Tuesday Night Owls. Study: Richest 1% has snatched $50 trillion from bottom 90% in past four decades
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Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week.
At CommonDreams, Brett Wilkins writes—‘$2.5 Trillion Theft’: Study Shows Richest 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From Bottom 90% in Recent Decades:
New research published Monday found that the top 1% of U.S. income earners have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% over the past several decades, and that the median worker salary would be around twice as high today as it was in 1945 if pay had kept pace with economic output over that period.
The study’s authors, Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, examined income distribution and economic growth in the United States from 1945 to the present. The researchers found stark differences between income distribution from 1945 to 1974 and 1975 to 2018.
According to the study—which was funded by the Seattle-based Fair Work Center—the median salary of a full-time U.S. worker is currently about $50,000. Adjusted for inflation using the consumer price index, workers at or below the current median income now earn less than half of what they would have if incomes had kept pace with economic growth. This means that if salaries had kept pace with economic output, the median worker pay would be between $92,000 and $102,000 today, depending on how inflation is calculated.
Had the more equitable distribution of the roughly 30-year postwar period continued apace, the total annual income of the bottom 90% of American workers would have been $2.5 trillion higher in 2018, or an amount equal to about 12% of GDP. In other words, the upward redistribution of income has enriched the 1% by some $47 trillion—which would now be more than $50 trillion—at the expense of American workers.
David Rolf, a Seattle labor organizer, president of the Fair Work Center, and founder of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 775, is more blunt. He calls this “the $2.5 trillion theft.” […]
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“The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right.”
~~Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings (1892)
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Foreign help not on the horizon:
Four U.S. soldiers have died the past four days — glorious victories in Bush’s “flypaper” War Against Terror.
You see, as Bush, Andrew Sullivan, and other Chickenhawk Neocons remind us—we should celebrate every time U.S. forces are killed in Iraq, because those very same terrorists would otherwise be killing Americans here in the U.S.
Dead Americans in the U.S.—bad. Dead Americans in Iraq—good. Thank the heavens we can enjoy the benefits of good, sound Chickenhawk Neocon thinking.
Yet given our great successes in getting our US troops killed in Iraq, not the U.S., it’s difficult to understand why we can’t garner any international help.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Orange Hitler is now Orange Mengele. Speaking of war crimes, US risks in Yemen rise while Trump attacks the ICC. Joan McCarter is at a loss over how Feinstein has memory holed the blue slip fights. Meanwhile, the Mother of all Shutdowns looms.
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