August 09, 2007 03:45 PM
PBS's NOW: Insight Into America's Income Inequality
In America, the top one-tenth of one percent of earners makes about the same money per year collectively as the millions of Americans in the bottom fifty percent combined. This is putting a tight squeeze on the middle class, while leaving millions of others in the cold. On Friday, August 10th, David Brancaccio talks with Pulitzer prize-winning financial reporter David Cay Johnston, as well as author and advocate Beth Shuman about the state of our country's vast income divide and how it's hurting those just trying to make ends meet.
The NOW website will feature book excerpts from both authors and stories of low-wage earners fighting for income equality.
THis is what i love about PBS, reporting on things that really matter to regular ppl.
I thought it felt a mite nippy out
As the drunkard or the unweaned mite might say.
bill oreilly is gonna be pissed about this!
when is it going to
tinkletrickle down to me mr. uberwealthy?from a R Kelly fantasy, i'm begging you, tinkle on me, poppa needs a new pair of shoes.
And still there are some of the poor voting R. Insanity or what?
yes, we KNOW. Jeez.
More redundancies from social experts as american citizen's plight is "examined" like an insect impaled on the point of a collector's pin, legs kicking.
Not that any active SOLUTIONS will come out of this.
I hate being "examined" don't you?
If we want to become richer, we need to create wealth and the wealth rather than stealing it. If we were all collectively rebuilding our infrastructure rather than manning the guns of the empire, we might have something when we get old and gray.
One of the biggest dangers of such an income discrepancy is that money movement of just a few people in the top one percent can artificially make or break markets. Less severely, a market where only a few people can decide the outcome of an industry is not an economically efficient or optimized market - the more players the more likely the money is optimally allocated in the system to the growth markets.
What do think is going to happen to millions of low wage American jobs once these two trends of RFID check-out technology and electronic customer service kiosks are implemented, and deployed, throughout not only Best Buy but Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, Macy's Bloomingdales, etc, etc, and then all the fast food chains, then all Mom & Pop stores in America in the next 5 to 7 years?
What jobs are going to come along to replace them?
Best Buy *Eager* to Use RFID to Eliminate Checkout Lines
The greatest obstacle to deployment, according to Best Buy CIO Bob Willett, is the current cost of tags and readers.
By Claire Swedberg
June 20, 2007—Technology costs are the greatest obstacle to the store of the future, according to Best Buy's CIO, Bob Willett. In fact, he says, once the price of RFID tags and other hardware comes down to an affordable level, Best Buy plans to adopt an automated system designed to eliminate checkout lines.
Willett envisions a scenario, within the next few years, in which customers could locate an item in the store, pay for it with a credit card at a station located in the department in which they're shopping and request the item be home-delivered or prepared for pick up at the store front—either way, without having to wait for a cashier's assistance. This could be managed, he explains, through the placement of RFID tags on items and the installation of interrogators throughout the store—to quickly identify an item's specific location—as well as at point-of-sale devices that would read credit cards or Best Buy preferred-customer cards containing embedded RFID tags.
To that end, Willett says he challenges vendors to create a system economical to retailers, including lower-cost readers and tags. Such a development, he predicts, could be accomplished within the next one or two years.
"The technology is out there to produce a checkout-less store now, but it is not yet cost-effective," Willett says. However, he adds, Best Buy (if not other retailers) is seeking this low-cost solution as soon as possible, to improve customer service. In describing the current shopping experience at Best Buy, Willett says, "We create a wonderful environment for customers and then, like all other retailers, ask them to line up for checkout." Such a scenario is not only inconvenient for Best Buy's customers, he states, but also frustrating for its staff, who could put their time to better use.
*"Could you imagine how many people would be relieved from working on checkout to help other customers in the store with the products?" he asks. "Really, this is all about enhancing the customers' experience."
Right, here's what's going to happen to the "people would be relieved from working on checkout to help other customers in the store with the products."
That's a lot of jobs that will evaporate overnight.
~Nyc
E Ryno @ 7:
You mean the gov't stealing from us, right? Funding state infrastructure (with our own money) would mean jobs and pulling together and a stronger society: we forget the bush cabal took the glass canister from the shelf that's labeled "AB-NORMAL" brain. (Young Frankenstein, Marty Feldman).
They are NOT interested in strengthening our society, quite the opposite.
E Ryno @ 7:
It's not about being rich or even "richer." It's about the right of every American to earn a living wage and to be part of the grand infrastructure of this country.
I don't know about you, but I don't have the option of waking up one day and building a bridge. Government needs to sponsor and encourage greater equity in income distribution.
Greed, especially in the form of hedge funds, is on the verge of bringing us into a new recession or WORSE.
crazylove @ 6:
Then you are really gonna hate the RFID chips...
Naw, this new animal wants free or lowest cost possible labor. First you need to lure them in with say, a promise of citizenship (20+ million illegals) and begin reneging like the Chinese do with their desperate hard-scrabbling people. Default on them.
Let the rest get by as best they can being monitored for every move they make.
(don't think they'll get too far with this one, personally)
Nycholas W. Alberts @ 9-
Yes, a lot of jobs will evaporate overnight. But do ya think prices will drop, or will corporate boards pocket the difference?
RFID is just the latest technology to effect unemployment numbers. When ya shop at Amazon, or any other on-line mega-market, yer helpin' to cut out the middle man and the jobs he provides.
The nexus of the service economy and technology has been so easy to plot out, yet somehow we've mostly overlooked the signs. We need to find a way to re-orient ours to a manufacturin' society. If we don't we're doomed to re-live the Gilded Age, or worse, the Dark Ages.
RasslinGod @ 1:
True; this is a real -- and most troubling -- issue. Yet the corporate media automatically and disparagingly slaps the populist label on anyone who raises it, ignorant of the fact that history is littered with many examples of economies that have collapsed as a result of a vanishing middle class and gross income inequalities.
AndyK@14 you said,
"The nexus of the service economy and technology has been so easy to plot out, yet somehow we’ve mostly overlooked the signs. We need to find a way to re-orient ours to a manufacturin’ society. If we don’t we’re doomed to re-live the Gilded Age, or worse, the Dark Ages."
The only way "the regime" will allow manufacturing again is slave wages and setting it up to be America Inside-Out. Unsettled as we are being hammered with doublethink and an enabling and very strange democratic party full of omissions.
kudos to Moyers. His friday show rocks
I would very much like to see Moyers discuss these multi-faceted peripheral moves and where they are actually leading us. Factors taken together lead to something like an intention just down the pike. If we don't name it we can't prepare for it as a country.
The rest of us see the writing on the wall and trust our paranoid instincts.
Andy K @ 14:
Corporate boards will pocket the difference. We already see this when a major corporation lays off thousands of its workers and their share price seemingly inexplicably rises.
It becomes less inexplicable when you realize for the corporations that human workers are simply a negative cost center, and if you can eliminate them, then profits rise.
Marshall Brain does a much better job of explaining this than I can here, here, and here.
He also proposes as a possible solution to this coming problem of mass unemployment, that realistically reigniting our manufacturing sector is not going solve, is to simply give each American citizen a no-strings stipend of $25K a year which is not as crazy as it sounds, when you stop to consider that Brazil has already signed into law a program of 'Guaranteed Minimum Income' for its citizenry.
I'd not be so quick to dismiss Brazil, since after all, they're a little ahead of the curve on other things, such as being an energy independent country, as of this year, because they had the foresight to plan ahead.
Income equality is retarded.
Striving for income equality makes everybody poor. If we've learned anything in the last 100 years, havent we learned THAT?
Eliminating employees isnt always a bad thing. Often it makes products cheaper, which stimulates economic output and increases living standards and luxuries.
Screw your income. I want my cheap plasma TVs! And there is hard economic logic in that statement. If one guy loses his job so that a million people can get products and services for a lower cost, it will stimulate the economy, despite the one guys job loss. And that RAISES living standards for everyone. Which also means, incidentally, that the guy who just got laid off is more likely to find other work, since employers will have more money to spend on wages thanks to the lower costs of products and services.
BTW, the most prosperous, successful, happy, healthy, educated, and free societies in the WORLD all have the GREATEST amount of income inequality.
Hong Kong and Japan come to mind.
And, of course, all the crappiest, most miserable, unhealthy, unemployed, and uneducated societies all have the most relatively equalized income distribution.
Africa and China come to mind.
Aaron Kinney @ 20:
AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Where do you live, mars?
casper46 @ 5:
Yeah, and that is what amazes me or is surprising. You and I know that not all Repigs
are in the top 1 percent of wealth, with many, many in the middle or lower income class;
yet it is evident that they do not realize how this admin. with it's tax cuts for the
wealthy is affecting them nor how much each family's debt is w/respect to the cost of bush's war in Iraq, and especially the debt that their children and grandchilder are going
to inherit. It just does not add up...
Which also means, incidentally, that the guy who just got laid off is more likely to find other work, since employers will have more money to spend on wages thanks to the lower costs of products and services.
As a famous physicist once said of a students theory, "that's not even close enough to be wrong!"
Yeah, we use a LOT of Cheap Plasma TVs in our manufacturing process at my company....NOT!
What we do use, Energy, and Electronic Components, and raw materials IS NOT GOING DOWN, on the contrary, raw materials cost is going UP!
The reason those Plasma TV's are cheaper is, labor and infrastructure costs in China and the third world are being held artificially LOW by currency control by their governments...and by lack of environmental and worker standards, that in the end, are a ticking time bomb!
But, if you think this is going to go on forever, read about what is already happening in India?
back to your theory, laid off workers means a bigger available worker pool, which means industry can drive DOWN wages....
Doesn't mean there are more jobs, instead, just lower wages for the same # of jobs.
Even Henry Ford knew, you don't pay your workers enough to buy your products, you're not going to succeed?
And, therefore there IS NOT more actually money running around in the economy with lower wages....
Most of these cheap Plasma TV's are being bought on MasterCards or Visa, NOT with increased wages in peoples pockets.
The rich are getting WEALTHIER, and if you don't understand the difference between money and wealth, no point in going any further.....
Aaron Kinney @ 21:
Japan comes to mind as having income inequality? Are you nuts? Japan comes in 5th in income equality, not inequality. Denmark is 4, Sweden 6, Belgium 14, Germany 19, the Netherlands 30.
And Africa comes to mind when you think of income equality? Sierra Leone is number 1 in inequality, Central African Republic is number 2, South Africa is number 6, Lesotho is number 12, Nigeria is number 20, Mali is 21, Niger is 22, Gambia 23, Zimbabwe 24, Cameroon 29.
I knew wingnuts were divorced from reality, but to be 180 degrees opposite to reality is much more impressive. At least people can look at views like yours and take the opposite view with confidence of being correct.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908770.html
Aaron Kinney @ 21:
Regarding the former, most of those prosperous happy healthy etc. people in Japan work 100+ hours per week and rent cubicles to sleep in. Prices are super-inflated and these educated people are worked like ants.
Both Africa and China have huge landmasses with nomad and farming subsistence outside cities, China's pop travel by train for days to an inner city project, commit for a year, live in segregated bare-sustinance shacks, and often get shagged (defaulted upon) by the Chinese gov't. Since '99 chinese workers jumped off scaffoldings, blew up or burned down just-completed projects in increasing numbers until the Chinese gov't decided to give them a basic wage about 8 months ago.
Calling that equalized is a bit bizarre.
Crazylove,
Check out the statistics I listed. Kinney is completely unhinged from reality in his assessment of equality vs inequality.
Aaron Kinney @ 21, 22:
One can be against both gross income inequality and income equality -- an argument against the former does not necessarily imply a defense of the latter. Income disparity is only one of many factors that determine the level of prosperity in a society. Another is the size and strength of the middle class.
The examples you give of "the crappiest, most miserable [...] societies" in fact validate, not negate, the point I made earlier: many an economy has failed as a result of rising income inequalities and a vanishing middle class.
Contrary to what you seem to assert, hour glass-shaped economies do not exemplify "prosperous, successful, happy, healthy [...] free societies."
BTW, the most prosperous, successful, happy, healthy, educated, and free societies in the WORLD all have the GREATEST amount of income inequality.
Hong Kong and Japan come to mind.
What? Dude, have you ever BEEN to Japan?
In a Japanese company, if a CEO were to make 400 times what the workers make, it would be a national scandal?
There is no enclaves of the super rich in Japan, it's a realtively flat economic society compared to ours?
Now, you want your model for income inequality, try what I bet is a nice HOT BUTTON for you.
Mexico!
You think all those workers are HERE because they are happy with the Economic Inequality there, which is HUGE?
Nope, they are all sneaking into the US, to get even the low wages we have, to send the money back home.
Here's another bit of info, that money they are sending home isn't buying Plasma TV's for those folks,
Cause, if you like the Income Inequality here, then get ready for the US being JUST LIKE MEXICO in about 30 years.
A nice Oligarchy, with the ruling elite class and the dirt poor.
Otay @ 25: thanks for the statistics. As you state @ 27, the fellow is "completely unhinged from reality."
...which suggests to me that s/he is spending way too much time with his/her plasma TV and not enough reading...
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega @ 31:
;)
It's time to start letting ALL of our elites that the country is rotting beneath their feet and if the bastards really give a damn about it at all drastic changes must begin now. Unless they don't care, which is altogether possible. I wonder who is going to start emigrating first, us or them.
Carlo @ 33:
Carlo @ 33:
They'll stay. They'll just build bigger walls between themselves and us riff-raff, so they don't have to suffer the torture of seeing us middle class slip into poverty. Poor rich folks. You really have to have sympathy for their suffering rich asses. ;)
Otay thanks for the stats telling it like it really is.
I've a taxidriver friend named "Coffeepot" who is the son of two university educators.
He actually resembles the wild-haired professor in Back to the Future and has an exceedingly thoughtful and long contingiency list of "must-haves" for the time it all falls apart. He's witty, positive and zanily wild. Just the kind of guy you'd want to be trekking with if it does. You could trust him with your grandmother.
The problem with our country is the number of people that think and would agree with comment #20 - Aaron Kinney. Its an hypothetical argument of economists and MBA's. It is also Wal-mart's argument. Unfortunately, when people lose jobs and they just don't walk across the street and start their life over. They usually go thru hardship. Meanwhile, cost savings are absorbed by senior management in the form of millions of dollars of compensation annually.
Mike @ 37:
Diabolical, innit. AK's unreal world is finite and in this ordinary (real) world, a patch of hell in temporality.
crazylove @ 10:
No, that's not what I mean. I meant that our tax money should be used to build our country.
Aaron Kinney @ 20:
Whenever you talk about income and money, I guess you're talking about the stuff that the Federal Reserve can print at will and devalue your life's work . . . it happened today.
Question: does anyone know whether the top one-tenth of one percent pay as much in taxes, collectively, as the bottom 50%?
ERyno@39,
"No, that’s not what I mean. I meant that our tax money should be used to build our country."
We're all saying the same thing, Ryno. To think the bush regime has made this 225 year old given an abberation calls for a loud countrywide foot-stomping on the floorboards countering their sick shitpile of lies.
E Ryno @ 40:
Guess who's footing the bill? That's right. It's our taxes at work in reverse.
Red Planet @ 41:
Wealth is taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income. Stock dividends, capital gains, real estate income, and more offer great tax benefits to reinvesting that income. Plus the rich have tax shelters like living trusts to accumulate their wealth without paying tax on the income until they remove it to spend.
As a percentage of their net worth, the rich pay far less in taxes than the poor.
I saw a CNBC financial analyst on Hardball and she said, "Maybe home ownership is not for everyone." How sad that this is what we've come to in this country. If not a reality, it should at least be someting to strive for.
I don't think anyone is talking about income parity. Some folk, like doctors who spend 12 years in training (thus offsetting their incomes for a dozen years) deserve higher pay.
But then it goes beserk. Rock stars, rappers and atheletes making amounts that far exceed our national leaders. CEO's making 800 times the amount of their typical minimum wage earners.
They do that by being born into the right circumstances, get tax breaks and other economic incentives at the expense of tax payers, and have the rights to lay-offs and outsourcing to maintain their level. Then they also get estate tax breaks on their beneficiaries when they go belly up.
We're creating a new version of American Aristocracy.
The idea that the economy is dependent on low income, if any income, workers is plantation and sharecropping thinking.
AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Where do you live, mars?
No, up in Uranus.
Not to worry. The money printing presses are running 24/7 at top speed. Never mind that every new dollar they print further devalues the ones that you already hold. You should not be bothered that the Fed produces these dollars out of thin air (no gold backing) and charges you interest for creating them. In fact they don't have to even actually print them. They can just do what they did this past week when the Dow crapped. They just create billions (new liquidity) with a few keystrokes on a computer. When this entire fiat/fractional monetary system collapses I hope you can eat your plasma TV. Yummy.
Charles @ 44:
Great answer. I'd add that inescapable taxes, such as sales tax, hit the poor much harder. It is simply incredible that people are dumb enough to believe the B.S. economic theories of people who have consistently f'ed up this country (advisers to Reagan, the Bushies, etc.). When will these idiots finally be discreditied? I mean, this isn't a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. I suppose facts don't matter when you're so rich you can't find a way to spend it all.
Comments are closed on this entry