Tag: Income inequality
Sounds Like ‘Trickle Down’ to Us, Jeb
The challenge isn’t that some people are successful and some people aren’t. Taking from the successful people to provide for those that aren’t isn’t the solution. The solution is, How do you build capacity so people can achieve earned success?
— Jeb Bush, speaking after a closed meeting at the Metropolitan Republican Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, reports the Palm Beach Post.
The World Does Not Share the Belief That the Rich Always Deserve Their Wealth
The rich in America agree on one thing: They deserve their wealth. Recent research cited by Carol Graham of the Brookings Institute shows that unlike both the rich and poor in Latin America, in the United States the Mitt Romneys of the world believe they built that, all alone.
Even before a video exposed Mitt’s attitude toward what he termed the 47 percent who would never vote for him because they want their government assistance, wife Ann described in her speech before the 2012 GOP convention her skewed idea of how poor they were in their early days, after they spent their honeymoon in Hawaii and lived only investment income from stocks while attending the private Brigham Young University.
The Romneys are, unfortunately, typical of their cohort. This attitude is unfortunate because by being mistaken, it makes it harder to deal with America’s growing income inequality problem, which is transforming us, as often noted, into two countries.
It’s Expensive to be Poor
3
Times more annually that it costs a community to leave a homeless person on the streets than it would cost to provide housing.
What Are You Searching For? It Depends on How Much Money You Have
If you’re not dirt poor, with few prospects for changing your situation, it’s hard to consider how much of your thought would be devoted to grim subjects. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir illustrated the concept and the myth of the so-called cycle of poverty in their recent book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Being stuck in perpetual crisis mode is less about wasting your food stamps buying lobster, the authors say, and more about what they call lack of bandwidth.
It works like this. When you’re laying in bed all night wondering how you’re going to pay your child’s daycare provider if you put tires on the car, but if you don’t get tires it’s just a matter of time before you have a flat and can’t get to work and then you’ll lose hours of pay and possibly your whole job…let’s just say you don’t have a lot of energy left for healthy meal planning, shopping, and preparation. The authors call this a “bandwidth tax” on the poor that America’s better off just don’t have to pay.
Leonhardt: The dark side of religion is of special interest: “Antichrist,” “hell” and “rapture” make the top 10 search terms
Now Google, courtesy of The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, is giving a stark glimpse into the mindsets of those on the losing end of income inequality. The search terms of poor people show that they and the well-off live in different countries, and possibly on different planets.
