What concerns me most...

There are lots of things that make me pessimistic about the future - but my main concern is inequality.

"One of the most dramatic trends since 1968 has been the growing divide between rich and poor. U.S. GDP grew by more than eighteen-fold between 1968 and 2016, but the rising tide has not lifted all boats. The top 1 percent's share of national income has nearly doubled while the official poverty rate for all U.S. families has merely inched up and down. The extreme concentration of income and wealth at the top has not only siphoned resources away from those at the bottom end of the income ladder. It has also increased the political power of the ultra-rich, which they’ve used to shape trade, tax, labor, health care, campaign finance, and other policies in their interest.

 A key driver of our growing economic divide is the steep drop in unionization. With the hemorrhaging of U.S. manufacturing jobs and the expansion of anti-labor policies, the share of U.S. workers in unions has fallen from 24.9% in 1968 to 10.7% in 2016. This has undermined workers’ ability to press for higher wages, even as the national economic pie has been growing. The decline of unions has also coincided with structural changes in the labor force, as businesses cut labor costs by reducing full-time workers.

A National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that between 2005 and 2015, all U.S. job growth was in temporary, part-time, freelance, and other “contingent” work. A recent study from the International Monetary Fund confirmed that the precarious employment trend has played a significant role in suppressing wage growth. The federal minimum wage remains a poverty wage and the federal minimum for tipped workers, at just $2.13 per hour, creates particularly high levels of economic insecurity for restaurant servers, one of the fastest-growing U.S. occupations, particularly for women and people of color. And according to Oxfam and the Economic Policy Institute, around 58.3 million U.S. workers are earning below the living wage of $15 per hour. It’s hardly a surprise that Brookings found that working-age adults account for most of the growth in the number of Americans living in poverty over the past 30 years. The number of 18-64-year-olds living in poverty has increased from 9.8 million in 1968 to 16 million in 1986 to 22.8 million in 2016."

Read this report: The Souls of Poor Folk: A Preliminary Report, Institute for policy Studies, December, 2017

GROWING DIVIDE BETWEEN RICH AND POOR Sources: Institute for Policy Studies analysis based on Thomas Piketty and U.S. Census.