Informant38

So claims that we've entered a second Gilded Age aren't exaggerated. In
America's middle-class era, the mansion-building, yacht-owning classes had
pretty much disappeared. According to Piketty and Saez, in 1970 the top 0.01
percent of taxpayers had 0.7 percent of total income -- that is, they earned
''only'' 70 times as much as the average, not enough to buy or maintain a
mega-residence. But in 1998 the top 0.01 percent received more than 3 percent
of all income. That meant that the 13,000 richest families in America had
almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households; those 13,000
families had incomes 300 times that of average families.

And let me repeat: this transformation has happened very quickly, and it is
still going on. You might think that 1987, the year Tom Wolfe published his
novel ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' and Oliver Stone released his movie
''Wall Street,'' marked the high tide of America's new money culture. But in
1987 the top 0.01 percent earned only about 40 percent of what they do today,
and top executives less than a fifth as much. The America of ''Wall Street''
and ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' was positively egalitarian compared with
the country we live in today.

_______
Canadians can expect to live about
two years longer than Americans. In fact, life expectancy in the U.S. is well
below that in Canada, Japan and every major nation in Western Europe. On
average, we can expect lives a bit shorter than those of Greeks, a bit longer
than those of Portuguese. Male life expectancy is lower in the U.S. than it is
in Costa Rica.
________
A few months ago the conservative cyberpundit Glenn Reynolds made a splash
when he pointed out that Sweden's G.D.P. per capita is roughly comparable with
that of Mississippi -- see, those foolish believers in the welfare state have
impoverished themselves! Presumably he assumed that this means that the
typical Swede is as poor as the typical resident of Mississippi, and therefore
much worse off than the typical American.

But life expectancy in Sweden is about three years higher than that of the
U.S. Infant mortality is half the U.S. level, and less than a third the rate
in Mississippi. Functional illiteracy is much less common than in the U.S.

How is this possible? One answer is that G.D.P. per capita is in some ways a
misleading measure. Swedes take longer vacations than Americans, so they work
fewer hours per year. That's a choice, not a failure of economic performance.
Real G.D.P. per hour worked is 16 percent lower than in the United States,
which makes Swedish productivity about the same as Canada's.

But the main point is that though Sweden may have lower average income than
the United States, that's mainly because our rich are so much richer. The
median Swedish family has a standard of living roughly comparable with that of
the median U.S. family: wages are if anything higher in Sweden, and a higher
tax burden is offset by public provision of health care and generally better
public services. And as you move further down the income distribution, Swedish
living standards are way ahead of those in the U.S. Swedish families with
children that are at the 10th percentile -- poorer than 90 percent of the
population -- have incomes 60 percent higher than their U.S. counterparts.
________
Kevin Phillips concludes his book ''Wealth and Democracy'' with a grim
warning: ''Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to
life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime --
plutocracy by some other name.'' It's a pretty extreme line, but we live in
extreme times. Even if the forms of democracy remain, they may become
meaningless. It's all too easy to see how we may become a country in which the
big rewards are reserved for people with the right connections; in which
ordinary people see little hope of advancement; in which political involvement
seems pointless, because in the end the interests of the elite always get
served.


{ ok. guy in a limousine, guy driving the limousine, stopped at a stoplight, homeless guy with cardboard sign on traffic meridian. guy asks chauffeur to give the homeless guy a $20. chauffeur makes $65K a year. guy in back makes $12.5 mil. homeless guy might hit $5K, including food stamps etc. ok average income for all the people in that transaction is....$12.57 mil divided by 3. which is...let me think here...$4.19 mil annually. cool. America. way to go.}