“The Haves And The Have-It-Alls”: The Pain Of Inequality Among Yacht Buyers
In this season of mass commercialism, let’s pause to consider the plight of simple millionaires.
Why? Because we now share a common cause: Inequality. You don’t hear much about it, but millionaires are suffering a wealth gap, too, and it’s having a depressing impact on both their level of consumption and their psychological well-being. While it’s true that millionaires certainly are still quite rich — indeed, they’re counted as full members of the 1 percent club. But that generalization overlooks the painful and personally grating fact that mere millionaires today are ranked as “lesser 1 percenters.” They don’t dwell in the same zip codes as the uber-rich few, who comprise the uppermost 100th of the 1 percenters, with wealth starting in the hundreds of millions of dollars and spiraling up into multiple billions.
No doubt you’ll be saddened to learn that this divide between The Haves and The Have-it-Alls is widening. Astonishingly, plain old millionaires are being abandoned by retailers that are now catering to the most lux of the luxury market. For example, have you checked out what is happening in the yacht market recently? Sales of your 100- to 150-footers are down by as much as 50 percent from 2008, and that is just one indicator of the hidden suffering being endured by the merely rich.
In the same time period, however, yacht sales of your 300-footers, with price tags above $200 million, are at all-time highs. As noted by Robert Frank, a New York Times wealth columnist (yes, such a rarefied beat does exist), “For decades, a rising tide lifted all yachts. Now it is mainly lifting megayachts.”
“Whether the product is yachts, diamonds, art, wine, or even handbags,” says the Times‘ chronicler of American wealth, “the strongest growth and biggest profits are now coming from billionaires and nine-figure millionaires, rather than from mere millionaires.” What this reflects is not the widely acknowledged wealth divide between the 1 percenters and the rest of us, but a stunning concentration of America’s total wealth in the vaults of the ever-richer 0.01 percenters.
They are the elitest of the elites, an extravagant moneyed aristocracy, sitting so high above our society that they largely go unseen. This exclusive club includes only a tiny fraction of American families, with each holding fortunes of more than $110 million. The riches of these privileged ones keep snowballing — their outsized share of our national wealth has doubled since 2002, and their holdings are expanding twice as fast as other 1 percenters.
Their growing control of wealth is distorting high-end consumerism, including not just yachts, but private jets as well. Sales of your common millionaire-sized jets are down by two-thirds since the 2008 Wall Street crash. So jet makers have shifted to the billionaire buyers, including some who are spending eye-popping levels of lucre to possess such pretties as their very own Boeing 777-300 — which normally carries 400 passengers, rather than one gabillionaire.
Imagine how this makes people with only a few million dollars feel. This extreme, obscene concentration of wealth is creating an intolerable inequality that will implode our economy and explode America’s essential, uniting sense of egalitarianism. It’s important to remember that money is like manure — it does no good unless you spread it all around.
In the spirit of holiday harmony and good will toward all, I say it’s time for you working stiffs (and even those of you who’ve been badly stiffed and still can’t find work in this jobless economic recovery) to extend your hands in a gesture of solidarity with America’s millionaires. Let’s reach out to comfort our downcast brothers and sisters. Tell them, “We’re all in this inequality fight together,” and invite them to come to the next rally in your area to raise America’s minimum wage above the poverty level.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, December 10, 2014
“It’s Always Black Friday For Clerks”: The Result Of Decisions And Policies That Have Had A Hideous Impact
Contrary to what you may assume about me, I actually enjoy the occasional trip to the mall. It’s a kind of a sociological expedition of the sort I find instructive and entertaining—I love watching the gangly teens, for example, as I recall going to the mall myself when I was 16, combing my hair and hoping to run into the girl of the moment. I find the big-box stores similarly interesting. The biggest downside these days is the parking, an already Hobbesian horror that has been exacerbated in the smart phone era by this new thing whereby now when you see a person get in his or her car, you can’t assume they’re leaving immediately because they’re probably going to sit there and check their phone for at least two minutes, and thus your search continues.
So I don’t want to be a killjoy here. I’m good with commerce, I’m fine with Christmas, and I will even defend Christmas music up to a point, a topic to which I may devote a column sometime between now and the fateful day.
But just take a few minutes with me to ponder the side of all this that most people don’t bother to think about. On Thanksgiving morning, I awoke to a batch of emails like the Nordstrom “Black Friday Is Here Early” one; when I brought in my Washington Post, I flipped through the circulars and really was gobsmacked the number of stores from Macy’s to Sears to H.H. Gregg and loads of others opening Thanksgiving night at 5 or 6 or 7 pm. Yes, I was aware that this is a thing, but I guess I’d thought it was an unpopular thing and had peaked a couple of years ago. Evidently not.
Who’s working at Sears or wherever on Thanksgiving evening? Maybe she doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s the most ironclad excuse going to escape the family. But…is she getting overtime? Does she make decent money to begin with?
On the overtime question, chances are she is not, and this is a huge and hugely overlooked issue that has had a dramatic effect on stagnating middle-class incomes over the last three decades and has surely contributed, in turn, to our growing inequality. Nick Hanauer, the Seattle venture capitalist and admirable class traitor (and friend of mine, I guess I should say), laid it out last week in a terrific column he wrote for Politico.
“In 1975,” Hanauer wrote, “more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay—the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime—has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today. Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime.” He then cited a study from the Economic Policy Institute calculating that just 11 percent of American workers, well down from that old 65 percent, qualify for overtime pay today.
In an issue paper it released in June, the Center for American Progress suggested that the overtime threshold be increased from the current poverty-level maximum to $960 a week, which would match the 1975 levels after adjusting for inflation. This would restore overtime rights to workers earning up to around $50,000 a year, which is roughly the current median. Remember—American workers work longer hours and are more productive today than they were in 1975. But they are paid less, and the vanishing overtime pay is a big part of why. The CAP paper estimates that if current trends continue unabated, overtime pay will disappear entirely by 2026.
If it were raised, who would be covered? Well, a hell of a lot of people. There’s this web site glassdoor.com that lists typical salaries. Wow, are these salaries terrible in some cases! A Best Buy sales associate makes, according to glassdoor’s information, $10.36 an hour, which (assuming a 35-hour week and 50 paid weeks a year) comes out to $18,130. So that person would qualify for some overtime now. But that’s a poverty wage. Try to keep that in mind the next time you start fuming when you can’t get the young man’s attention.
Over at Sears, a sales associate makes just $8.44 an hour, $14,770. Managers of course do better—an assistant manager pulls down $46,629, so she or he would still qualify for overtime if it were brought up to 1975 levels. A sales manager at Macy’s gets $47,324. Even at the higher-end Nordstrom, a department manager hauls in a mere $41,828. All of these people, and millions more like them, deserve a little overtime.
I know the counter-arguments. Yes, it would cost businesses more. Tough. Businesses have been cheating American workers for three decades. Would businesses merely lay off workers? Some would, some would not. Every capitalist isn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. Communities and society as a whole would reap huge benefits if we had a larger and more prosperous middle class that had more money to spend, as capitalists like Hanauer know well and preach regularly.
So just remember this season that if you’re purchasing anything that costs north of $300 or so, the person who’s selling it to you probably can’t afford to buy it herself. And that this state of affairs is not just the way things are. It’s the result of decisions and policies that have had a hideous impact. They can be reversed, too, someday.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 28, 2014
“So Much Unpaid, Unrewarded Labor”: Why Women Should Get The Rest Of The Year Off
As of October 11, the average American woman who works full time, year-round started working for free.
That’s because she makes just 78 percent of what a man makes. If a man’s pay lasts the whole year long, hers doesn’t even make it to Halloween.
Women of color have been putting in even more time. Black women have been working for free since August 21. Hispanic women have been doing so since July 16.
Even if we take into account things like the fact that women tend to go into different industries and occupations, stay in the labor force for less time (often thanks to raising children), and are less likely to be in a union, women should still walk away from work beginning Black Friday and not come back until New Years Day.
The fact that women’s work comes so heavily discounted has inspired unions in Denmark for the last five years to call on Danish women to take the rest of the year off after they reach that point—and they have just a 17 cent pay gap, one of the world’s smallest. “It’s a way to remove the gender pay gap in a split second,” Lise Johansen, who heads the campaign for the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions, told Bloomberg News. “Go to a tropical island for the rest of the year!”
Women aren’t just working for free when they leave their houses, of course. They’re working for free every day of the year when they go home and raise children, cook meals, and clean house. They devote far more time to this than men: they spend a half hour more on child care, housework, cooking, and household management each day compared to men. That’s double the time men spend on child care.
That time may not be rewarded, but it still has a value. Take the effort women put in caring for elderly parents, which they are far more likely to do compared to men. If all the informal elderly caregiving by family and friends were instead replaced by someone paid to do it, the total would be $522 billion a year. That’s a half trillion dollar gift (mostly) women give to society.
So maybe they should get even more time off than just what the gender wage gap allows, since they’re putting in so much unpaid, unrewarded labor. Given that they do seven hours more housework each week, or fifteen extra days a year, and eight hours more child care a week, or seventeen days a year, let’s call it even if they get another month tacked on to their early vacations. Being generous, that means women could have thrown in the towel when we reached the end of October.
What would happen if American women stopped working inside and outside the home for two months out of the year? It’s all obviously relegated to the world of thought experiments. Even in Denmark, where three-quarters of the workforce belongs to a union, women won’t actually heed the mostly joking call to stay away from work, and here in the United States union power is far lower.
But desperate times call for desperate measures, and when it comes to the wage gap, these are increasingly desperate times. The gap was closing quickly and steadily between the 1960s and 1990s and continued to shrink in the 2000s, but over the last decade, it’s only budged by 1.7 percentage points. At this rate, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates it won’t close until 2058. While President Obama has issued executive orders related to equal pay and Democrats in Congress have proposed bills like the Paycheck Fairness Act, none of these measures will close the gap on their own. In the meantime, the pay gap contributes to more women living in poverty, relying on government benefits, and facing economic instability in their retirement years.
Maybe what’s needed is for this issue to jump from a talking point to a day of action. Perhaps if the country witnessed what it would be like for half the population to refuse to type a word, ring up a purchase, pick up a wrench, or to wipe a booger or a counter, women’s value would be brought into sharp focus. Then we might see some aggressive action to correct for the discrimination that still suppresses women’s wages. Until then, women should at least slack off as much as they can for the remainder of the year.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, November 13, 2014
“Vote For Yourself Tuesday”: When The 99% Vote, They’re More Likely To Get What They Want From Politicians
The rich always vote for themselves. They go for their self-interest, their tax breaks, their liability escapes (think Wall Street). Meanwhile, they’ve relentlessly instructed the non-rich that they too must vote for the rich.
They’ve promised for decades that if the 99 percent just comply with the wishes of the wealthy, bow down, kiss their feet, shine their shoes, then some paltry portion of the bucket-loads of dough that the rich are amassing will dribble down upon the 99 percent.
That trickle-down trick didn’t work for the vast majority of Americans. The rich got richer, all right. But the rest slid backwards. Now income inequality is worse than it was during the era of robber barons. It’s time to turn that around. Political leaders must focus on the needs of the 99 percent. For that to happen, the 99 percent must vote for themselves on Tuesday. They must go for their self-interest, their wages, their health insurance, their Social Security.
Vote for higher wages for the 99 percent.
Minimum wage workers in the United States are paid so little that taxpayers subsidize the likes of Walmart and Wendy’s through government programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. That doesn’t happen everywhere.
As the New York Times pointed out last week, McDonald’s, Burger King and Starbucks all pay their workers in Denmark at least $20 an hour and provide paid vacations and pensions. And the companies still make profits.
The one percenter CEOs of these companies, who demand millions in pay for themselves, have squashed efforts to raise the U.S minimum wage, a pittance stuck five years at $7.25. Instead of improving paychecks, McDonald’s told its workers to get second jobs, forego heat in their homes and find health insurance for $20 a month.
When the minimum wage rises, it bumps up pay for everyone else. The 99 percent benefit. And the majority supports lifting the wage.
Voting for raises means voting for Democrats. President Obama has called for an increase, and U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the U.S. minimum wage is an international embarrassment. “I mean, we suck. We really do,” he said.
Republicans have consistently blocked a raise. New Jersey’s GOP Gov. Chris Christie, the nation’s fourth highest paid governor at $175,000 a year, said last month that he is “tired of hearing about the minimum wage.”
Vote for health insurance for the 99 percent.
The majority of Americans believe that health insurance should be accessible to everyone. The Affordable Care Act moved the nation closer to that, enabling tens of millions to get covered.
It prevented insurers from dumping clients when they get sick and from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, like diabetes. It covered millions of young people to age 26 on their parents’ plans. It protected millions with an expansion of Medicaid.
National surveys have shown that low-income Americans are obtaining health insurance at a faster rate than the rich. There are two reasons for this. The rich already were covered. And the law was designed to help the working poor. This is creating fairness in access to medical care.
Republicans hate the law. Two dozen GOP governors refused to expand Medicaid in their states, and those places now suffer from the highest rate of uninsured residents. Republicans are so intent on denying health care to the working poor that they rejected a program that would cost them nothing for three years.
Now, Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, has again pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act if the GOP takes control of his chamber. Republicans want to regress to higher inequality in health insurance coverage.
Vote to preserve and expand Social Security and Medicare.
These programs are not priorities of the rich. The wealthy are riding high on golden parachutes, gilded pensions, tax-sheltered off-shore accounts, and the built-in security of immense salaries. Social Security wouldn’t pay their country club fees.
For the rest, however, Social Security and Medicare mean fear relief. They’re crucial to the 99 percent.
For years now, however, Republicans have tried to privatize, cut and destroy these programs. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, repeatedly has issued a “roadmap” for an America in which the rich drive new Ferraris bought with tax breaks and the rest forfeit their wheels because of cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cuts. Among Democrats, there’s a movement to increase benefits by lifting the $117,000 cap, after which income no longer is taxed for Social Security. The cap means that the rich pay proportionately less into Social Security than the rest.
Vote for the overwhelming majority, the non-rich, to get their needs met.
The nation’s richest are more politically engaged and get easier access to high-level politicians than the 99 percent. That isn’t just obvious. It’s also according to surveys and interviews of one-percenters conducted by three university professors. They are Northwestern University’s Benjamin I. Page and Jason Seawright and Vanderbilt’s Larry M. Bartels. Their report is called Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans.
The rich minority gets its way. Bartels and another researcher showed in earlier studies that federal government policy corresponds much more closely with the wishes of the rich than the needs of the rest.
Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, has noted that no other rich country came close to the United States in cutting the budget based on class preferences. It went this way: the workers lost programs; the wealthy kept perks.
This has got to change. And it could. In states with low voter turnout inequality – that is balloting by the non-rich more closely matching participation rates by the wealthy – there are higher minimum wages, stricter anti-predatory lending laws and better health benefits for the working poor. In other words, when workers vote, they’re more likely to get what they want from politicians.
Vote for yourself on Tuesday.
By: Leo W. Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers; The Huffington Post Blog, November 3, 2014
“The Millionaire’s Club Expands”: The Wealthiest 10 Percent Of Americans Own 75 Percent Of The Personal Wealth
The millionaire’s club isn’t what it used to be.
Time was that “being a millionaire” was a mark of unimaginable success. You’d joined the financial elite. People didn’t much discuss whether you arrived by wealth or income, because it didn’t matter much. The millionaire’s club was so small that the path to membership wasn’t worth discussing.
No more.
Millionaires aren’t as common as water, but there are plenty of them. A new study puts the worldwide total at 35 million in 2014, with about 40 percent (14 million) of them American. That’s about 5 percent of the U.S. adult population (241 million in 2014), or one in 20. Rarefied, yes; exclusive, no. After the United States, Japan has the largest concentration of millionaires with 8 percent of the world total, followed by France (7 percent), Germany (6 percent) and the United Kingdom (6 percent). At 3 percent, China ranks eighth.
The figures come from a study by Credit Suisse Research, which has been estimating worldwide personal wealth since 2010. The numbers reflect net worth, not annual income. The wealth totals add the value of people’s homes, businesses and financial assets (stocks, bonds) and subtract their loans. Doubtlessly, the number of millionaires would be much smaller if the calculations were based on income. In the study, an American with a $300,000 mortgage-free home and $700,000 in retirement accounts and financial investments qualifies as a millionaire.
On this basis, the study put global personal wealth in mid-2014 at $263 trillion, up from $117 trillion in 2000. Wealth in the United States reached $84 trillion, almost a third of the total. All of Europe, with a larger population, was virtually the same. Median wealth in the United States — meaning half of Americans were above the cutoff and half below — was $53,000, dominated by homes for many middle-class families. Japan’s total wealth was $23 trillion, but with a more equal distribution and a smaller population, its median was more than twice the American at $113,000. China’s wealth was $21 trillion and its median $7,000.
Credit Suisse did a special analysis of wealth inequality and, not surprisingly, found plenty of it. For starters, the analysis reminded readers that wealth inequality (basically, the ownership of stocks and bonds) is typically much greater than income inequality (basically, wages, salaries, dividends and interest).
In the United States, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own about 75 percent of the personal wealth, a share that’s unchanged since 2000; the income share of the top 10 percent is slightly less than 50 percent. But the study also found that wealth inequality is high in virtually all societies. Although the United States is at the upper end of the range, the low end is still stratospheric.
Consider.
In 2014, the wealthiest 10 percent owned 62 percent of the personal wealth in Germany; 69 percent in Sweden; 49 percent in Japan; 64 percent in China; 51 percent in Australia; 54 percent in the United Kingdom; 53 percent in France; 72 percent in Switzerland; and 68 percent in Denmark. These steep levels, the report noted, defied large cross-country differences in tax and inheritance policies.
There is, however, one country where wealth inequality is “so far above the others that it deserves to be placed in a separate category.” This is Russia. In 2014, the wealthiest 10 percent owned 85 percent of personal wealth. They aren’t oligarchs for nothing.
By: Robert Samuelson, The Washington Post, October 22, 2014
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