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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GPS Info who wrote (83577)	7/20/2018 7:25:03 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360314

according to a report from the United Nations, which ranked poverty in the U.S. alongside some of the poorest areas in the world Which reflects poorly on that report. ---------- Then there's this rather older one. It comes from the EPI's State of Working America Report (2004 vintage I seem to recall): This is now purely economic numbers: nothing about civic engagement and all the rest. It's after all taxes and benefits, it using PPP (so we have adjusted for price differences between countries) and it's incomes of the top 10% and bottom 10% compared to the US median income. And we see very much the same story as we do at the top. The US is a much more unequal place than other countries. But notice also that we're told that the US bottom 10% have a living standard very similar to those of Finland and Denmark: you know, those icy social democracies where they care more about the poor. They might indeed care but caring doesn't seem to do all that much to improve their living standards. We might even say that higher economic growth and also higher economic inequality (or, alternatively, limiting economic growth through redistribution as the opposite) leaves the poor just as well off. And the third comes from Branco Milanovic, the World Bank's main man on global inequality: The New York Times has a slightly different version of the chart about which they say: Notice how the entire line for the United States resides in the top portion of the graph? That’s because the entire country is relatively rich. In fact, America’s bottom ventile is still richer than most of the world: That is, the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants. Now check out the line for India. India’s poorest ventile corresponds with the 4th poorest percentile worldwide. And its richest? The 68th percentile. Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest. forbes.com Now you might be wondering: How can there be so many people in the world who make less than America’s poorest, many of whom make nothing each year? Remember that were looking at the entire bottom chunk of Americans, some of whom make as much as $6,700; that may be extremely poor by American standards, but that amounts to a relatively good standard of living in India, where about a quarter of the population lives on $1 a day. economix.blogs.nytimes.com Note "India's richest" here doesn't mean the megarich there. There talking about the richest 5% in India, not the small number of very rich people there. Also the data is getting a bit old now. Something like 8 years for that second chart and more for the first one.