Saturday, August 24, 2013

Recycling: Income Distribution #hashtag

This is me recycling from my previous post.

I was reading through my rival's blog post and came across a link to this article about income distribution. According to the data from the Census Bureau, the shrinking middle class is not the result of a descent into poverty but a growing upper class. Now, the source should be considered. While the author does come from the Flint campus of the world's most prestigious public university, he is also writing for the AEI. Some of the people involved with the AEI include Paul Wolfowitz, who has a BA in mathematics from Cornell along with a certain political bias, and former UN Ambassador John Bolton. Without going back into the Census data used to create the table, we will have to take what the author writes with a grain of salt.

Contrasting the aforementioned article is this piece from USA Today: "4 in 5 in USA face near-poverty, no work". The title is misleading. If I were to walk down the Mainstreet USA, 80% of the people I met would not be struggling to make ends meet. Something closer to the opposite is true; eighty percent of people are doing fine. However, at some point in their working lives (20-60 years old), four out of five Americans will struggle with some combination of prolonged unemployment, living on government assistance or living below the poverty line. That sort of economic volatility is something that has grown. It presents a different problem. The challenge we face is not one where the majority of people are locked into permanent poverty, but a world where uncertainty is around every corner. It is a world where every family we work with could end up facing economic disaster. The world is a little bit scary.

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