The Truth about Inequality - Couverture souple

Meierding, Loren

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 169839733X ISBN 13 : 9781698397337

Editeur : Independently published, 2019

Synopsis

Americans listening to the Democratic politicians, the media, political pundits, and many economists believe income and wealth inequality in the U.S. is extreme and has gotten much worse in recent years. The U.S. should emulate the much greater income and wealth equality in Sweden and Denmark. The top one percent is presumably stealing income gains. Households with lower incomes have wages that haven't increased in real terms in four decades. Fourteen percent of households are poor. A family can't survive on a minimum wage. This book was written to shed light on the facts about income and wealth inequality in the U.S. In fact inequality in the U.S. is not nearly as great as persons with a superficial acquaintance with the data believe. American voters should have more faith in the fairness of the U.S. economic system than those who would undermine it by socializing industries and trying to punish the rich. The facts are that all segments of the income distribution are much better off than they were four decades ago. Inequality has not increased much at all since 1989. Current income inequality is not much different from inequality in 1774 and better than many periods since then, although inequality did increase slightly during the 1980s. If one compares the U.S. and Sweden using the same disposable statistics with inclusion of foreign source income and the same method of household adjustment, Sweden's equality is only slightly better. The top one percent's share of disposable income is not much higher than its typical share since 1860 and less than during the 1920s. Incomes of average U.S. households will not grow faster than growth in the National Income and Gross Domestic Product. Growth in National Income slowed after 2000 from excessive regulation and poor government economic policies, reducing income growth for nearly everyone. In recent decades households in the bottom income quintiles have done better than average. Only about 3 percent of Americans are really poor. Nearly everyone has more income to spend than their poverty line indicates. The very few families with head of household at minimum wage already earn $15 an hour when government wage subsidies are included. They also have Medicaid coverage.With respect to wealth inequality U.S. marketable wealth inequality has increased slightly since the Great Recession of 2008, but is still about the same as Sweden and better than Denmark. The important wealth measure however--augmented wealth-- includes private and public pensions wealth and employer or government medical coverage. When augmented wealth is considered U.S. wealth equality is better than it has ever been.The main point of the book is to argue that implementing policies redistributing income and wealth inevitably reduce future prosperity for nearly everyone. Socialists believe that fairness and social justice require reducing inequality and are almost never satisfied short of taking draconian measures. But if redistribution will lead to much reduced prosperity in the long run, how can that be a morally justified position to take? Wouldn't we expect that households with lower incomes would rather have their income increasing 1 percent a year to 20 percent more in 20 years than remaining the same with the top incomes losing 20 percent 20 years down the road? Fairness means people get what they deserve. Much of the time what they deserve differs based on their work effort and degree of contribution to the economy. Of course there are times when fairness required benefits be divided equally.It is unfortunate so many young American voters vote for socialists. When they do so they just shoot themselves in the foot economically. U.S. entitlements are already set up in a way that transfers income and wealth from the young to the old at an increasing rate from year to year. Obamacare's guaranteed issue magnifies the problem. The Left strongly resists any changes that would be fairer to the young.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 169839733X
• ISBN 13: 9781698397337
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 249
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg