While CEO compensation is growing exponentially, the 99% have to scrape for gas, food, housing and all else.
The U.S. And Canada’s Middle Class Has Not Grown In Over 30 Years
Only Mexico’s middle class has grown over the past 30 years in North America, while income disparity has increased in Canada and the United States, according to a study here out Tuesday.
“Mexico’s middle class has benefited from urbanization, greater female employment, improved education and better social programs,” said economist Lars Osberg, the author of the report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
Similar trends in Canada and the United States helped maintain middle-class growth until the 1970s, Osberg said, but those trends “have since run out of steam.
“Globalization, technological advances, a drop in unionized work, and a deregulated labour market have contributed to stagnant real incomes for most in Canada and the US since the 1980s,” he said.
Osberg said that income disparity “has accelerated” in both Canada and the United States.
“When the rising savings of the rich are parked in the financial markets, but everyone else falls deeper into debt, a house of cards is created, producing the kind of economic instability that led to the 1929 financial sector crash and the market meltdown of 2008.”
The path to stability “requires either an acceleration of the income growth rate of the bottom 99 percent or a decline in income growth of the top one percent,” Osberg said.
The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.
From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.
But white privilege doesn’t exist right?
Long-Term Unemployment Remains Virtually Unchanged In Economic Recovery
When the US Labor Department releases its latest monthly jobs figures on Friday morning, all eyes will be on the headline number. Rightly or wrongly, with the 2012 election looming the jobs figures have become a monthly report card on Obama’s economic policy. Last month they were disappointing, but still positive. With the focus on jobs growth, or the lack of it, the plight of the long-term unemployed is getting ignored.
According to the official measures in March there were 5.3 million long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) – essentially unchanged from February and accounting for 42.5% of the unemployed.
But that figure under-represents what is going on in the labour market. Another 7.7 million people were working part-time because they couldn’t find full-time work, and another 2.4 million didn’t count because they had stopped looking for work.
Stock markets are recovering. After two years of pay cuts, America’s CEOs are back in the money. Meanwhile, life for those at the bottom of the pay scale has just gotten steadily worse. And for Obama, the sense that the recovery is not reaching ordinary Americans could prove the strongest challenge to his chances of a second term in the White House.
According to the labour department, people who have been unemployed fewer than five weeks face a re-employment rate of 31%. If you are unemployed for more than a year, there’s just a 9% chance you’ll find work.
Study: CEO Pay Increased 127 Times Faster Than Worker Pay Over Last 30 Years
Compensation for chief executives at American companies grew 15 percent in 2011 after a 28 percent rise in 2010, part of a larger trend that has seen CEO pay skyrocket over the last three decades. Workers, on the other hand, have been left behind.
Since 1978, CEO pay at American firms has risen 725 percent, more than 127 times faster than worker pay over the same time period, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute:
From 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation increased more than 725 percent, a rise substantially greater than stock market growth and the painfully slow 5.7 percent growth in worker compensation over the same period.
In 1978, CEOs took home 26.5 times more than the average worker. They now make roughly 206 times more than workers, EPI found. The pay isn’t always tied to the performance of their businesses — as ThinkProgress has noted, CEOs at companies like Bank of America often pocket huge pay increases even as the company’s stock price plummets and jobs are cut.
Workers’ wages aren’t tied to productivity either. Despite substantial gains in productivity since the 1970s, worker pay has remained flat. According to Labor Department data cited by the Huffington Post, inflation-adjusted wages fell 2 percent in 2011.
As a result, American income inequality has skyrocketed, growing worse than it is in countries like Pakistan and Ivory Coast. Wealth inequality is worse than it was even in Ancient Rome. And, as pay skyrockets and tax rates fall for the richest Americans, the rising inequality has left the bottom 95 percent of Americans saddled with more debt than ever before.
Mayor Bloomberg Veto’s Bill That Would’ve Raise Minimum Wage And Calls It Communism
Michael Bloomberg axed the Prevailing Wage bill last week and vowed to veto the Living Wage bill if passed by the City Council.
“Let them eat cake!”
That’s the message Mayor Bloomberg sent New Yorkers with his veto of the Prevailing Wage bill last Wednesday.
With little patience for any measure that could put even the smallest dent in the private sector’s bottom line, Bloomberg has also promised to veto the Living Wage bill.
“By vetoing this legislation, the administration has turned a blind-eye to the suffering of New York residents who are in desperate need of wage-relief,” said Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan).
Actually income inequality is out of control in Bloomberg’s New York with more than 40% of all income in the city going to 1% of the population.
“The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn’t work out so well,” said Michael Bloomberg, “You cannot stop the tides from coming in.”
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced a watered down deal on the living wage agreement Wednesday, which will require businesses receiving $1 million or more in city subsidies and earning more than $5 million a year in revenue to pay their workers at least $11.50 an hour, or $10 with benefits.
Quinn called the bill “the most impactful living-wage law in the United States,” according to Capital New York. After some businesses were exempted from the measure, however, experts say it will effect roughly only 500 New Yorkers.
And yet, Bloomberg has vowed to veto the bill.
The Fortune 500 CEO Now Paid 380 Times As Much As The Average Worker
According to the latest edition of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch report, the gap between CEO pay and worker pay expanded last year. In 2011, CEOs in the Fortune 500 made an average of $12 million, about 380 times what the average worker makes:
The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay between CEOs of the S&P 500 Index companies and U.S. workers widened to 380 times in 2011 from 343 times in 2010. Back in 1980, the average large company CEO only received 42 times the average worker’s pay.
This explosion in pay certainly isn’t justified by corporate performance. In fact, “while the average CEO pay increased 13.9 percent at S&P 500 Index companies in 2011, the S&P 500 Index ended the year at the same level as it started.” Just this week, shareholders at Citigroup voted to reject CEO Vikram Pandit’s pay package (in a non-binding vote), saying that he was collecting millions while the company floundered.
Meanwhile, workers saw their pay increase by just 2.8 percent last year. Already, most of the gains of the nascent economic recovery have been going to the richest Americans (just as they have for recent economic expansions). In 2010, the richest 1 percent captured 93 percent of the nation’s income gains.
Income Inequality By Race And Gender (Must Read)
Today is Equal Pay Day, the day that women completed the extra 3.5 months of work they needed in order to make an equal amount to what men earned in 2011. And while it is fairly common knowledge that women make 77 cents for a man’s dollar in the workplace — which is why we need to work 15.5 months to match a man’s 12 — it’s not as well known that the pay gap is much worse for some women than others. For instance:
Women make less by industry: Women tend to work in lower-paying industries: 68 percent of jobs in education are held by women, as are 78 percent of health and social assistance jobs. But even within those industries where they are the vast majority of employees, women are paid significantly less than their male counterparts. This chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the percentage of men’s income that women make in given sectors. In some of the biggest industries for female employment, men still make significantly more. *Check First Picture*
Black and Latina women are still struggling much more than their white counterparts: While women make less than men, black and Latina women make significantly less — black women make just 69 cents, and Latinas just 60for every dollar made by men. At the same time, women of color are more often single mothers and thus the primary earners for their families. This chart from NYU’s Wagner school illustrates (PDF) the wage disparities *Check Second Picture*
Women with higher education face a larger pay gap: ThinkProgress has learned that women face the largest pay gap on Wall Street, and that even CEOs of lobbying firms get paid less if they’re women. But there’s a greater trend. The more that women pay into their education, the less they get out compared to their male peers. According to an analysis from the Center for American Progress, “The lifetime wage gap for a woman who did not finish high school is $300,000, while the lifetime wage gap for a woman with at least a bachelor’s degree is $723,000.”
Today may be the day we commemorate Equal Pay Day, but many women will have to work additional months just to collect the same pay that men got in 2011. Even if the gap were closed today, women (especially older women) may not have enough months left to make up the wages lost over their lifetimes, which can total hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Income Equality Is Worse Under Obama Than Bush
Under Bush, the 1% captured a disproportionate share of the income gains from the Bush boom of 2002-2007. They got 65 cents of every dollar created in that boom, up 20 cents from when Clinton was President.
Under Obama, the 1% got 93 cents of every dollar created in that boom. That’s not only more than under Bush, up 28 cents. In the transition from Bush to Obama, inequality got worse, faster, than under the transition from Clinton to Bush.
Source (PDF)
Net worth and financial wealth distribution in the U.S. in 2007
In terms of types of financial wealth, the top one percent of households have 38.3% of all privately held stock, 60.6% of financial securities, and 62.4% of business equity. The top 10% have 80% to 90% of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate. Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of America.
Wealth distribution by type of asset, 2007: investment assets
Wealth distribution by type of asset, 2007: other assets
POC on welfare and income inequality
It seems like racist white people often point out that Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be on welfare but they conveniently forget to point out the income inequality between racial groups.
Blacks and Hispanic families have low median household income compared to white families. The average while family made $113,149 in 2009 (assets minus debts). The average Hispanic family made $6,325 in 2009 and black families made $5,677.
That means the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. (Source)
Income for Top 1% of Americans Rose 74% From 1996-2006
The inequality of income among American taxpayers has grown markedly in recent years, the Congressional Research Service confirmed in a new study of U.S. tax records.
Even as total income grew between 1996 and 2006 (the last year for which individual tax data are available), many Americans were losing ground.
“Inflation-adjusted income actually fell for those in the bottom income quintile (the poorest 20% of tax filers) and almost doubled for the richest 0.1% of tax filers,” the CRS found.
“Consequently, income inequality increased between 1996 and 2006.”
The rich have gotten richer, thanks to the stock market and the Bush tax cuts, a recent report has found.
Growth in income from capital gains and dividends has widened the divide between the wealthy and the poor in recent years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. It supplanted wage inequality as the primary driver of the growing income gap, which helped spur the Occupy Wall Street movement last fall.
After-tax income for the top 1% of taxpayers soared 74%, on average, between 1996 and 2006. The top 0.1% benefited even more, nearly doubling their income over that decade.
By comparison, the bottom 20% of taxpayers saw their income fall by 6%, while the middle quintile experienced a meager 10% gain.
