Wealth Distribution in the USA

[mu4]

America isn't really bad or irrecoverable right now.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...ca-chart-graph

However the main problem is not the top 20%, it's the 20% below the top 20%.



This is above average folk, call it the average middle class, that are declining at the same rate as the bottom 60%

This is the group that will produce the individuals of above average competency, the desire to organize and move ahead and when exceptional offspring of this class start organizing the bottom 60% to commit bloody murder on the top 1-10%, it will come to a head.

As you can see this group is below the share of wages and wealth today and in fact they do virtually no better than the 3rd 20%. As the bottom 80% converges towards a mutually felt misery, poverty and lack of opportunity, their goals become shared instead of separated and well the exceptional individuals born within these groups will start organizing within and engaging in conflict. Note 2003 tax cuts(largely capital gains and dividend tax cuts, without any for the bottom 80%) and the decline of the bottom 80% after that.

What needs to happen to overturn this sort of death spiral is that the bottom 40% needs to level off(you can see the bump in the lowest due to the minimum wage increases in states and eventually national around that time(2007ish), a lot of wages increases in anticipation to federal legilsation so the trend should pre-date the federal legislation.)

The problem that exists is that the second 20% is doing horrible, and is losing as far as share of total income.

In the long term this is not a tenable situation, and in fact it's important that the 2nd and 3rd 20% have steadily increasing income, this essentially is the middle class and lower middle class. A very small shift in this amount actually represent a large number of individuals disenfranchised and becoming a long term problem. If this 40% were to converge at the minimum wage level you can be sure there will be extreme social turmoil.

The longer term trend is that the bottom 80% have been hurting since Reagan, that this trend needs to be reversed.

I want to see this chart for 2008-2012, I think that should be much much worse for the bottom 80%.