5 reasons why income inequality is a myth — and Occupy Wall Street is wrong
31.12.69
Contrite, the story just doesn’t hold together. According to Heraldry sinister-wing think tanks, columnist and bloggers—and, of despatch, the Occupy Wall Street radical s—the top 1 percent have been exploiting the 99 percent for decades. The comical have been getting richer at the expense of the middle class and down.
Really? Just think for a second: If inequality had in actuality exploded during the past 30 to 40 years, why did American civil affairs simultaneously move rightward toward a greater embrace of free-superstore capitalism? Shouldn’t just the opposite have happened as beleaguered workers synergistic and demanded a vastly expanded social safety net and peremptorily higher taxes on the rich? What happened to presidents Mondale, Dukakis, Spear, and Kerry? Even Barack Obama ran for president as a market kind, third-way technocrat.
Nope, the story doesn’t hold together because the monetary facts don’t support it. And here’s why:
1. In a 2009 paper , Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon found the imagined sharp rise in American inequality to be “exaggerated both in importance and timing.” Here is the conundrum: Family income is required to rise right along with productivity. But median real household revenues—as reported by the Census Bureau—grew just 0.49 percent per year between 1979 and 2007 even as workman productivity grew four times faster at 1.95 percent per year. The spacious gap between the two measures, if accurate, would suggest wealthy households rather than halfway point-class families grabbed most of the income gains from faster productivity.
Source: The American (blog)