Economist Says Greatest Economic Challenge Is Income Inequality While Working Families Suffer

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/Channels/Story.aspx?ID=1355365

1/31/2011

By Doug Cunningham

Dr. James Parrot of New York’s Fiscal Policy Institute says the greatest economic challenge in the U.S. is the fact that middle income families have been struggling to survive while income inequality is at an all-time high. He argues that tax an economic policies need to address the concentration of income flowing to the tiny few while workers struggle for survival.

: “Given the trend over the last 30 years where we've seen the acceleration of income gains going to people at the top - nationally the top one percent, the wealthiest one percent, had ten percent of all income in 1980 - today it's 23 or 24 percent. We've had economic growth. But it certainly hasn't been the case that a rising tide has lifted all boats. Middle income families have been treading water for the last thirty years.
I think this is fundamentally our greatest economic challenge. And certainly in the context of the state budget crises, it shouldn't be too much to expect high-income people, who have benefitted tremendously from this income concentration trend to pay a little bit more in state taxes."

[mike_c]

1. rec'd!

kickity kick kick! :kick:

[Ikonoklast]

2. I remember Paul Volcker back in the eighties saying American's standard of living must fall.

I didn't realize he meant only for those of us without trust funds.

[ThomCat]

3. Of course that's what he meant.

Would anyone ever suggest that the rich must sacrifice anything? Would the rich every have allowed such a thing, especially in the 80s?

:grr:

That was when the bloodshed really started and they really began openly acting like parasites upon society, rebuilding the gilded age.

I think Paul Krugman is right, that we had a brief period after WWII of relative financial equality that was not the norm, and now we are returning to the historical norm of huge financial inequality. The gilded age was the norm, and we are returning to it unless we show some real historical nerve that our society just doesn't seem to have.

[Ikonoklast]

4. We were the only functioning manufacturing economy post-WWII.

That was a twenty-year anomaly.

We will never see the likes of that again.

Cheap labor is the mantra of all businesses now, and until working people in this country lower their standard of living to match third-world hourly wages, manufacturing will flow to cheap labor nations.

The wealthy, however, care not for nations and such, they can go be parasites anywhere on Earth. Crooked, easily bought off politicians of any nation would welcome them and their bribe money with open arms.

If the Koch brothers suddenly realized that they could sell all they own in this country and make more by buying up and investing in, say, Viet Nam, they'd be there tomorrow, and never look back.