99% Repeats for You: Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, C.B.O. Says - NYTimes.com

Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, C.B.O. Says - NYTimes.com:

Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: October 25, 2011

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WASHINGTON — The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, in a new report likely to figure prominently in the escalating political fight over how to revive the economy, create jobs and lower the federal debt.

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Charmaine Marriott was a long way from Wall Street, but sympathy for the protesters there led her to make her own statement in Albany last week. A new report may spur the protests.

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In addition, the report said, government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income.

The Free Press -- Independent News Media from Columbus, Ohio

The Free Press -- Independent News

The abandoned class: Will Occupy Wall Street hold together long enough to cut to the deep chase?
by Robert C. Koehler
October 22, 2011

Will it find a voice to articulate not merely the pain of the struggling middle class but the endemic unfairness and racism of inescapable poverty? “Everyone is important,” read the sign of an elderly protester. My God, what if it were true? What if we could see, in the desperate thrashing of the abandoned class, everyone’s future, that of the 99 percent and that of the 1 percent?

Let the Occupy movement become such a merging of voices that it reaches and changes the rigged game of American democracy and puts the collective failure of the system, in all its manifestations — from environmental collapse to our doomed wars and the hubris of empire to the violence in our streets — at the forefront of our media and our consciousness. Let the movement be the first tremor of a new awareness that dehumanizes no one.

This awareness has been under construction for a long time. My guess is that I’m not the only one who keeps coming across ideas and idealists who seem to be part of the movement even if their focus is solely on a small, particular corner of the world they have devoted their lives to changing, and ostensibly has nothing to do with Wall Street or politics. Could it be that our solutions are converging?

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Interracial Marriage: The Changing Face Of Seeing Race : NPR

Interracial Marriage: The Changing Face Of Seeing Race : NPR:
Today, African-Americans and white Americans both widely accept marriages between blacks and whites. According to a recently released Gallup Poll, 96 percent of African-Americans and 84 percent of whites accept the idea.

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The sad effects of gender socialization

Single Ladies Devastation - YouTube:

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Women's Health Resources

(21) Women's Health Resources: "Women's Health Resources
Poorer Women More Likely to Die from #BreastCancer

http://ow.ly/6P9lU #breastcancer"

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Occupy Wall Street: More popular than you think - Political Hotsheet - CBS News

Occupy Wall Street: More popular than you think - Political Hotsheet - CBS News:

(Credit: AP Photo/Andrew Burton)

The conservative criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it is a "growing mob" (House majority leader Eric Cantor) of "shiftless protestors" (The Tea Party Express) engaged in "class warfare" (GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain) whose grievances - whatever they are - are far outside the political mainstream.

The polls don't back that up.

A new survey out from Time Magazine found that 54 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the protests, while just 23 percent have a negative impression. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, meanwhile, found that 37 percent of respondents "tend to support" the movement, while only 18 percent "tend to oppose" it.

The findings suggest that the right's portrait of the movement as a collection of lazy hippies who need to stop whining - to "take a shower and get a job" (Bill O'Reilly) - isn't resonating with most Americans.

That's because while the protesters' aims are vague - Bill Clinton said Wednesday that they need to start advocating specific political goals - their frustrations are easily identifiable and widely shared. The Occupy movement may be a big tent (one with room for opposition to fracking, calls for campaign finance reform, and a host of other positions), but nearly everyone involved says they are angry that a small group of wealthy Americans have grown increasingly rich while "the other 99 percent" have been left behind.

That's a belief that seems to be shared by Americans across the political spectrum. In 2010, as CBSNews.com reported in a story on the income and wealth divide last month, researchers and Harvard and Duke asked Americans how they thought wealth is spread among income groups, as well as how they thought itshould be spread. Overwhelmingly, Americans said they wanted a more equitable distribution of wealth; they also underestimated just how large the wealth divide has grown.

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Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power

Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power:

Do Americans know their country's wealth distribution?

A remarkable study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) reveals that Americans have no idea that the wealth distribution (defined for them in terms of "net worth") is as concentrated as it is. When shown three pie charts representing possible wealth distributions, 90% or more of the 5,522 respondents -- whatever their gender, age, income level, or party affiliation -- thought that the American wealth distribution most resembled one in which the top 20% has about 60% of the wealth. In fact, of course, the top 20% control about 85% of the wealth (refer back to Table 1 and Figure 1 in this document for a more detailed breakdown of the numbers).

Even more striking, they did not come close on the amount of wealth held by the bottom 40% of the population. It's a number I haven't even mentioned so far, and it's shocking: the lowest two quintiles hold just 0.3% of the wealth in the United States. Most people in the survey guessed the figure to be between 8% and 10%, and two dozen academic economists got it wrong too, by guessing about 2% -- seven times too high. Those surveyed did have it about right for what the 20% in the middle have; it's at the top and the bottom that they don't have any idea of what's going on.

Americans from all walks of life were also united in their vision of what the "ideal" wealth distribution would be, which may come as an even bigger surprise than their shared misinformation on the actual wealth distribution. They said that the ideal wealth distribution would be one in which the top 20% owned between 30 and 40 percent of the privately held wealth, which is a far cry from the 85 percent that the top 20% actually own. They also said that the bottom 40% -- that's 120 million Americans -- should have between 25% and 30%, not the mere 8% to 10% they thought this group had, and far above the 0.3% they actually had. In fact, there's no country in the world that has a wealth distribution close to what Americans think is ideal when it comes to fairness. So maybe Americans are much more egalitarian than most of them realize about each other, at least in principle and before the rat race begins.

Figure 4, reproduced with permission from Norton & Ariely's article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, shows the actual wealth distribution, along with the survey respondents' estimated and ideal distributions, in graphic form.

Figure 4: The actual United States wealth distribution plotted against theestimated and ideal distributions.

Note: In the "Actual" line, the bottom two quintiles are not visible because the lowest quintile owns just 0.1% of all wealth, and the second-lowest quintile owns 0.2%.

Source: Norton & Ariely, 2010.

David Cay Johnston, a retired tax reporter for the New York Times, published an excellent summary of Norton & Ariely's findings (Johnston, 2010b; you can download the article from Johnston's Web site).

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