terms of fiscal health, level of inequality, affordability, poverty rate, and labor market participation.
...in 1901 the average US family’s income was $750 - worth about $2300 a century later. Before 1940, households spent more than a third of their income on food alone.
Meanwhile, the National Conference of State Legislatures released a report on the partisan composition of state legislatures as of November 8, 2017. I figured that state legislatures are largely responsible for the fiscal health of their states and was curious how the state fiscal rankings matched up with the political composition of their legislatures. This is what I found...
"Since the payoffs of free riders depend on the total contribution to the public good, the only way to punish free riders in this experiment was to stop contributing. This is the tragedy of the commons.” - Section 4.7 Public good contributions and peer punishment - The Economy
That adds up to 75% of households within the lowest income quintile that are either families headed by women or individuals living alone. In other words, fathers living with their families are mostly missing from the poorest households in this country.
One surprise is that so many of the low-income households are owner-occupied. But remember, per our previous posts, that 57% of the lowest income category are headed by individuals who are 55 or older. A
My purpose here ... is to understand why some people get stuck in poverty, because you can't hope to fix a problem you don't understand. And part of that is figuring out who needs help and what kind of help. Sometimes we're talking about old or disabled people, who don't need a job - they just need to help in paying their bills. Sometimes we're talking about young people whose poverty is transient (see that 14% in the lowest income group with a Bachelor's Degree or more?), who don't really need special assistance from the government. And then there are the poorly educated and single parent families.
A few observations. Lower income households skew old: 57% are 55 or older, an age group likely to be dominated by retirees and disabled folk. Affluent households skew middle aged, but once they hit the golden years, their numbers dwindle...
In other words, substantial majorities of all political groups feel they've achieved the American Dream or are at least getting there. Yet we hear all the time that "the American dream is dead". Take this Chicago Tribune commentary, "The American Dream is dead, and voters are angry". To quote...
As it is, we already have 23 million prime-age (24-54) adults who are not part of the US labor force. Many are unmarried, childless men with limited education and skills. Their numbers keep growing: the rate of inactive prime-age men has more than doubled since the 1970, when it was 4% It is now 11%.