Tag: Income Inequality

Contributor Post Created with Sketch. Should America’s Middle Class Really Envy Canada’s? — James Pethokoukis

James Pethokoukis
By James Pethokoukis
James Pethokoukis Contributor
James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute. (Previously, he was Washington columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, the opinion and commentary wing of Thomson Reuters.) In addition, he is an official CNBC contributor.  Pethokoukis has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, National Review, The Washington Examiner, and The Daily.  Pethokoukis has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, Fox News Channel, Fo… [more]
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The American middle-class certainly has reason to be bummed. The worst downturn since the Great Depression has been followed by an unusually weak recovery. Unemployment remains high. Median wages are still below their pre-recession peak. And if all of that weren’t bad enough, the New York Times’ new Upshot site offers this additional bit of discouraging news: “The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest.”

Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it. Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then. Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several — including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — is much smaller than it was a decade ago.

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. Wealth As a Means to an End—Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes
By Amity Shlaes
Amity Shlaes Contributor
Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, and writes a syndicated column for Forbes.  She is author three national bestsellers, The Forgotten Man,  The Greedy H
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These days, even conservatives think class warfare works. That’s the takeaway from a spate of conferences on the topic of wealth distribution that have been taking place across the country lately. It’s also the takeaway from Mary Kissel’s excellent recent video interview with Charles Murray for the Wall Street Journal. In the video, Murray cautions that class warriors succeeded in part because the American “upper class has given them a wide open target.” Murray continues with a warning about display of wealth: “it’s an American tradition that you don’t get too big for your britches once you get rich.”

Sort of. Conspicuous modesty is not an American tradition. It’s a Protestant tradition. That wealthy Americans tend to become Protestant once they are wealthy is a second tradition. Here Murray is remembering history selectively.

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Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. Paul Krugman: Poster Boy for Income Inequality — Pejman Yousefzadeh

Pejman Yousefzadeh
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
Pejman Yousefzadeh Inactive
Homepage: http://pejmanyousefzadeh.com. Blog: http://pejmanyousefzadeh.net. Bio: http://pejmanyousefzadeh.com/call-me-pejman/. Tumblr: http://pejmanyousefzadeh.tumblr.com. Twitter: http://twitter.com/Yousefzadeh.
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6 COMMENTS
 

You cannot make this up:

In late February, the City University of New York announced that it had tapped Princeton economist and New York Times blogger Paul Krugman for a distinguished professorship at CUNY’s Graduate Center and its Luxembourg Income Study Center, a research arm devoted to studying income patterns and their effect on inequality.

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