Yep, I know rich people who were born on third base, but want to act like they hit a triple. But let’s not bullshit each other, shall we? When it comes to economic status, and even personal health, there’s an awful lot of luck in this. I’m not saying “don’t try,” BTW, just “Let’s avoid the pride that cometh before a fall.”

There’s a Polish riddle about this: Q: How do you make a woman into a lady? A: Start with the grandmother.
…

Meanwhile…Stop the presses! I made a mistake! Mesa econoguy is correct, his figures for median wage were adjusted for inflation. His figures were not, however, about the bottom 90% of taxpayers, which is what the previous income immobility argument brought up here: “According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez–confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office–between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent.” Mesa Econoguy cites the bottom 100%, not the bottom 90%. Gosh, someone should learn to read!

Incidentally, Mesa Econoguy, the way to correct someone else, at least in civilized society is *not* “Learn how to read, idiot.” (Sheesh! not even an exclamation point!) It’s “you are mistaken.” Let’s disagree without being disagreeable, shall we?

In any case, without the income of that top 10% the median wage would be falling.

…

Kyle Bennett believes my argument is “circular” because “To the extent that mobility is diminishing, an hypothesis that no one here has made a serious effort to prove or disprove, history tells us that the single greatest factor likely to cause it is government interference in the economy.”

Yoshidad says: I won’t deny that government policy is important, but where’s your proof that the “single greatest factor” in diminishing economic mobility is government interference. I thought we had 30 years of Reagan-ites de-regulating everything under the sun. When will government interference be lowered enough to detect a rise in income mobility? This contention doesn’t pass the sniff test.

And it sure looks to me like the point of the Business Week article was exactly to *prove* diminishing income mobility. And that has been diminishing even during the supposedly effective Reaganite de-regulations. Mr. Bennett: Are you reading something else?

Mr. Bennett’s statement also assumes that government only “interferes” with the economy. Is making farm-to-market roads or printing money interfering? How about making a secondary market for mortgages or student loans? Or is that “helping” rather than “interfering.” The constant meme on this blog is that government can do no right. Should we have privately minted money? Or what about the Centers for Disease control… shut it down? (IMHO, a better question is this: Did the government miss opportunities to actively help the economy?)

…Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe government is perfect, either.

Mr. Bennett continues: “Those programs to help the poor do help the poor to become marginally better off, at the expense of tending to keep them among the poorest bracket of income earners.” How do we know this? Silence…

And does the lack of social safety net cost more than it saves? For example, are the junkies doing $10,000 worth of damage by stealing copper from the school’s boiler to get $70 for a fix really “kept in their place” by government programs, or the lack thereof? Is that even relevant? (And who’s most focused on class envy, the junkies or the rich folks writing in Coyoteblog?)

Bennett says: “Income mobility, at least by anecdotal evidence partly supported by official statistics, is still quite high in this country, especially when compared to most other countries.”

This contention is not supported by the facts. For example, this 2006 article says: “Although the United States occupies a middle ground in international comparisons of occupational mobility, its ranking in terms of income mobility is lower. Both the United States and Great Britain have significantly less economic mobility than Canada, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and possibly Germany; and the United States may be a less economically mobile society than Great Britain.45 “

Ouch! Less mobile than the notoriously class-bound Blighty! Double ouch! So “middling,” not “quite high” is how to characterize U.S. economic mobility. Notice, BTW, that the Scandinavian socialists beat the U.S. in terms of economic mobility. Sad when you learn you’ve believed a lie, no?

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Solar lad is unhappy that I call the folks who predicted Clinton’s tax raise would be a disaster “voodoo” economists. Pointless? Really? So did we have an economic meltdown during the Clinton years as they predicted? Face it, the prognostication that higher taxes alone would sabotage the economy were false. Period.

As for job creation, and why I left out Carter: Here is the full story about job creation, covering the Republican side too. Although the news for Carter was not all sunny, an excerpt debunks Solar Lad’s claim, at least about job creation: “Government statistics do indeed show that the economy lost 1.5 million jobs in Mr. Bush’s [the current president's] years in office. Those same measures would also rank Jimmy Carter as one of the most successful presidents.”

Solar lad posts again: “there’s almost no social mobility in Sweden whatsoever” .. contradicted by the article above which shows economic mobility in Sweden is actually higher than in the U.S.

….

Again, my young right-wingers, the points you make are noble in effort, but lacking in substance. I suggest that you consult reality, rather than ideology, and then perhaps our exchange will be mutually profitable.

Job creation numbers are as much a product of demographics as any other factor. During the 1990′s the smallest population groups of the 20th century – those born in the 1930′s – began retiring. They were replaced in the workforce by a group nearly as large as the early Boomers – those born in the mid to late 1970′s.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html

In addition, immigration added millions of new workers during the 1990′s.

Which is why the “poor” in Sweden are pretty well-off, but also why there’s almost no social mobility in Sweden whatsoever, with the exception of those lucky enough to have great talent in the entertainment or athletic fields – in other words, those whose income leaps, rather than builds incrementally. There’s no incremental mobility in Sweden.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

Yeah, the 50s and 60s, when the average number of vehicles per household was under “1″, (and those autos had no seatbelts), when the average home size was under HALF of what it is now, when medical
care featured a lot of dyin’, when a NYC-to-LA phone call cost the equivalent of $ 10/min, when people wore formal attire to travel by plane and all airline tickets cost the equivalent of today’s “first class” fares, when there was a standing military draft and the Cold War was always threatening to go hot and destroy the civilized world, the era of “Jim Crow”, a time when blacks couldn’t vote in many states and minorities and women were routinely denied access to many institutes of higher education, particularly professional post-grad schools, and many jobs, including most of the highest-paid or executive…

Panglossian nostalgia is no substitute for facts. That hardly seems like a better era from a standard-of-living perspective, and additionally, publicly naming such racist and misogynist times as a “golden era” provides an unwelcome and appalling insight into a troubled mind.

And the poor rich people, carrying so much of the tax burden while 43 million don’t pay income tax, seem to have forgotten that [...] those 43 million are now paying four times as much in the doubly regressive FICA (social security) taxes.

While FICA is regressive, a) the lowest income-earners receive the EITC, which more than makes up for FICA, b) who benefits most from SS, the poor or the rich ?, and c) most of the “poor rich people” pay FICA too, in addition to Federal income taxes, and since more high than low income-earners are self-employed, they’re more likely to be paying DOUBLE the FICA – both the employee and employer parts.

President Total Job creation (millions) Private sector job creation (millions)
Reagan (1981 – 1988) 14.8 13.7
Bush I (1989 – 1992) 3.4 2.0
Clinton (1993 – 2000) 23.1 21.2
Bush II (2001 – 2005) 1.7 0.7

Notice that the Clinton raised the top income tax brackets, and contrary to [insert characteristically gratuitous and pointless ad hominem] assertions that this would lead to economic meltdown, produced many more jobs.

Way to cherry-pick!! Of those four Presidents, Clinton was the ONLY ONE to not have one or more recessions during his terms of office, and Clinton’s era also featured the end-of-Cold-War “peace dividend”. Think that had anything to do with those job-creation numbers ?????

And, why’d you start with Reagan? Why not with Carter? Perhaps because that might tend to undermine your attempted point ?

From the Census data I cite:

Income in current and 2006 CPI-U-RS adjusted dollars

The income numbers do correct for inflation using an index which probably overstates inflation by about 1.2% per year for the last 10 years. They don’t include employer contributions to healthcare or retirement, which understates total income.

Learn how to read, idiot.

Maybe we should count offspring as a capital asset. Rather than building their own earning power, people seem to like creating new earning power in the form of new humans. The investment in child-rearing makes the per-person income appear to grow more slowly. Let’s build robots instead of babies and we’ll all be rich!

Only the rich have time to lump people into classes so they can borrow angst. Somebody must be suffering…let’s find a way to ignore the individual cases (and choices) to demonstrate that people are different and life isn’t fair. Complaining about income equality is a luxury. To me, it makes the whole issue moot. If you’re rich and complaining about income for somebody else, you’re a phony. If you’re poor and complaining about your income relative to somebody else, a) you’re rich enough to complain–so shut up; and, b) shut up and build your skills.

Each person is in charge of his own income mobility. Who cares what the guy down the block or in the next town is doing? Why not focus on helping some distinct individual person you deem an “inequality victim” to increase his earning power? Don’t use your wealth to buy thugs to take my wealth and give it away. Use your wealth to help those you think are suffering. And shut up about it.

To the extent that mobility is diminishing, an hypothesis that no one here has made a serious effort to prove or disprove, history tells us that the single greatest factor likely to cause it is government interference in the economy. Those programs to help the poor do help the poor to become marginally better off, at the expense of tending to keep them among the poorest bracket of income earners. Taxes, while disproportionally paid directly by the highest earners, tends to disproportionally hamper the efforts of the poor to better themselves. And entitlement programs, unions, minimum wage, business regulation, and the like all hurt almost exclusively the mobility of poor and lower middle classes.

Income mobility, at least by anecdotal evidence partly supported by official statistics, is still quite high in this country, especially when compared to most other countries. The greatest threat to that is the socialist’s vicious and barely masked attempts to keep poor people “in their place”, that place being one of desperation, depravity, disillusionment, disenfranchisement, and jealousy. In other words, the perfect constituency to support the socialist’s naked grabs for power they try to claim they need as the solutions for problems they deliberately caused.

Mesa Econoguy cites census data that demonstrates rising incomes. What he omits mentioning is the word “real” in that phrase “real income.” If you correct for inflation, then Piketty, Saez, and CBO figures show no such income rise, as Krugman notes above.

The “evolutionary psychology” post from Les is fascinating. There is actually some class envy, I’m sure. There’s also a case to be made for keeping the rich in touch with conditions for the poor for the sake of civilization’s survival. See Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed “

When would better times be? Perhaps it would be when U.S. economic growth was strongest. That’s the 1950′s and ’60′s when marginal tax brackets for high income people were as high as 92%. Perhaps it would be when public policy created the most jobs. For a look at that, consider this chart:

President Total Job creation (millions)  Private sector job creation (millions)
Reagan (1981 – 1988)   14.8     13.7
Bush I (1989 – 1992)  3.4     2.0
Clinton (1993 – 2000)  23.1     21.2
Bush II (2001 – 2005)  1.7      0.7

Source: bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007, http://www.bls.gov; Dick Alexander, http://www.globalshop.com cited in Ravi Batra’s “The New Golden Age” (p.109)

Notice that the Clinton raised the top income tax brackets, and contrary to the Reaganites and supply-side witch doctors… er, I mean voodoo economists’ assertions that this would lead to economic meltdown, produced many more jobs.

…and yes, I still say it’s bullshit.

Make no mistake. This is part of a long-running attempt by the truly reactionary right to paint all this income kerfuffle as a tempest in a teapot. Again, this is the complete debunk of this meme.

This debunks the myth of income mobility. An excerpt:

“The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

“The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled “Waking Up From the American Dream.” The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society. “

…”According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez–confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office–between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they’re not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

“Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that of a 2001 Heritage Foundation piece, “Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments.” America, they say, isn’t a caste society–people with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa, and the route to wealth is open to all. That’s where those commies at Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have lately become a lot more rigid. “