by Rick Lowe
Scott Winship, Fellow, Economic Studies, Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institute has done and is doing some very interesting work on income inequality, that in effect puts the lie to damage caused by the so called 1%.
Here's an interesting point from his Assessing Income Inequalty, Mobility and Opportunity testimony for the Senate Budget Committee hearing:
"Unlike inequality within the 99 percent, inequality between the 99 percent and the top 1 percent has risen a lot (though not just in the United States).[14] The top 1 percent received 24 percent of all income in 2007 compared with 10 percent in 1980. But there is very little evidence to suggest that the gains at the top have come at the expense of other Americans. Income concentration at the top fell quite a bit between 2007 and 2009, dropping down to 18 percent of all income received, but that hardly translated into gains for everyone else.[15] Why should increases in income concentration necessarily translate into losses for everyone else? The size of the economic pie can grow in such a way that everyone gets a bigger slice despite the top getting a bigger share of the pie."
Read the entire discussion here…
Here's an interesting quote from his piece, Has Rising Inequality Actually Hurt Anyone?
"I would like to see social policy do more to help the poor and to promote opportunity. But I don’t see much evidence that the gains among the top 1 percent have done anything to increase poverty or reduce opportunity. From 2007 to 2009, the average income of the top 1 percent fell by 37 percent while the median household income fell by 2 percent and the average income of the poorest fifth may have increasedslightly. If that reduction in inequality — the extent to which the “plutocrats” were taken down a peg — helped the middle class and the poor, it is not obvious. We should question, then, whether the earlier gains at the top hurt everyone else."
