Economic inequality in the United States has been
receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting
richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.
The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household
was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent
decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage
Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median
point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number
of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the
net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.
The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the
95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population
had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do
slice of the population, household net worth increased
14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research, by economists like Edward
Wolff at New York University, has shown even greater gains in
wealth for the richest 1 percent of households.
For households at the median level of net worth, much of
the damage has occurred since the start of the last recession in 2007. Until
then, net worth had been rising for the typical household, although at a slower
pace than for households in higher wealth brackets. But much of the gain for
many typical households came from the rising value of their homes. Exclude that
housing wealth and the picture is worse: Median net worth began to decline even
earlier.
“The housing bubble basically hid a trend of declining
financial wealth at the median that began in 2001,” said Fabian T. Pfeffer, the
University of Michigan professor who is lead author of the Russell Sage
Foundation study.
The reasons for these declines are complex and
controversial, but one point seems clear: When only a few people are winning
and more than half the population is losing, surely something is amiss. Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/business/the-typical-household-now-worth-a-third-less.html?_r=1
Comments
By
2003, the federal government had already sown the seeds of our demise. NAFTA
passed in 1993 and the auto industry was abandoning Detroit, but the other
manufacturers had not left the U.S. and we had a “war economy”. Our National Debt was $5 trillion. Laws like the Community Reinvestment Act and
HUD rules forced Banks to make bad loans. They bundled them into securities
that became worthless. The 2008 Meltdown was totally preventable.
By 2013,
most manufacturing had left our shores and the federal government had added
another $12 trillion to the National Debt.
The federal government also continued to spend twice as much as it took
in, continued to disallow oil and gas exploration, launched debilitating EPA
and other regulations to steal our farms and close our hydro and coal-fired
electrical power plants, maintained open borders and increased immigration to 2
million a year and squandered $1 trillion a year on the global warming scam.
Also, the Federal Reserve has increased the money supply by 450% and dollar
decline is inevitable.
Thinking
that they were helping our largest companies with NAFTA, federal government
policies are decimating their U.S. customer base. We are now facing further economic decline
accompanied by 10% inflation over the next 45 years. Excessive immigration is the sole reason for
our high unemployment and Democrats want to increase it even more.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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