Forum Post: 2007 Treasury Department Study on Income Mobility
Posted 12 years ago on April 4, 2012, 5:59 p.m. EST by JustTheFacts123
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Fact: 2007 Treasury Department study on income mobility cites: "more than half the households in the top 1% were not there nine years earlier."... Hmm hard work does seem to pay off.
Who are you? Why are you using an iteration of another users name?
Why are you posting something that's been gone over before.
Are you lame?
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The Rich Get Even Richer Source: The New York Times
By Steven Rattner
March 26, 2012
NEW statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else - and the desperate need to address this wrenching problem. Even in a country that sometimes seems inured to income inequality, these takeaways are truly stunning.
In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 - $288 billion - went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.
Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.
The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.
That study was based on pre 2007 data of course.
Since then, there are fewer jobs, higher costs for everything, from college tuition to gas, longer hours for less pay and benefits.
To be sure, hard work does pay. But its only getting harder, and that should not be the case.
Additionally, You say half of the ones making millions are new. Great. I am not concerned about them.
I am concerned about the other income brackets. How many of those who were below the poverty line started moving up? How many of the middle class managed to maintain or raise their income levels?
The report talks about 60% the 'bottom quintile' moving to 'a higher quintile'.... over 9 years..... How much higher did they go? Who took their place in the bottom quintile?
Upto 2007, starting from 1980, the share of total reported income attributed to the top 1% had increased from 10% to just shy of 25%. Only makes it sound like a smaller piece of the pie for the remainder does it not?
More importantly. What are the trends NOW? 2007 was 5 years ago.
According to IRS statistics, in 1990, the bottom 50 percent of income earners reported 15 percent of real adjusted gross income, some $517 billion in pre-tax income. In 2007, they reported only 12 percent of AGI, but this percentage amounted to more absolute dollars—some $1.1 trillion in pre-tax income. The bottom 50% doubled their income in 17 years.
If you dig in to the numbers you see very good income mobility especially when taking into account immigration numbers which are primarily low income workers.
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How do we know they got there by hard work? You don't know.
And .5% of the population getting into the top 1% is certainly not proof that hard work pays off. What about the other 99.5%? Hard work may not have paid off for them.
The Treasury report does show there is upwards mobility. But that is only because the people on the bottom have nowhere to go but up. And just because some poor people can increase their income does not mean that our economic system is fair or that someone who goes from $18k to $25k over the course of 10 years is somehow getting a good deal.
There was upwards mobility for slaves. Over time, slave standard of living increased. Does that justify slavery? Does that mean slaves are getting a good deal?
Hey JustTheFacts, drawing wrong conclusions from facts is not going to help you understand the world.