Income shrinking for "poor" workers/families while rich grow richer. . .

Clearly, our best efforts aren't working.  And, I've about decided we aren't working on the right things.  The problem of declining earning power among your low-income neighbors will not be solved via charity.  Only large, systemic reforms and investments will move the income needle in the necessary direction. 

Read this troubling report and give me your feedback.

Dallas income gap widens, Brookings study reports

Household earnings at top of scale 12 times those of working poor

By MICHAEL E. YOUNG                

The income gap continues to grow between affluent Americans and those struggling to get by, with Dallas households near the top of the scale earning more than 12 times as much as those broadly defined as the “working poor,” according to a new study by the Brookings Institution.

The study compared household income of those in the 95th percentile — about $220,000 in Dallas — with those in the 20th percentile, roughly $18,000 a year, said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at Brookings and deputy director of its metropolitan policy program.

The growing disparity isn’t just about rising incomes for upper-class households, Berube said, but rather about shrinking paychecks in poorer households, whose incomes remain 13 percent below levels prior to the recession of 2007-09.

 

Read the entire article here.

Dallas, we have a problem

A radical word, now all but forgotten. . .

Poverty Is Not the Problem

For Jesus, it is clear, poverty is not the problem; it is the solution. Until human beings learn to live in naked contact and direct simplicity and equality with each other, sharing all resources, there can be no solution to the misery of the human condition and no establishment of God’s kingdom. Jesus’ radical and paradoxical sense of who could and who could not enter the Kingdom is even more clearly illustrated by his famous praise of children.

Andrew Harvey
Source: Son of Man

Getting worse in Dallas

Other people's kids

"The American dream is in crisis. . .because Americans used to care about other people's kids and now they only care about their own kids."

 

Robert Putnam,

Our Kids:  The American Dream in Crisis

Check out related The New Yorker article here

My privileged life. . .

Every day I. . .

• start with breakfast, coffee and my iPad
• freely access a private bathroom, complete with shower, sinks, toilet, mirrors, towels, etc.
• start one of my two cars and drive to work or to some weekend, enjoyable destination
• spend about an hour working out in the YMCA Downtown (Gordie's torture chamber!)
• enjoy conversation with my wife, family, work mates, friends, neighbors, strangers without fear or concern
• read something worthwhile
• study and think and dream because I have the "space" to do so
• plan and strategize on how to achieve my vision for work, life, faith
• laugh with good reason
• experience good reason to hope
• freely access wellness and health enhancing activities and resources
• exist in a space to imagine better times
• don't worry about meals
• don't worry about clothes
• don't worry about keeping my "stuff" secure
• pet my cats
• wonder what next blessing might fill me up
• live in the midst of absolute privilege
• thank God
• beg for mercy from above, within and all around
• receive mercy freely
• brag on my four grandchildren--have I told you about Gracie, Wyatt, Owen and Henry lately?
• don't worry about becoming poor
• know that if I get sick or injured, I'll be cared for in a state-of-the-art medical facility
• wonder, "Why me?"

Life of the 1%

Gap widens. . .unsustainable

Two cities, divided

The map below depicts the segregated nature of the Dallas Metroplex.  

The teal/blue areas indicate high-income sections of the community.  The red represent the low-income portions of this urban area.  

While racial segregation does not play as negative a role in community life as it once did, still, it has been replaced by financial or economic segregation.  And, that segregation accompanies a sharply divided community in racial terms as well.  

Dallas is a divided, unequal, troubled community in terms of income distribution.  

I've long said that it is the richest poor town in the US.  In fact, Dallas is among the top 10 most income/resource divided cities in the nation.  This reality affects every aspect of our community life.  

You can read the entire report, including analysis of cities other than Dallas, here.

Insightful tool. . .

I found an insightful tool regarding family income and budgeting.  

Take a look here!

Looking for reactions!

Resurrection and beyond. . .

The words of Jesus
Luke 16:19-31

The Rich Man and Lazarus

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Springsteen's Rock with a Message. . .

Rolling Stone published an interview with Bruce Springsteen conducted by Jon Stewart in its March 29, 2012 edition.  Springsteen spoke of his new album (Wrecking Ball) and of a number of his classic recordings that reflect his own social values and his vision for and concern about America.  His language is the language of community, fairness, compassion and collective will, as well as responsibility.  Here are some of his comments:

The first cut, "We Take Care of Our Own," is where I set out the questions that I'm going to try to answer.  The song's chorus is posed as a challenge and a question.  Do we take care of our own?  What happened to that social contract?  Where did that go over the past 30 years?  How has it been eroded so terribly?  And how is it that the outrage about that erosion is just beginning to be voiced right now?  I've written about this stuff for those 30 years, from Darkness on the Edge of Town to The Ghost of Tom Joad through to today. . . .

So these are issues and things that occur over and over again in history and land on the backs of the same people.  In my music--if it has a purpose beyond dancing and fun and vacuuming your floor to it--I always try to gauge the distance between American reality and the American dream.  The mantra that I go into in the last verse of "We Take Care of Our Own"--"Where are the eyes, where are the hearts?"--it's really:  Where are those things now, what happened to those things over the past 30 years?  What happened to the social fabric of the world that we're living in? What's the price that people pay for it on a daily basis?"  Which is something that I lived with intensely as a child, and is probably the prime motivation for the subjects I've written about since I was very, very young. . . .

You cannot have a social contract with the enormous income disparity--you're gong to slice the country down the middle.  Without jobs, without helping folks with foreclosures, without regulating the banks, without some sort of tax reform. . . .Without addressing those issues in some way, I don't think the country is going to hold together.  . . .at the end of the day, you can't have a society and you can't have a civilization without a reasonable amount of economic fairness, full employment, purpose and civic responsibility. (page 41)

"Bruce Springsteen's State of the Union"

Rolling Stone

Issue 1153, March 29, 2012

Attacking the income disparity gap

Here's a fascinating essay comparing how the U. S. handled its income gap between the well-to-do and the bottom early in the 20th Century when William Howard Taft served as President.  The analysis quickly reveals how so much more conservative our nation has become, a trend that appears to be growing. 

Read the article and tell me what you think.


Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality

If only Americans today were as open-minded about leveling the playing field as we were 100 years ago.

By Beverly Gage|Posted Wednesday, Feb. 15, 201

In one of his last acts of office, President William Howard Taft attempted to solve the problem of inequality in America. In August 1912, on the cusp of a brutal third-place finish in the presidential election, he created a Commission on Industrial Relations to investigate “the general condition of labor in the principal industries.” Despite its fusty charge, the commission turned out to be one of the most sensational sideshows of the Progressive Era, a cross-country journey through the wilds of American class conflict. For three years, government commissioners traipsed from city to city asking capitalists, union organizers, and reformers what it was like to work in America, and whether the spoils of industry seemed to be distributed fairly among the rich and poor.

The commission’s answer, released in a 1916 report, speaks volumes about the persistent dilemma of inequality in the United States, and about the intellectual timidity of today’s political responses. “Have the workers received a fair share of the enormous increase in wealth which has taken place in this country…?” the report demanded. “The answer is emphatically—No!”

Their numbers bore this out. According to the commission, the “Rich”—or top 2 percent—owned 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. By contrast, the “Poor”—or bottom 60 percent—owned just 5 percent of the wealth.

Today, after a century of ups and down, we’ve landed back at those extremes, give or take a few percentage points. But what’s striking about the commission’s report, read from a 21^st-century perspective, is how limited our own debate about inequality seems by comparison. For the commission, inequality was a fundamental problem that threatened the entire fabric of American democracy. Today, by contrast, we’re busy debating whether a multimillionaire like Mitt Romney ought to pay a few more percentage points in federal taxes.

To read the entire article click here.

Beverly Gage, a Yale history professor, is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

Opportunity disparity

The following article appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  The author, Margaret C. Simms is a senior fellow and director of the Low-Income Working Families project at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research organization based in Washington, D.C.

Opportunity still has racial hue

At the march on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these now famous words: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

While King made the statement about racial equality and racial justice, at some level, it is a sentiment to which all parents can relate. All parents want their children to reach their potential and not be held back by anything other than their willingness to work hard.

Children are more likely to succeed if they have a stable home environment, adequate nutrition and the opportunity to get a good education. Unfortunately, nearly 50 years after the march on Washington, opportunity still has a racial dimension. That is not to say that progress hasn’t been made in breaking racial barriers. Advancement can be seen in every dimension of American life — education, politics and economic achievement. The percentage of African-Americans that have a college education has gone up from 3.5 percent to 18 percent. The number holding political office, including the presidency, has risen from about 1,400 to more than 10,500. Black men and women have held corporate CEO positions.

Yet in many areas, African-Americans have made little progress relative to their white counterparts. Median household income for African-Americans is only 58 percent of the median white household income, little different from the ratio in the late 1960s. This disparity reflects the fact that African-Americans are more likely to be unemployed regardless of how the economy is faring and that African-American families are more likely to be headed by women. Even when you compare households with the same family structure and educational level, African-Americans aren’t as well off.

A recent Pew Research Center study showed the recession and housing market crash hit African-Americans hard, as those with any assets at all were most likely to have them in the form of homeownership. The Pew report shows that between 2005 and 2009, African-American wealth fell by 53 percent compared with a 19 percent drop for white households. As a result, the typical white household had 20 times the net worth of the typical black household in 2009, up from 11 times in 2005. This is the biggest gap seen in the 25 years that the data have been collected.

To read the entire article click here. 

As always, reactions invited.