[Two new official reports out of Washington trace our growing
economic divide and the high price we pay, in dollars and lives, for
letting that divide fester. ] [[link removed]]

WHEN WAGES STAGNATE, LIFESPANS FALL. INEQUALITY KILLS.  
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Sam Pizzigati
September 12, 2019
Inequality.org
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_ Two new official reports out of Washington trace our growing
economic divide and the high price we pay, in dollars and lives, for
letting that divide fester. _

A woman in New York City counts out food stamps with her daughter,

 

The weight of the wealth that sits at the top of America’s economic
order isn’t just squeezing dollars out of the wallets of average
Americans. That concentrated wealth is shearing years off of American
lives.

The latest evidence for that squeeze on American wallets comes from
the Census Bureau. Researchers there have just released results
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their latest annual sampling of U.S. incomes. In 2018, the new Census
stats show, incomes for typical American households saw a “marked
slowdown
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In effect, average Americans have spent this entire century on a
treadmill getting nowhere fast. The nation’s median — most typical
— households pocketed 2.3 percent _fewer_ real dollars in 2018
than they earned in 2000.

The “vast majority” of American households, note
[[link removed]] Economic
Policy Institute analysts Elise Gould and Julia Wolfe, “have still
not fully recovered from the deep losses suffered in the Great
Recession.”

America’s most affluent households have been having no such problem.
Average top 5 percent incomes have increased 13 percent overall since
2000, to $416,520. The new Census Bureau figures, based on a sampling
of U.S. households, tell us that top 5 percenters are now collecting
23.1 percent of the nation’s household income.

But these Census Bureau figures significantly understate just how much
income America’s richest are annually grabbing, mainly because
Census researchers “top code” high incomes to keep the identity of
sampled deep pockets confidential. All incomes above fixed top-code
levels get recorded
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the top code. These levels have changed over the years, but the Census
Bureau’s continuing reliance on top coding leaves us with figures
that fudge the real extent of our inequality.

Analyses based on other data sources — like IRS tax return records
— show that top 1 percenters _alone_ are pulling down
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household income, essentially triple the top 1 percent income share of
a half-century ago.

THE ‘UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES’
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. . . of letting the rich get richer
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What impact is this top-heavy distribution of America’s income
having on Americans of modest means? Increasing inequality, a
just-released Government Accountability Office study makes clear, is
killing many of us off before our time.

This new GAO research tracks
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life has played out for Americans who happened to be between 51 and 61
years old in 1992.

Americans with household wealth that placed them in that age
cohort’s most affluent 20 percent, the GAO found, did fairly well
over the next two decades plus. Over three-quarters of them — 75.5
percent — went on to find themselves still alive and kicking in
2014, the most recent year with full stats available.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, a different story. Among
Americans in the poorest 20 percent of this age group, under half —
47.6 percent — were still waking up in 2014. In other words, the
poorest of the Americans the GAO studied had just a 50-50 chance of
living into 2014. The most affluent had three chances in four.

“The inequality of life expectancy,” as economist Gabriel
Zucman puts it
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“is exploding in the U.S.”

The new GAO numbers ought to surprise no one. We’ve seen over the
past quarter-century a steady stream of research studies that show
consistent links between rising inequality and shorter lifespans.

And mortality trends in the United States reflect similar dynamics
worldwide wherever income and wealth are concentrating. The more
unequal a society becomes, the less healthy the society. The nations
with the narrowest gaps between rich and poor turn out to have
the longest lifespans [[link removed]].

The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan
agency that services Congress, conducted its new inequality research
after a request from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). He draws
a simple lesson from the GAO’s sobering new numbers.

“We must put an end to the obscene income and wealth inequality in
our country,” Sanders noted
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the GAO report’s September 9 release. “If we do not urgently act
to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole
generation will be condemned to early death.”

_Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. His latest book: The Case for
a Maximum Wage
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Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich
Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created
the American Middle Class, 1900-1970
[[link removed]] and Greed
and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our
Lives [[link removed]]. Follow him at @Too_Much_Online._

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