Donald J. Trump (For everyone else)

Thanking Lucy for the frequency it/that posts is a new one

In the US, the world's richest man is governing flailing and arbitrary spending cuts while portraying the people he lays off as enemies and making his millions of supporters hate them, meanwhile the billionaire president has in less than two months cost the taxpayers some tens of millions of dollars golfing as his own resort profits from it.

While the graphs are nice, and while I do like evidence and I find it amusing when someone disagrees with their own posted graph...you don't' really need a graph to tell you that inequality is on the rise in the US.

Did you read the post you were replying to?

it's in the graph above.

There is currently an identical post tax income inequality as in 2006-07 in the USA.

I understand your bubble narrative is different, but objective data is objective data anyway.

it is the same as in 2006-07, per the graph. same as in 2019.

why do you guys always lie about everything even in front of objective data?

This is actually hysterical. The confirmation bias is literally off the charts.

If we are cherry picking just the peak of an outlier and the trough of another outlier, you could argue it hasn't changed. But to deny this trend is just quality work. Bravo.

you said

and also

we can play that game too you know

basically you covered 5,10,20,25 years ago but now all of a sudden it's specifically 2006-07.

You want to be right so much.
As I said, demented old man.

Also how can someothing be the same while growing slowly?

Income inequality is just one aspect of inequality as a whole. Other things objectively relating to equality would include:

1) economic related stuff like wealth/income/assets/land/housing

2) access to and the quality of education

3) participation in politics/decision making

4) gender and identity inequality: uneven treatment/opportunities based on gender/identity/religion/ethnicity/etc.

I would argue inequality in all of these areas is increasing and will likely to continue increasing under a Trump administration.

We've briefly discussed (1) specifically as a function of the "gini coefficient" which I've outlined reasons why that might not be a particularly accurate variable for measuring income inequality to begin with. That being said, even with that data it did appear that it was increasing since 1960 and surprisingly enough it appeared that with the available data in that graph basically only the US was increasing in inequality over the dataset.

Gorgonian's post illustrating the increase in overall wealth for the top 1%/0.5% also shows that more and more wealth is concentrating at the top end of the wealth/income bracket. It is pretty disingenuous to argue against this fact. If more and more wealth is concentrated at the top, then that by definition will increase income/wealth inequality. It is also disingenuous to state that income inequality has not increased over the last, "5, 10, 20 years" and then specifically reference a very specific moment in time where the value of this gini coefficient was "x" and is also "x" at some time later. The important thing to take away is that the value has increased over the last few decades and is continuing to increase. Again, though, I still don't think this is a particularly good metric for evaluating income inequality by itself and would want a better definition of what constitutes as income for these calculations.

Luciom only read as far as "Hello Luciom and thanks for posting so often." in your other post. Wonder if he's going to read any further into this one.

Yes and it checks out

It's in the freaking graph, it's oscillating between 0.36 and 0.4 since 25 years ago jfc, and where we are now (0.4) was the 2006, how the holy **** can that be an "increasing" value if it stays in a range for 18 years , and remember i answered the loltastic claim it was "exponential"

Ok so

1) Home ownership is approx the same since the 60s (a tad higher than the 60s, a tad lower than peak which caused the worst financial crisis in 80 years because it was only achieved by loaning money to people who were terrible credit risks)

Households who own stocks are the same as 25 years ago, and more than in the past 10-15 years (and a little lower than peak)

2) The % of under 35 who are college educated is ever-increasing i hope you don't need a graph for that? it's objectively true that more people than ever have access to higher education (so lower inequality under your framework that considers that an inequality issue)

3) We need an objective measurement for that, i wait for your suggestions (and if it can't be measured it doesn't exist in a conversation about something "increasing" or "decreasing". It becomes a feeling discussion which is completly worthless).

4) I think it's grotesque to deny that women in particular, but minorities as well, face far lower wage gaps with white men than ... ever today. To the point that for several ethnicities, minority women (purportedly a super-discriminated against group in your view) have higher incomes than white men.

So under your list inequality is either the same or significantly lower than 20, 30, 50 years ago, objectively.

Now you claim those parameters will get worse under Trump. I can't "disprove" what's simply an estimate about future outcomes. Pretty not-obvious to me that home ownership will collapse under Trump , or that women income will be a lot worse than men income, but you never know. Unclear why you think women income will behave worse than men income under Trump though.

Anyway i can and did disprove that inequality (*under your enlarged definition*) is higher than in the past. Which was the claim i countered to begin with from the other poster.

You must be new to Politics here because you take Luciom's contrived nonsense seriously.

ok so the 50-99 have slightly less total assets in $ value as a proportion of total than before, with all of that going to the top1%. That's slightly more unequal yes. Very little more unequal though, it doesn't matter that much for inequality what the 1% does (it would be far more unequal if the same share went to the top 10%). I guess that's the counterintuitive part for people without a trained statistical intuition?

While a lot of the other variables are better (for people who want lower inequality), or the same in the last 20-30-50 years (depending on the variable).

So?

That data is called the decline of the middle class (50 to 90th percentile) whose share of national household wealth dropped from 35.9% to 28.4% over the last ~30 years while being entirely captured by the top 1% (+ a little from the poor too, who had so much to give). That is a very large redistribution to the extreme... but nothing really matters except what you believe.

When you want bullshit and cherry picked statistics to make disingenuous arguments, luciom is your guy.

I explained why inequality has been flatter for the specific time period Luciom is talking about. He was wrong about the 5, 10, 20 thing he said and picked a year right before the financial crash in order to make his claim work.

I think too much is made of Income Inequality instead of Wealth Inequality though and:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/...

Top 1% goes from 8.6% to 13.8% from 1989 to 2024. And that's with it having dipped a fair amount during the financial crash and recovering after that.

To me absolute standards of living are more important anyway...but....Luciom actively wants higher inequality.

Lol it's not a redistribution JFC. The 50-99 didn't LOSE ANYTHING, their wealth GREW IN REAL TERMS, just less than that of the top 1%.

Jfc if your wealth doubles and mine quadruples you would call that a large redistribution? which mental model even thinks of using that word while describing an improvement for both people?

That said, it's not a large increase in inequality, especially because it doesn't account for SS, which for all purposes is actually wealth, which value increased (annuities are valued on long term interest rates which are historically low) , and which isn't captured as an asset because of technicalities (can't be sold for ex).

I think both absolute standards of living and higher inequality matter yes. Higher inequality is fundamental because it proves the state isn't intervening basically. In a winner-take-all economy you let... winners take it all.

Absolute standards of living are nice to have for people who deserve them. So strictly only citizens, and only those who either can't help themselves (truly disabled and the like) or tried their best and failed anyway (so not the lazy, the fraudsters and so on).

It's always hard to determine among the non-disabled who actually deserves help admittedly. Doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist, **** people do exist and they don't deserve any absolute standard of living at all.

How to avoid wasting money on undeserving people while helping the deserving one is very hard an historically a problem. As with basically everything in life though i think private charity would do a better job with that than the state, because it can cut off anyone for any reason as soon as it (arbitrarily, under the definitions the donors want to use) discovers undeserving people are accessing the resources. While the state can't.

Right, you're a sociopath. Hopefully not a psychopath too.

Do these help you acknowledge basic reality. It's funny because "wealth inequality is increasing" is one of the few consensus bipartisan facts.

Yes, I am new here.

There is a lot in your response to unpack, so please allow me to discuss each point one at a time. I'm definitely interested in discussing home ownership because I (32, male) just recently purchased a house approximately 2 years ago and many of my friends/acquaintances are around 25-35 years old and are either looking to purchase a house or have recently purchased a house.

So, first, I was really surprised by your first graph which showed home ownership rate vs. time increasing. I was looking at the graph and thinking, wow 70% of people are owning a home? But, if you look at how it defines this dataset just below the graph at the bottom it is defined as:

So, basically it is calculating "home ownership rate" as being equal to (people who own a home)/(total number of homes). That means you could have no changes to the number of people owning a home and decrease or increase "home ownership rate" by changing the number of "households" --- building or destroying houses. If I'm understanding that correctly, then this is not at all useful in evaluating whether people have an easier or harder time to purchase a house as a function of time. Please, let me know if I'm interpreting the definition and this graph correctly. Again, data/information can be very misleading without understanding what it is referencing and what the definitions for the stated values are.

Here is a graph showing % of 35 and 60 year olds owning a house as a function of time. Data is taken from https://www.ipums.org/.

Here is another graph showing house price/median income:

source: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-pric....

Obviously this data is not perfect either, but it shows that over time people are spending a higher % of their income on housing which would likely correlate to people's ability to purchase a house. Basically, the cost of housing is increasing faster than income/wages which results in people having a harder time to purchase their first house.

In addition to this, since covid (2020) interest rates for mortgages has increased substantially and this has a very significant effect on being able to afford a mortgage as well. I understand this is very recent and is related to monetary policy and basically a black swan event, but it is having a very large impact on people's ability to purchase and afford their first home.