President Obama gave a speech on winding down Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the GSEs often blamed for the housing crisis and a darling of conservative ire. Government sponsored enterprises, or GSEs buy up mortgages from private lenders and the theory is to loosen up funds to stir additional lending.
It's been said that money is the root of all evil. But does money really make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? New research released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencessays "yes".
The rich get richer and the rest of us get the economic shaft. That is the theme of this so called economic recovery since 2009. A new Pew Research report, A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%, analyzes newly released Census data on wealth. What they found is the rich got richer and the rest of us got poorer. The great American wealth transfer continues.
A flurry of studies have been released telling us what we already know. America is not the land of opportunity for most folk.
Social mobility is the ability to rise or fall economically in relation to one's peers. Increased social mobility implies people get ahead by their own efforts.
The CBO has quantified what most of America already knows, the richer got richer while the rest of us are squeezing blood from a financial stone. In a new report, the Congressional Budget Office analyzed after tax household income growth by percentiles for 1995-2007. Guess what they found? The Rich increased their wealth out of the stratosphere in comparison to the rest of us.
The newest economic inequality numbers, which ran counter to the expectations of almost all experts, are frightening. Yesterday, the Associated Press released an article titled, US income gap widens as poor take hit in recession. The opening paragraph of the article, based on recent census data, reads:
The recession has hit middle-income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets.
Brad DeLong is generating some sharp criticism for his Would Marx Say A Rising Tide Raises All Boats article which tries to rationalize the growing wealth inequality distribution and that the solution to our current economic malaise is market competition
DeLong states:
The consequence has been a loss of morale among those of us who trusted market forces and social-democratic governments to prove Marx wrong about income distribution in the long run - and a search for new and different tools of economic management
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