The Divide

For almost 40 years I've witnessed the expanding, deepening equity divide in this nation.  Much like a canyon dividing people on either side, this gaping crevice separates people and communities from one another. 

Life on either side presents drastic differences for the people involved.  Whats-more, the divide keeps us from knowing one another.  Consider for a moment the fundamental institutions that exist wherever people are free and working on the realization of better lives for themselves and their families.

• Education
• Employment/Career/Earnings
• Housing
• Health Care
• Nutrition 
• Transportation
• Recreation
• Public Safety
• Civic Live/Culure
• Entertainment
• Spiritual Life
• Family

In every case how people experience these basic, necessary institutions for productive life turns out to be quite different, depending on which side of the equity divide you occupy.  

Every day I see "the poor" just trying their best to make it through to something better.  Surprisingly, there is real joy to behold where I move about.  

But, a deep, deep sadness and recognition lives here as well. 

Over the years, steady sadness creases faces.  

It dims eyes.  

Such sadness presses people into the resignation of humility, but a humble spirit overdone.   

I know about the equity canyon.  It is very real.  

I see it every day.  

Privileged?

Crisis of hope

"The real crisis isn’t one night of young men in the street rioting. It’s something perhaps even more inexcusable — our own complacency at the systematic long-term denial of equal opportunity to people based on their skin color and ZIP code."

 

Nicholas Kristof, "When Baltimore Burned,"

The New York Times, April 29, 2015

Getting worse in Dallas

If you can read the following essay and not be concerned, you process reality much differently than do I.  Read and let me know your response.

__________________________________

 

 

Richer and Poorer

Accounting for inequality.

By Jill Lepore       

For about a century, economic inequality has been measured on a scale, from zero to one, known as the Gini index and named after an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, who devised it in 1912, when he was twenty-eight and the chair of statistics at the University of Cagliari. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. The United States Census Bureau has been using Gini’s measurement to calculate income inequality in America since 1947. Between 1947 and 1968, the U.S. Gini index dropped to .386, the lowest ever recorded. Then it began to climb.

Income inequality is greater in the United States than in any other democracy in the developed world.


Read more 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?"

Freedom day. . .for what?

Today could be a day of national reflection on where we are actually headed.

Possibly this could be your reading for mediation today before you take in the local pyrotechnic display.

We must do better.

Tax policy and income inequality

This is startling! 

No wonder we have major issues.

The startling wealth gap in America

Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, will blow your mind. 

Income inequality may be the biggest domestic threat to the future of our nation and its democratic culture.

For a preview click here. 

Wages, it's all about wages and labor's share

How do we explain how a place like Dallas, Texas, with its booming economy, continues to grow poorer and poorer at the bottom? 

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that a growing, vibrant economy--like we enjoy in Dallas--would begin to cut into the poverty rate in our city. 

But, it's just not happening. 

Why? 

Read on: 

Growth Has Been Good for Decades.
So Why Hasn’t Poverty Declined?

JUNE 4, 2014

 

campaign: nyt2014_sharetools_mkt_topstories_478QW -- 247890, creative: nyt2014_sharetools_mktg_topstories_478QW -- 373809, page: www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/upshot/growth-has-been-good-for-decades-so-why-hasnt-poverty-declined.html, targetedPage: www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/upshot, position: MiddleLeftThe surest way to fight poverty is to achieve stronger economic growth. That, anyway, is a view embedded in the thinking of a lot of politicians and economists.

 

“The federal government,” Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “needs to remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth,” which is not so different from the argument put forth by John F. Kennedy (in a somewhat different context) that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

 

In Kennedy’s era, that had the benefit of being true. From 1959 to 1973, the nation’s economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent.

 

But over the last generation in the United States, that simply hasn’t happened. Growth has been pretty good, up 147 percent per capita. But rather than decline further, the poverty rate has bounced around in the 12 to 15 percent range — higher than it was even in the early 1970s. The mystery of why — and how to change that — is one of the most fundamental challenges in the nation’s fight against poverty.

 

Read the entire article here.

 

Reactions?

A Seattle Model on Wages

[The story of how Seattle put in place a plan to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour provides much to consider.  What follows is a good report from Think Progress.  Reactions invited!]

How A Millionaire, A Socialist, And Some Taco Bell Workers Brought A Living Wage To Seattle

By Alan Pyke   

When Mayor Ed Murray (D) signed a bill that gradually raises Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour on Tuesday, his choice of location seemed to reflect the complex and cooperative process that produced the document he was signing.

Rather than City Hall, Murray chose to hold the signing ceremony in Cal Anderson Park, which was the starting point for some of the many rallies that activists from groups, like 15 Now, organized over the past year. A ballplayer with a good arm would have no trouble throwing a rock from the park’s northwest corner into Dick’s Drive-In, a local Seattle burger chain. The south end of the park looks onto a multi-block stretch of bars and restaurants that has exploded with development and commerce in the past few years. Business interests like these played an essential role in crafting the aggressive-but-thoughtful law that Murray signed in that park on Tuesday.

And just a couple hundred feet west of the park sits Seattle Central Community College, a hub of Occupy Seattle activity and the trampoline from which Socialist Kshama Sawant launched her successful city council campaign.

It took a year of activist pressure, a worker-dominated election cycle that put a socialist on the city council, and several months of hard negotiating across ideological lines, but the new law will raise Seattle workers’ standard of living dramatically over the coming years. Some things about that process may be unique to Seattle, and replicating the exact recipe the city’s labor, business, and political communities used might be impossible. But interviews with some of the most prominent participants reveal that the key ingredients for a $15 minimum wage are completely portable, and could soon come to a city near you.

A Confluence Of Pressure

On the evening of May 29, 2013, Taco Bell and Burger King night shift workers walked off the job, forcing a pair of stores to close. They were joined the next morning by dozens more workers from other chain restaurants in other neighborhoods around the city, who planned to converge in the late morning — near Cal Anderson Park, of course — and march together a little more than a mile west to Denny Park for an afternoon rally. A local progressive activist called it “a powerful kickoff” for a movement that didn’t yet know what shape it would take.

Read the entire article here.

 

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.

An interview with Steve Blow

Yesterday, Dallas Morning News columnist, Steve Blow published comments on a conversation that he and I enjoyed last Tuesday.

 The subject:  income inequality and "the poor" in general.

Read it here!

Insightful tool. . .

I found an insightful tool regarding family income and budgeting.  

Take a look here!

Looking for reactions!

Surprising facts. . .

Nine Economic Facts That Will Make Your Head Spin

Wednesday, 20 February 2013 10:07By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet | Report

Half the population of the US has slipped into poverty or is barely making enough to get by.

How much will you need for medical expenses in retirement? What does it cost to keep 2.5 million Americans behind bars? Here are a few facts and figures that might surprise you.

1. Recovery for the rich, recession for the rest.

Economic recovery is in rather limited supply, it seems. Research by economist Emmanuel Saez shows that the top 1 percent has enjoyed income growth of over 11 percent since the official end of the recession. The other 99 percent hasn’t fared so well, seeing a 0.4 percent decline in income.

The top 10 percent of earners hauled in 46.5 percent of all income in 2011, the highest proportion since 1917 – and that doesn’t even include money earned from investments. The wealthy have benefitted from favorable tax status and the rise in stock prices, while the rest have been hit with a continuing unemployment crisis that has kept wages down. Saez believes this trend will continue in 2013.

2. Half of us are poor or barely scraping by.

Click here to read on. . . 

Wealth gap drives new era of segregation

Rising Income Gap Shapes Residential Segregation
by NPR STAFF
September 23, 2012

The income gap is receiving much attention lately as more Americans are isolating themselves around "people like us." More accurately, they surround themselves with people who earn similar incomes, and it is now fueling a rise in residential segregation. One recent study suggests the income gap might be greater today than even during colonial times – even when you account for slavery.

 "Thirty years ago, about 9 percent of all upper-income people lived in predominantly upper-income neighborhoods," says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center. "That share has now doubled to 18 percent."

Taylor recently co-authored a study that tracked this income gap increase between 1980 and 2010.

 He tells Jacki Lyden, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered, that this is a national trend. But, he adds, locally several factors can contribute to residential segregation by income, including in-migration, the nature of the local economy, housing discrimination and even a city's physical layout.

 Although it might seem self-evident that people of similar incomes would gravitate toward one another, Taylor says the problem is that it creates an increasingly polarized electorate. "We are in a political moment where the sense of the middle, the sense of the cohesion, isn't feeling particularly robust," he says. "One outcome of that is a sense that the political process is ossified ... [and] that Washington doesn't work." 

Residential segregation also makes it easier when it comes to gerrymandering, or redrawing district boundaries. Taylor says that increasingly the people who draw those lines do so in order to create "safe" districts, whether for Republicans or Democrats.

Read and listen to the entire report here.

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. 

The evidence mounts on income inequality and the growing national gap. . .

23 Mind-Blowing Facts About Income Inequality In America

Gus Lubin
Nov. 7, 2011, 9:29 AM
From Business Insider

Once again the rich are getting richer as the poor get poorer in America.

Although rich people took a hit in the financial crisis, the stock market has recovered strongly.

Main Street has not: Median household income has fallen 10% since the beginning of the recession and unemployment has increased by nearly 5 percentage points.

Populist movements among Democrats and Republicans have finally put this issue in the spotlight. If you haven't seen these charts, then prepare to have your mind blown.

To read on click here.  Take the time to view the remarkable charts and graphs that simply report the facts established by the data.  The current trends appear frighteningly like the period immediately prior to the Great Depression. 

All the while, the poor suffer most. 

Half of Americans poor & low income

Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income

by HOPE YEN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

Full report found here.