American wealth gap

[danaeris]

I don't agree with some of the more absurd claims this guy makes earlier on in his maunderings, but the links, at least, are interesting.
For those interested in the theory that the wealth gap is widening in the United States

Comments

widening weath gap

[admiralthrawn.livejournal.com]

There's a recent series in the NY times on this subject, some of which are good. One of their more interesting points was that the gap between rich and poor isn't getting much worse, it's the gap between the insanely rich and the just-normally-rich that is exponentially growing -- the top tenth of a percent is what's rocketing away from everyone else at unprecedented speed, the top ten percent aren't.

That said, I think this guy's sources are being used rather stupidly out of context; monthly layoffs and job figures are notoriously inaccurate (they come out with revisions of these figures a couple months later which usually change things radically, and even when they don't, there are huge shifts from one month to the next, and the figures are relative -- may layoffs being massively up from april in this case mostly means that april was quite good, not that may was bad), and are also mostly irrelevant to his thesis -- it's not how many jobs were gained or lost this month, it's how many there are in aggregate, so he should be citing something about the unemployment rate (or the fraction of people employed or the average wage of hourly employees or any of a dozen other things more relevant to how well the lower-income fraction of the country is faring).

I also disagree completely with his thesis that we're heading for a class war; while I agree that weath divisions are expanding, I think we're actually headed much more for culture war -- much as he seems to be trying to claim that the rich are conservatives, the reality is that we're not splitting as a country along wealth lines, we're getting polarized along conservative/liberal lines, and both sides have a sizeable share of every wealth demographic.

Re: widening weath gap

[iclysdale.livejournal.com]

I'll actually go further than that -- it's at this point a fairly well known fact backed up by a number of studies that in fact, in America, wealth and conservatism are on the whole inversely correlated. (Yes, there are lots of other factors that come into play, but there's a very strong correlation.)

The heartblood of the Democratic Party in the US is in urban communities, which tend to have significantly higher per capita incomes than their rural counterparts. Michael Gastner drew a map of the 2004 election results which clearly drives that point home -- you can spot the blue urban enclaves.

Glittering Eye put together a table showing the states that receive the most and least federal financial aid per capita -- comparing their list to the election results shows clearly that the strongly Democratic states are those that received the least in financial aid, grants, and subsidies.

In Canada, you're seeing the same things happening. The NDP lost the last of their Saskatchewan rural seats in the last election (albeit by heartbreaking margins, and they may yet win them back) - and Saskatchewan has always had a very different rural culture. After that, the seats of our left-wing party were restricted to downtown urban centres - downtown Ottawa, downtown Toronto, downtown Vancouver, downtown Winnipeg, and downtown Halifax. Ridings with lots of young, well educated professionals, and with substantially higher per capita incomes than the rural seats dominated by the hard-right Alliance-turned-Conservative.

If there's a class war coming, it's very distinct from that culture war -- and most of the working and urban poor really aren't interested in hearing some liberal intellectual's version of what the revolution should look like.

Re: widening weath gap

[iclysdale.livejournal.com]

In Canada, you're seeing the same things happening. The NDP lost the last of their Saskatchewan rural seats in the last election (albeit by heartbreaking margins, and they may yet win them back) - and Saskatchewan has always had a very different rural culture. After that, the seats of our left-wing party were restricted to downtown urban centres - downtown Ottawa, downtown Toronto, downtown Vancouver, downtown Winnipeg, and downtown Halifax. Ridings with lots of young, well educated professionals, and with substantially higher per capita incomes than the rural seats dominated by the hard-right Alliance-turned-Conservative.

Actually, just to correct myself here, there are in fact still a very few exceptions, which however thoroughly serve to prove my point. Bev Desjarlais, for example, represents Churchill, a riding covering most of northern Manitoba, including lots of logging communities and First Nations reserves. While a firm socialist and labour advocate, Desjarlais went against the party whip to vote against same-sex marriage bills, strongly opposes gun control, and in general votes with the social conservatives on a wide variety of social issues. Peter Stoffer, from the north shore of Nova Scotia, was the other NDP member to conspicuously miss all of the votes on the same-sex marriage bills, and similarly represents the social conservative end of the party.

Re: widening weath gap

[earthdog.livejournal.com]

I would like to second what you say about this. The new gap is from the upper-middle class to the hyper-rich. I know people who own million dollar houses and still feel they cannot afford what they want.

I think the standards for middle class, upper middle class, well off and rich are changing. This is part of the crunch.