"Income Inequality" Is Upside-Down. Stop Working!!

This report will cause eye-bleed at The Usual Suspect propaganda outlets--if they read it, of course.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most dramatic and consequential change in the distribution of income in America in the past half-century isn’t rising income inequality but the extraordinary growth in income equality among the bottom 60% of household earners....

Oh, really?  How did THAT happen??

 ...Real government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of household earners surged by 269% between 1967 and 2017, while middle-income households saw their real earnings after taxes rise by only 154% during the same period. That has largely equalized the income of the bottom 60% of Americans....

The way the Census Bureau calculates the numbers simply does not reflect reality.  Census ignores transfer payments (food stamps, welfare, earned-income rebates, social security, etc.) and also ignores income taxes paid.  The first is an addition to spendable income, the second is a subtraction.

Why do they ignore those?  Who knows?  What counts is "spendable cash," right?

It gets even more obvious when you figure the spendable cash per household person (per capita.)

  ...In the bottom quintile, there are on average only 1.92 people living in a household. The second and middle quintiles have 2.41 and 2.62 people respectively. After adjusting income for the number of people living in the household, the bottom-quintile household received $33,653 per capita. The second and middle quintile households had on average $29,497 and $32,574 per capita, respectively. The blockbuster finding is that on a per capita basis the average bottom quintile household received 14% more income than the average second-quintile household and 3.3% more than the average middle-income household.

The authors contend that THIS is the reason for the anemic labor-force participation rate.  We've all heard about the couch-potatoes, and blamed it on the Pandemic Welfare given by the Feds and States.  But now the pandemic is over with, yet participation remains.......not good.

As the labor organizer said in today's Pravda, 'it's not worth it' to work.

He's right.  If you're in that bottom quintile and file for all the freebies, you're going to do just fine.  Add a few hours' work per day, get the earned-income rebate, and eat caviar with your champagne.  Only suckers work 40++ hours/week or add second jobs.