{"id":4344,"date":"2012-07-19T19:26:50","date_gmt":"2012-07-20T00:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=4344"},"modified":"2012-07-19T19:26:50","modified_gmt":"2012-07-20T00:26:50","slug":"50-of-us-hold-only-1-of-american-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=4344","title":{"rendered":"50% of us hold only 1% of American wealth"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nCalifornia, 1936<\/em><\/p>\n

Right-wingers cracked up on right-wing propaganda make much of the fact that almost half (around 46 percent) of Americans pay no federal income tax. It is true. The Wall Street Journal often calls these people the “lucky duckies,” and all right-wingers just know<\/em> that the lucky duckies are getting a free ride off the rest of us and that it’s the lucky duckies who are eating the lunch of the middle class. What right-wingers don’t know, though, because their propaganda machine doesn’t tell them the rest of the story, is that almost all of those lucky duckies are living at or below the poverty line (defined as an income of $23,350 or less for a family of four including two children). They pay a high proportion of their income in other taxes, but they don’t pay any federal income tax because their income is so low and they have dependents. The highest income for qualifying as one of these lucky duckies is $26,400 for a couple with two children. But many of these people make less than $15,000 a year. The reason that so many Americans pay no federal income tax is that poverty is so widespread — measured as either income or assets.<\/p>\n

(By the way, in 2011, 78,000 taxpayers with incomes between $211,000 and $533,000 paid no federal income tax. Worse, 24,000 filers with incomes between $533,000 and $2.2 million paid no federal income tax. And not only that, but 3,000 filers with incomes above $2.2 million paid no federal income tax. What were we saying about lucky duckies? You can be sure that the Wall Street Journal hasn’t reported on these<\/em> lucky duckies. And it is generally assumed by those who bother to think about it for a second that the reason Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns is that he paid no federal income tax for one or more years.)<\/p>\n

Americans, in their bottomless ignorance and eagerness to be deceived, hold extremely warped notions of just how poor the poor are and how rich the rich are. Middle-class Americans also have a been fooled into believing that they get a much larger piece of the pie than they actually get.<\/p>\n

My old colleague Dan Froomkin, in the Huffington Post, reports today<\/a> on a study by the Congressional Research Service that shows that half of Americans hold 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. The top 1 percent hold 34.5 percent, and the top 10 percent hold 74.5 percent.<\/p>\n

A study in 2010 by academics from Harvard University and Duke University surveyed Americans on how Americans think wealth is distributed. On average, Americans thought that the richest 20 percent hold 59 percent of the wealth. The real number is closer to 84 percent. Americans were shown pie charts showing the distribution of wealth in different countries and were asked which country they would prefer to live in. They chose Sweden, where the top 20 percent control only 36 percent of the wealth. Distribution of wealth in the United States actually is similar to Latin American countries such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Guyana.<\/p>\n

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Each year since the late 1970s, the rich have been eating more and more of our lunch. There are two main ways they have done this. First, they have drastically changed taxation, so that the rich pay are now paying taxes at the lowest rate in 80 years, while increasing the tax burden on the middle class. Part of the reason the right-wing propaganda machine goes on and on so loudly about taxes is to obscure those facts. Second, they have been scooping up almost all the gains from increased productivity, as this chart shows:<\/p>\n

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The most important task of Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine is to keep Americans ignorant of these basic facts. If you keep ’em angry at the lucky duckies, they won’t notice who actually is eating their lunch.<\/p>\n

Another peculiarity of Americans is that they have the oddest tendency to identify with the rich, even when they’re barely getting by, falling farther behind each year, and are utterly dependent on the safety net — such things as Social Security and Medicare. It’s an excellent exercise in propaganda analysis, actually, to try to figure out how this is accomplished. I believe that the two biggest factors are television (including not only the propaganda channels but entertainment channels as well) and the “prosperity gospel” prevalent among evangelicals. This “gospel” teaches people that the poor are to be blamed for their situation, that god wants them to be rich, and that giving money to the church is the first step to prosperity. It also teaches them to love war and to hate anyone who isn’t just like them, but that’s a different rant. My point is that it’s as sorry a theology as has ever been devised, which is saying something, since there are so many sorry theologies out there. But it does pack ’em in on Sundays, because they love<\/em> to hear that god wants them to be rich and to consume voraciously.<\/p>\n

But this is nothing new. John Steinbeck was aware of it:<\/p>\n

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Note: I am aware (because I always try to diligently check my facts to avoid being corrected in a comment) that some have disputed<\/a> this Steinbeck quote, but whether Steinbeck said those exact words or not, the observation is a true one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

California, 1936 Right-wingers cracked up on right-wing propaganda make much of the fact that almost half (around 46 percent) of Americans pay no federal income tax. It is true. The Wall Street Journal often calls these people the “lucky duckies,” and all right-wingers just know that the lucky duckies are getting a free ride off … Continue reading “50% of us hold only 1% of American wealth”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-issues","category-political-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}