On September 12, 2019, Sam Pizzigati writes on Inequality.org:
he weight of the wealth that sits at the top of America’s economic order isn’t just squeezing dollars out of the wallets of average Americans. That concentrated wealth is shearing years off of American lives.
The latest evidence for that squeeze on American wallets comes from the Census Bureau. Researchers there have just released results from their latest annual sampling of U.S. incomes. In 2018, the new Census stats show, incomes for typical American households saw a “marked slowdown.”
In effect, average Americans have spent this entire century on a treadmill getting nowhere fast. The nation’s median — most typical — households pocketed 2.3 percent fewer real dollars in 2018 than they earned in 2000.
The “vast majority” of American households, note Economic Policy Institute analysts Elise Gould and Julia Wolfe, “have still not fully recovered from the deep losses suffered in the Great Recession.”
America’s most affluent households have been having no such problem. Average top 5 percent incomes have increased 13 percent overall since 2000, to $416,520. The new Census Bureau figures, based on a sampling of U.S. households, tell us that top 5 percenters are now collecting 23.1 percent of the nation’s household income.
But these Census Bureau figures significantly understate just how much income America’s richest are annually grabbing, mainly because Census researchers “top code” high incomes to keep the identity of sampled deep pockets confidential. All incomes above fixed top-code levels get recorded at the top code. These levels have changed over the years, but the Census Bureau’s continuing reliance on top coding leaves us with figures that fudge the real extent of our inequality.
Analyses based on other data sources — like IRS tax return records — show that top 1 percenters alone are pulling down over 20 percent of America’s household income, essentially triple the top 1 percent income share of a half-century ago.
What impact is this top-heavy distribution of America’s income having on Americans of modest means? Increasing inequality, a just-released Government Accountability Office study makes clear, is killing many of us off before our time.
This new GAO research tracks how life has played out for Americans who happened to be between 51 and 61 years old in 1992.
Americans with household wealth that placed them in that age cohort’s most affluent 20 percent, the GAO found, did fairly well over the next two decades plus. Over three-quarters of them — 75.5 percent — went on to find themselves still alive and kicking in 2014, the most recent year with full stats available.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, a different story. Among Americans in the poorest 20 percent of this age group, under half — 47.6 percent — were still waking up in 2014. In other words, the poorest of the Americans the GAO studied had just a 50-50 chance of living into 2014. The most affluent had three chances in four.
“The inequality of life expectancy,” as economist Gabriel Zucman puts it, “is exploding in the U.S.”
The new GAO numbers ought to surprise no one. We’ve seen over the past quarter-century a steady stream of research studies that show consistent links between rising inequality and shorter lifespans.
And mortality trends in the United States reflect similar dynamics worldwide wherever income and wealth are concentrating. The more unequal a society becomes, the less healthy the society. The nations with the narrowest gaps between rich and poor turn out to have the longest lifespans.
The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency that services Congress, conducted its new inequality research after a request from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). He draws a simple lesson from the GAO’s sobering new numbers.
“We must put an end to the obscene income and wealth inequality in our country,” Sanders noted after the GAO report’s September 9 release. “If we do not urgently act to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole generation will be condemned to early death.”
Gary Reber Comments:
Yes, concentrated capital asset wealth KILLS.
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor — the equivalency of mass murder — the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
We must recognize that human life, dignity, and liberty require that each person has the power and independent means to support and sustain one’s own life, dignity, and liberty –– i.e. through one’s own private property rights (personal or shared control) and rights to the full fruits or “profits” in what one owns. Thus, we, as a society need to aim to structurally diffuse economic power by democratizing access to capital ownership for each person.
At the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) we subscribe to a school of thought or intellectual movement, which we term “personalism.”
Personalism focuses on the reality of each person’s unique dignity and promotes the fundamental human rights of each person. In contrast to Individualism, Personalism also recognizes the social nature of human beings, who as members of groups can create traditions, laws and institutions to support each one’s individual well-being and dignity. In contrast to Collectivism, Personalism rejects the idea that human rights are created by the State or the collective; it holds that human rights are inherent within the nature of each human being. Personalism seeks the empowerment and full development of every person, not only to fulfill one’s own human potential and individual good, but also to be liberated and educated to work for the good of others and for the Common Good. It offers principles for restructuring social, political and economic institutions and laws toward that end.
Economic Personalism is an economic system (and subset of “Personalism”) centered upon the dignity and economic empowerment of each human person. The JUST Third Way version of Economic Personalism recognizes two categories of inputs that each person can contribute to, and gain consumption income from, the production of marketable goods and services. These are (1) one’s labor, including manual, intellectual, managerial, entrepreneurial, etc., and (2) one’s capital, including land, structures, machinery, patents, etc. The chief institutions for universalizing equal access to the means of acquiring and owning productive capital, while respecting the private property rights of current owners, include a just monetary system, a just tax system and a just inheritance system that remove barriers to equal opportunity for every citizen to become a capital owner in the future.
