Saturday, October 26, 2013
The Gradual Approach to Wealth
According to Wikipedia (2007), the median net worth of a person age 65-74 is $218,000. This is roughly 3Xs the amount of a person in the 35-44 age bracket. Is not this one fact alone proof positive that there exists a) ample income mobility and b) an actual career contingency within which most flesh and blood human beings proceed? I mean, I know that the progressive folks really relish this whole notion that people are somehow these powerless creatures that the government has to rescue and all but maybe it isn't quite as dire as that........................................................................................P.S. I actually could have painted an even brighter scenario here by utilizing the means ($924,000 and $296,000 respectively) instead of the medians but that would have skewed the data much more toward the wealthy and I wanted to avoid that.
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19 comments:
If you are talking about income mobility why not look at income rather than wealth?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbueX92CKPk - the date comes from the census bureau and Brookings.
And then there's the Pew study which shows that 82% of people make more money (adjusted for inflation) than their parents did.
Interesting. How so then is the middle class shrinking, the top 1%. better off than it ever was, and we have a growing number of working poor?
Or is this a case of liars figure? I'm betting if we stick with what we've been doing the past 25 to
30 years in another 10 to 20 years the nation will witness a great social upheaval and resulting economic dislocation.
I worry for my grandchildren and their eventual offspring.
Les, the actual people in the top 1% (not the static category) saw their income DROP from 1996 to 2005 (with close to 50% of the people in that category changing). Yes, the current recovery has been a tough one but that I tend to blame much more on the politicians (a complicated tax code, myriad of regulations, etc.) and FED chairman Bernanke than I do the American economy.
I've written about the need to simplify the tax code, eliminate duplicity, review regulatory proceedures etc. in the past. Just try to reach a consensus everyone will accept.
Another thing that we could do is loosen up a little on Visa restrictions. We used to get 17% of the world's tourism dollars and after 9/11 that plummeted all the way to 11%. There's gotta be a way that we can allow more people to come here and spend money and still keep the crazies out. At least I would hope so.......We should also probably be making a stronger case for the trades. There are literally millions of jobs out there that aren't being filled because of a lack of appropriately skilled people. Good paying jobs, too; plumbers, pipe-fitters, electricians, automotive repairmen (or chicks), welders, truck drivers, etc.. Maybe we should be encouraging people who are unemployed to take a look at some of these careers. Just a thought.
"There are literally millions of jobs out there that aren't being filled because of a lack of appropriately skilled people. Good paying jobs, too; plumbers, pipe-fitters, electricians, automotive repairmen (or chicks), welders, truck drivers, etc.."
Millions?!? I would say that is probably a bit of an exaggeration.
Professor Tyler Cowan, described as a 'libertarian economist', writes in "Why Texas Is Our Future"
that in 2012 the top 1% earners got 19.3% of household income. He
adds that this was the largest since 1928. IMO, such disparity was the makings of the Great Depression. Cowan is slightly more optimistic, writing in "Average Is Over" of a future country with 15% productive people; the rest surviving in shanty towns.
Jerry, in manufacturing alone there are 600,000 positions that can't be filled. And when Manpowergroup did a random survey of 1,300 employers, nearly half of them said that they still had positions open that they couldn't fill due to a lack of skilled applicants. We have a skills deficit in this country just as much as we have an unemployment problem.......And from a personal angle, I work in healthcare and I can tell you that there is a real shortage of nurses, OTs, and PTs these days - all exceptional paying jobs (especially the latter 2).
If there is such a nursing shortage, why can't 43 percent of newly-licensed RNs find jobs within 18 months?
BB, if the top 1% is so damn powerful (the actual human beings and not the static category), then why did their income go down and why are they constantly being supplanted by other people moving up? The American economy is still dynamic and the participants in all of these categories predominantly rise and fall.
That survey was from CA, Jerry. If they lived in CT, I could get 'em a job tomorrow and the future is even more impressive in terms of growth (the BLS has nursing at the top of its growth for the future projections - baby boomers retiring, etc.).......And I just can't believe that an RN couldn't find a job in 18 months; convalescent homes, home health care, 3rd shift, something. That doesn't make any sense at all.......I gather that you couldn't find anything contrary for OTs and PTs.
I actually did not look at PT and OT jobs. However, a quick look indicates the the current shortage of PTs is around 20,000 jobs, I would assume OTs are about the same. That doesn't put much of a dent in your millions of available good paying jobs.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-02-19/business/35444240_1_factory-workers-laid-off-workers-jobs - How 'bout 600,000 manufacturing jobs - would that make a dent?
And the Bureau of Labor Statistics has cited physical therapy as one of the top 30 growth occupations of the future (they're projecting a 30% growth rate by 2018) - http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/physical-therapists-in-short-supply-locally-around-the-nation-1.1191303
600,000 is a start, but still a long ways away from "literally millions". What we have is literally millions of people out of work or underemployed.
And, BB, I'm not exactly sure where Cowan got his numbers. The last official year that the IRS has released is 2010. In that year the top 1% made 18.9% of the total AGI and paid 37.4% of all federal income taxes.......And the highest year that I could see was 2007 when the top 1% made 22.9% of the total AGI - http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2012
I forgot where I read it, Jerry, but if we could fill all of these unfilled positions for pipe-fitters, plumbers, truck drivers, IT people, welders, machinists/tool and dye workers, health-care people, etc., we'd be well on our way to going under 6% unemployment. Hell, I think that they're even having trouble filling construction jobs in some quarters.
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