For years here, many of us have pointed out our House of Lords, errrr Senate being stacked with millionaires is a big problem on regard to financial policy-- Now we have some proof; Learn about the Gini Index and the Stepan and Linz study below the fold.
Jill Lepore's recent excellent article in The New Yorker "Richer and Poorer", subtitled "Accounting for Inequality" provides strong evidence a big part of our wealth inequity problem lies with our mis-representative upper house of Congress-- the Senate.
This is should be no surprise-- since we know nearly half of our Senators are millionaires while certainly not half of the population of the U.S. are. So I think it's fair to question why we need a Senate that is nearly half comprised of millionaires. and please, no partisan baloney about them all being repuglicans. Dianne Feinstein is one of the richest people in the Senate, if not THE richest.
For about a century, economic inequality has been measured on a scale, from zero to one, known as the Gini index and named after an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, who devised it in 1912, when he was twenty-eight and the chair of statistics at the University of Cagliari. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. The United States Census Bureau has been using Gini’s measurement to calculate income inequality in America since 1947. Between 1947 and 1968, the U.S. Gini index dropped to .386, the lowest ever recorded. Then it began to climb.
Income inequality is greater in the United States than in any other democracy in the developed world. Between 1975 and 1985, when the Gini index for U.S. households rose from .397 to .419, as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Gini indices of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, and Finland ranged roughly between .200 and .300, according to national data analyzed by Andrea Brandolini and Timothy Smeeding. But historical cross-country comparisons are difficult to make; the data are patchy, and different countries measure differently. The Luxembourg Income Study, begun in 1983, harmonizes data collected from more than forty countries on six continents. According to the L.I.S.’s adjusted data, the United States has regularly had the highest Gini index of any affluent democracy. In 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a Gini index of .476.
THIS:
The reason Democrats and Republicans are fighting over who’s to blame for growing economic inequality is that, aside from a certain amount of squabbling, it’s no longer possible to deny that it exists—a development that’s not to be sneezed at, given the state of the debate on climate change.
It's more or less impossible to remain in denial regarding wealth inequity and it's implications for our society and our political system-- the American Political Science Association did a study in 2001 which concluded "growing economic inequality was threatening fundamental political institutions". This was fourteen years ago--
what has been done since then to resolve the problem?
The Stepan and Linz study regarding congress' (they studied the congresses in twenty-three democracies around the world):
Then they observed something more. Their twenty-three democracies included eight federal governments with both upper and lower legislative bodies. Using the number of seats and the size of the population to calculate malapportionment, they assigned a “Gini Index of Inequality of Representation” to those eight upper houses, and found that the United States had the highest score: it has the most malapportioned and the least representative upper house. These scores, too, correlated with the countries’ Gini scores for income inequality: the less representative the upper body of a national legislature, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor.
My apology if I am over - quoting the article, but this information is important.
So-- this appears to be a bastardization of the whole concept of "checks and balances" our Founders attempted to create for us. I'm fairly sure if one of them returned for a week, he'd point to the numerous millionaires in the Senate and comment "WTF"??
It would be more than interesting to tie in the seeming institutionalized black poverty rate in our nation.
Read the entire Lepore article-- she covers several recently published books on wealth inequity.
http://www.newyorker.com/...