l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Obama’s Legacy: 5 Million Increase in Households Where No One Works
Posted by mishgea | March 6, 2016 1:45:48 | Economics
Promises Honored
Obama promised to do something about rising income inequality. He did. He
made matters worse.
Income inequality is up by three different measures, and there is a huge
five million jump in households in which no one works at all.
His policies prove that transfer payments reduce incentives to work and
lower incomes. Yet, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders promise the same.
How Progressives Drive Income Inequality
The Wall Street Journal comments How Progressives Drive Income Inequality.
The Census Bureau releases annual updates on income distribution in the
U.S., publishing three technical statistical measures — the Gini index, the
mean logarithmic deviation of income, and the Theil index — each of which
represents inequality levels on a scale of 0 to 1. (zero signifies perfect
equality and 1 indicates perfect inequality). By all three measures,
inequality rose more under Bill Clinton than under Ronald Reagan. And it
wasn’t even close.
Barack Obama’s administration follows this pattern, despite the
complaints he and his supporters have made about his predecessor.
The Gini index rose more than three times as much under Mr. Obama than
under Mr. Bush. When this statistic was released, Mr. Obama had only six
years as president compared with Mr. Bush’s eight.
The spin doctors for Messrs. Clinton and Obama may insist that it wasn’
t their fault.
But consider their policies. Both Democratic presidents presided over
bubble economies fueled by easy monetary policy. There is no better way to
make the rich richer than to run policies that push up the price of
financial assets. Cheap money is a boon to those who have access to it.
Interest rates were also too low under Bush 43, but that bubble was in
housing, and the effects were therefore more evenly distributed than under
Mr. Clinton’s stock-market bubble or Mr. Obama’s credit bubble.
In 1968, government transfer payments totaled $53 billion or roughly 7%
of personal income. By 2014, these had climbed to $2.5 trillion—about 17%
of personal income. Despite the redistribution of a sixth of all income,
inequality measured by all three of the Census Bureau’s indexes is far
higher today than in 1968.
Transfer payments under Mr. Obama increased by $560 billion. By contrast
private-sector wages and salaries grew by $1.1 trillion. So for every $2 in
extra wages, about $1 was paid out in extra transfer payments—lowering the
relative reward to work.
In 2008, during the deepest recession in 75 years, 13.2% of Americans
lived below the government’s official poverty line. The Great Recession
officially ended in June 2009, but in 2014, after five years of economic
expansion, 14.8% of Americans were still in poverty.
Research by the Hamilton Project and the Urban Institute show that when
families with children making between $20,000 and $50,000 attempt to have a
second earner go back to work, the effective tax rate on the extra earnings
—including lost government benefits such as food stamps, the earned-income
tax credit, and medical support payments—is between 50% and 80%. This
phaseout of the ever increasing array of benefits has created a “working-
class trap” instead of a “poverty trap” that is increasing inequality and
keeping the income of these households lower than they might otherwise be.
While the number of two-earner households declined during the first six
years of the Obama presidency, the number of single-earner households rose
by 2.6 million and the number of households with no earners rose by almost
five million. In other words, two thirds of the increase in the number of
families under Mr. Obama was accounted for by households with no one working
. This is the reason the middle class has shrunk, and the reason inequality
has increased.
Mish Comments
We need to be fair about this. Aside from appointing a Fed Chair, neither
Obama nor Bush is responsible for Fed policy.
Secondly, I have to wonder how many of that increase of 5 million households
where no one is working has to do with voluntary retirement.
Of course, we need to ask the same question another way: How much of that
increase is due to free handouts, transfer payment policies, and involuntary
retirement?
Without a doubt, Obama reduced the incentive to work. But coming up with the
actual numbers is a bit more complicated than the article implies. | T*********I
发帖数: 10729 | 2 豢养新的选票奴隶
和matrix里的给你美景换取你的身体好像没有什么区别 |
|
