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Is 40 percent a good or a bad number? On first reflection, it may seem impressive that 60 percent of those starting out in the bottom make it out. But most of them do not make it far out. Only a third make it to the top three fifths. Whether this is a level of upward mobility with which we should be satisfied is a question usefully approached by way of the following thought experiment: If you’re reading this essay, chances are pretty good that your household income puts you in one of the top two fifths, or that you can expect to be there at age 40. (We’re talking about roughly $90,000 for an entire household.) How would you feel about your child’s having only a 17 percent chance of achieving the equivalent status as an adult? That’s how many kids with parents in the bottom fifth around 1970 made it to the top two-fifths by the early 2000s.[8] In fact, if the last generation is any guide, your child growing up in the top two-fifths today will have a 60 percent chance of being in the top two fifths as an adult. That’s the impact of picking the right parents — increasing the chances of ending up middle- to upper-middle class by a factor of three or four.
Moreover, on the topic of income disparity, it's also false that the richest represent "risk takers" and entrepreneurs. Most of the top 0.1% are business executives. This is the group that doesn't invent anything and gets golden parachutes if their risky ventures go south. The ones that are really taking the risk are the workers, who will lose their jobs should the executives' plans fail:
The following chart tells the story. It shows inflation-adjusted GDP per capita and median family income from 1947 (the earliest year for which the income data are available) to 2007. To facilitate comparison of the over-time trends, each is indexed to its 1973 level. Since the mid-to-late 1970s, growth of income at the median has been slow — very slow — relative to growth of the economy. The current decade, with no improvement at all in median income, is especially striking.
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The disconnect between economic growth and middle-class income growth is due largely to rising inequality. In the past several decades much of the economy’s growth has gone to those at the top of the income distribution. link
If you don't like where you are financially in your life, then do something about it!
Stop with the EXCUSES and blaming the country for your failures.
If your job is being outsourced or has become less in demand, who's fault is it for not changing careers or thinking ahead?
Immigrants legal and illegal are coming here and STILL making a good living in THIS BAD ECONOMY.
I have at least 2 families that can't even speak english that bought houses on my block within the last 2-3 years!
There is a difference between lack of motivation and lack of opportunity. Sure it is easy to say, get a better job or get a better education but those can be difficult to put into practice.
If you throw 100 mice into a five gallon bucket few mice will find a way out. The only way many of them will get out is to climb onto the backs of their fellow mice, the success of a few comes at the expense of the many. If you raise the walls fewer mice can reach the top of the wall and succeed, if you lower the walls and increase opportunities for all more mice find a way to succeed and there are fewer mice dying at the bottom of the bucket.
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Stop with the EXCUSES and blaming the country for your failures.
I guess that would have been your advice to the victims of the dust bowl and great depression. I am sure you feel all that was all their fault, too. Watch the Grapes of Wrath once, walk thru a poor inner city neighborhood today... Seeing and feeling how others cope might give you some empathy.
Last edited by buzzards27; 01-16-2012 at 08:41 AM..
walk thru a poor inner city neighborhood today... Seeing and feeling how others cope might give you some empathy.
Sir, I don't need to walk through a poor inner city, I LIVED IT and so has my family before me INCLUDING sitting at the back of the bus, picking fruit and sundown towns.
When people learn to stop blaming the government and learn to help themselves with all the opportunity that is readily available, they will be in a better place.
Everything that you've posted in this thread is corroborated in "Winner Take All: Politics," complete with footnotes to verify its accuracy. To continue to insist that there has not been a policy to protect the top 1%
over the last 30 years is to live in denial. In fact, they richest among us have enjoyed an increase of nearly 260% since 1979. It's amusing to see people act as though the ultra-wealthy must be protected at all cost, including the deconstruction of programs designed to aid the poor and the elderly. According to Hacker and Pierson, American income inequality is the highest in the advanced industrialized world. The poor and those on fixed incomes aren't envious; they're too busy trying to keep their bills paid and their kids fed. Lazy? How many millions of Americans are working two and even three jobs just to get by? The situation is obscene, and for some reason I highly doubt that posters who defend "trickle down" while attacking the middle class and those in poverty are of the 1%; those folks are too busy shopping in Paris or skiing in Switzerland to spend hours posting here at C-D. They do have their ardent admirerers to do the work for them, of course.
Sir, I don't need to walk through a poor inner city, I LIVED IT and so has my family before me.
When people learn to stop blaming the government and learn to help themselves with all the opportunity that is readily available, they will be in a better place.
Does the system need work? Yes of course it does.
But please stop with the no opportunity B.S.
So have I, second oldest of six kids, in the 1960's my mom was given $50 a week to buy food and household goods. I am the only one to pull myself out. The others didn't find the opportunity and did not have the intelligence and drive to push thru failure. Most people don't succeed getting out, see the chart above from MTAtech. Upward mobility, climbing out of that five gallon bucket isn't for everyone. That said, we either provide opportunity, based on their abilities, for EVERYONE or we end up supporting the ones that fail easily.
So have I, second oldest of six kids, in the 1960's my mom was given $50 a week to buy food and household goods. I am the only one to pull myself out. The others didn't find the opportunity and did not have the intelligence and drive to push thru failure. Most people don't succeed getting out, see the chart above from MTAtech. Upward mobility, climbing out of that five gallon bucket isn't for everyone. That said, we either provide opportunity, based on their abilities, for EVERYONE or we end up supporting the ones that fail easily.
Exactly.
What behindthescreen chooses to do is deny the obvious. Over the last 30 years policies have been changed to favor and benefit the top 1% (actually, the top 0.1% -- 60 percent of the top 1% is concentrated in the top 0.1%) and now when the bottom 99% complain, we are faced with inequality deniers and inequality apologists, who insist that inequality is justifiable because those at the top are job creators and create new products.
However, when looks at the data (previously posted above) if you add together nonfinance executives, “financial professions”, real estate, and lawyers, you’ve got more than 70 percent of the total who are just business executives who don't especially create jobs (in fact, many have exported jobs), take personal risk or invent anything -- they just have managed to get large compensation, with large golden parachutes if they fail.
Immigrants legal and illegal are coming here and STILL making a good living in THIS BAD ECONOMY.
I have at least 2 families that can't even speak english that bought houses on my block within the last 2-3 years!
I'd lay odds that they work under the table for cash, get food stamps and AFDC for their kids, use the hospital ER for a runny nose and drive unregistered, uninsured automobiles.
Illegal immigration is nothing more than job theft by criminals who don't have to play by the same rules as citizens.
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