Our St. Johns County voters were defrauded in 2015 by deluded lugubrious goobers placing a half-penny sales tax on the ballot, "for the children," yielding a $150,000,000 windfall to developers and property owners -- including secretive foreign-funded LLCs (whose kleptocratic foreign owners are never disclosed), who spent $189,000 on a PAC propagandizing for this scheme. Return on investment: 33,200%. This situation stinks.
This regressive sales tax "for the children" was a fraud on the people
Will it be repealed, with impact fees raised to proper levels to fund schools, after a peer-reviewed study of present and prospective levels of impact fees? Or will developers get their way, as usual, in St. Johns County, quite possibly the most corrupt in Florida?
Enough waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery from government officials who are other-directed, at best -- unjust stewards who know not that they know not that they know not.
Enough coverups from the likes of St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR and his sere political machine. SHOAR and his hick hack henchmen are evildoers, daily doing the bidding for devious dodgy developers whose owners are seldom, if ever, disclosed.
We, the People will be heard and heeded. Official oppression must end. Now.
INCOME GROWTH
Over previous 34 years
But now, the very affluent
(the 99.999th percentile)
see the largest income growth.
+6%
5%
The poor and middle class used to see the largest income growth.
99.99th percentile
4%
3%
In 1980
99th percentile
2%
In 2014
1%
99th percentile
5th percentile
0
0
10th
20th
30th
40th
50th
60th
70th
80th
90th
100th
INCOME PERCENTILE
Higher Income
Lower Income
Note: Inflation-adjusted annual average growth using post-tax income.
Many Americans can’t remember anything other than an economy with skyrocketing inequality, in which living standards for most Americans are stagnating and the rich are pulling away. It feels inevitable.
But it’s not.
A well-known team of inequality researchers — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — has been getting some attention recently for a chart it produced. It shows the change in income between 1980 and 2014 for every point on the distribution, and it neatly summarizes the recent soaring of inequality.
The line on the chart (which we have recreated as the red line above) resembles a classic hockey-stick graph. It’s mostly flat and close to zero, before spiking upward at the end. That spike shows that the very affluent, and only the very affluent, have received significant raises in recent decades.
This line captures the rise in inequality better than any other chart or simple summary that I’ve seen. So I went to the economists with a request: Could they produce versions of their chart for years before 1980, to capture the income trends following World War II. You are looking at the result here.
INCOME GROWTH
Over previous 34 years
Over previous 34 years
The message is straightforward. Only a few decades ago, the middle class and the poor weren’t just receiving healthy raises. Their take-home pay was rising even more rapidly, in percentage terms, than the pay of the rich.
The post-inflation, after-tax raises that were typical for the middle class during the pre-1980 period — about 2 percent a year — translate into rapid gains in living standards. At that rate, a household’s income almost doubles every 34 years. (The economists used 34-year windows to stay consistent with their original chart, which covered 1980 through 2014.)
In recent decades, by contrast, only very affluent families — those in roughly the top 1/40th of the income distribution — have received such large raises. Yes, the upper-middle class has done better than the middle class or the poor, but the huge gaps are between the super-rich and everyone else.
The basic problem is that most families used to receive something approaching their fair share of economic growth, and they don’t anymore.
INCOME GROWTH IN 1980
INCOME GROWTH IN 2014
+6%
+6%
Average
income growth
4
4
Average
income growth
2.0%
1.4%
2
2
0
0
0
20th
40th
60th
80th
100th
0
20th
40th
60th
80th
100th
It’s true that the country can’t magically return to the 1950s and 1960s (nor would we want to, all things considered). Economic growth was faster in those decades than we can reasonably expect today. Yet there is nothing natural about the distributionof today’s growth — the fact that our economic bounty flows overwhelmingly to a small share of the population.
Different policies could produce a different outcome. My list would start with a tax code that does less to favor the affluent, a better-functioning education system, more bargaining power for workers and less tolerance for corporate consolidation.
Remarkably, President Trump and the Republican leaders in Congress are trying to go in the other direction. They spent months trying to take away health insurance from millions of middle-class and poor families. Their initial tax-reform planswould reduce taxes for the rich much more than for everyone else. And they want to cut spending on schools, even though education is the single best way to improve middle-class living standards over the long term.
Most Americans would look at these charts and conclude that inequality is out of control. The president, on the other hand, seems to think that inequality isn’t big enough.
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