[Outcast_Searcher]

Warren has a very blue collar message and is starting to make inroads into the moderate electorate.
Her book way back, "two income trap" wasn't targeting latte liberals but working class people.
Yeah, she talks all the lefty identity stuff and welfare state programs and gets into the weeds with her plans but I think she's rising because she is learning to communicate better. trump has lock her up and build the wall, Liz is getting the chant "2 cents"

You do realize that the "2 cents" chant is about targeting the rich, right? The rich who already pay a huge proportion of the US income taxes?

I'd call that much more in the class of "lefty" stuff than identifying with moderates.

Why not just kill all the rich and take all their money now and get it over with? The lefties could run the country for a few years on that. THEN what?

Or more likely with her current plan, just lose more taxes and productivity by encouraging the rich to leave, to hide assets, etc. instead of to try to productively contribute to the economy.

Yeah. That should work out just great. Just like something for nothing left wing economics always does.

[Pops]

Why not just kill all the rich and take all their money now and get it over with?

"The Rich" don't need your help, they are doing fine.

[Plantagenet]

I wonder what that chart would look like if the US hadn't allowed over 10 million illegal aliens into the country. Illegal aliens come into the country with literally nothing, and then they are exploited by unscrupulous employers due to their illegal status so they are often the poorest of the poor.

IF 10+ million of the poorest people who are non-citizens were excluded from the tabulation, the line for the income for the "bottom" 90% would pop up to a higher level.

We now have more illegal aliens in the country then ever in history----AND that affects things like average income calculations.

Cheers!

[Pops]

That's not income, it's wealth: accumulated profit.

The poorest half have never had any.

[Plantagenet]

That's not income, it's wealth: accumulated profit.

The poorest half have never had any.

Yes, of course. But I was talking about one of the reasons we are seeing these changes and somehow you've entirely missed my point. I will try to explain it again to you in simple, easy steps.

Here we go.....

Poor people don't have any income so they don't have any wealth.

Do you understand so far?

OK. Illegal immigrants don't have any money when the come to the US. They are often utterly impoverished.

Do you follow that idea? OK now lets take the next step.

Illegal immigrants tend to earn low wages in the US.

Therefore, on average, they don't arrive with wealth and while some do very well on average they don't create or accumulate much wealth while working at low level jobs in the US.

Are you OK with all those ideas? You with me so far? OK....next step.....

The 10+ million new illegal immigrants added to our population mostly constitute a demographic block of 10+ million new poor people who tend to have very low incomes and hence accumulate little to no wealth.

Right? OK...last step. Now these ideas require some knowledge of statistics and the ability to interpret graphs. OK with that? Then lets go for it.....

One reason the chart in question shows a lag in income for low wage people over the last several decades is that the US had added 10+ million new illegal aliens residents with extremely low incomes over the last several decades. Many of these people have had children so the total number of people living in these poor households that we have added to the US population is probably well over 20 million.

Thats a huge slug of poor people to dump into the system here in the US.

If the US had, instead of adding 10-20+ million extremely poor people to our economy we had instead set up our immigration system to add, say, 10+ million legal immigrants with high levels of education and the ability to work at professional level jobs and earn high salaries, then the addition of millions of people with good salaries would've tended to expand the middle class and IMPROVE the evenness of income and wealth distribution in the US.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

Plant,

Good point I had not thought of.

[jedrider]

What are you guys even arguing about? All, I mean ALL, that graph says is that income AND wealth disparity is rising.

So, let's say that again: Income and wealth inequality and disparity is RISING.

That has NOT been through rising income, per se, for the middle tier. Their rise in wealth is solely due to the rise in home equity.

Home equity advancement proceeds from all of the following: the ability of banks to lend money, to the government printing money, to negative interest rates.

The middle tier DOES benefit from the lower tier being plentiful and earning very little as, certainly, does the upper tier. That's what has inflation at bay, except for assets, which are inflating according to how much money is available.

I don't have any links for this, but it is rather common knowledge, I suppose.

[Cog]

Pops wants illegals here as long as they don't move in with him.

[Pops]

10+ million

1 or 2% of cheap labor added to the bottom 50% may have made that group poorer by some slight fraction.

Doesn't explain how it made the top group $30,000,000,000. richer.

Shielding the rich from paying taxes, busting unions, labor arbitrage, transferring externalities to society does.

[Plantagenet]

10+ million

1 or 2% of cheap labor added to the bottom 50% may have made that group poorer by some slight fraction....

Thank you for being honest enough to admit the principle is correct.

Now lets do the math right.....there are ca. 131 million workers in the US.

The best estimate of the number of illegal aliens in the US is something over 12 million.

Lets say 13 million just to make the math easy. That would mean that something like 10% of all US workers are illegal aliens. If we just consider the lower 50% of workers as you suggest in your post, then illegal aliens make up about about 15% of all those workers are illegal aliens. Either way your estimate of 1-2% is off by an order of magnitude (that means its wrong by a factor of 10, i.e. its really really wrong).

So, yes, if 10% of all US workers are impoverished illegal aliens working for very low wages and accumulating little wealth, that will skew the numbers on any estimate of income or wealth distribution in the US. In addition, adding millions of low skilled people will tend to depress wages for American born low skill workers.

We're in an unusual historic moment when the US unemployment rate is at record lows and there are jobs for just about everyone. But I doubt that will last.

IMHO we'd be better off doing what Canada does and redesigning our immigration system to encourage immigration from well educated people who can create jobs or fill high skilled positions, while discouraging immigration from people who have no education and who will for the most part wind up impoverished in the USA. Of course we need some low skills people for low skill jobs, but IMHO we don't need millions and millions of low skill uneducated people.

Cheers!

[Pops]

Thank you for being honest enough to admit the principle is correct.

Let's test it. If all additions to the population were in the bottom 50%, and they all had 0 wealth, that would push some marginally wealthy from poorest 50% to the middle. That would lower the average wealth of the middle, right?
The higher population in the middle then would move some at the upper margin into the top 10%, again, lowering the average wealth in the top 10%, right?

Yet the top 10% are $30 trillion richer.

Now lets do the math right.....there are ca. 131 million workers in the US.

OK, pretty sure it won't explain where that $30T came from tho

If you are gonna do it right probably should start with the right numbers. These numbers jibe with this total through last month.

[Pops]

What are you guys even arguing about?

Plant is trying to argue Mexicans cause inequality.

I've said it before, trump is using clinton's playbook. In this case he's stolen the Ds thunder by claiming to be all about jobs and taxing the rich. The difference is clinton did reduce welfare, trump on the other hand made promises but what he did was give a huge tax break to the wealthy, and a trade war, paid for by Americans, that has cost 300k jobs so far.

I've no doubt that at the bottom of the scale illegals have increased competition, lowered wages and to some extent that has increased the profits of the ownership. trump hires illegals for a reason.
The way to fix that is not a wall but prosecuting business that abuse ilegals.

We should put American workers first by ensuring that workers already here get the first opportunity to fill any available positions. We should empower workers, not employers, by coupling any expansion of legal immigration with real accountability on employers who break the rules, exploit workers, or don’t adhere to basic labor standards.

Doesn't have quite the ring of "they're bringing rapists" granted
.