Just curious. If you add these up, what do you get?
I started mulling this over a few weeks ago. With so much news and so many stories available on a nightly basis that contain so many bits and drips of data, it wasn't so hard to find these points even as I grew tired of hearing their dismal stories. And with Evernote collecting them...and organizing them...is relatively easy.
The availability of all this data, even for an art major such as myself, and the ease of collecting it only highlights the challenge. That is answering the question:
Do these add up to sustainable?
And more importantly:
How do we change these numbers?
UNEMPLOYMENT.
Reported vs Real
The ranks of long-term unemployed (jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased to 6.2 million (from 5.8 million) or 45.1% of all unemployed. The underemployment rate or “real” unemployment rate (includes unemployed, marginally attached and those working part-time for economic reasons) was 15.8%. Crew of 42: A Blog of Black Members of Congress
UNAFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE
Health spending as a share of GDP is expected to grow from its 2008 level of 16.3 percent to an estimated 19.5 percent of GDP in 2017 (about $4.3 trillion). Overall, GDP is also projected to grow over this period (on average, 4.7 percent per year), but health care costs will grow faster than GDP. In fact, through 2018, health care spending growth is expected to outpace GDP growth by an average of 1.9 percentage points annually. By 2017, about 20 cents of every dollar spent in the U.S. economy will be spent on health care. Rand Corporation
Do you see your income rising by 6.6 percentage points annually? If you do then you expect your income to double in less than 10 years.
FEDERAL DEFICIT
It's rising as a percent of GDP, in dollar amounts, to heights second only to that of WW2. Link
WALL STREET
The DOW is at or near its all-time high. Link
CONCENTRATION of WEALTH
Corporations have $1.9 trillion dollars in cash. Link.
In 2007, 35% of our country's networth was held by 1% of the population. Another 27% of our country's net worth was held by 4%. Add this up. 5% of our country's population owns 62% of our country's net worth. UC Santa Cruz (graphs)
Between 1993 and 2007, 50% of all the growth in the U.S. economy went to the richest 1%. Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three quarters of all the economy's growth was captured by the top 1%. In 2007, this top 1% captured 20% of all the income in the entire nation. The top 10% corralled fully half of all the income earned in the entire country, as much as the bottom 90% combined. Only one time since 1913 has so much of the nation's income been seized by such a small elite. That was 1928, the year before the stock market collapsed, ushering in the Great Depression. - Link
The richest 20 percent of Americans saw their share of all Americans’ wealth increase by 2.2 percentage points between 2007 and 2009. The remaining four-fifth of Americans saw their wealth decline by the same amount. Common Dreams
DECLINING INCOMES
The increase in total private-sector wages, adjusted for inflation, from the start of 2001 has fallen far short of any 10-year period since World War II, according to Commerce Department data. In fact, if the data are to be believed, economy wide wage gains have even lagged those in the decade of the Great Depression (adjusted for deflation)....To put that in perspective, since the Great Depression, 10-year gains in real private wages had always exceeded 25% with one exception: the period ended in 1982-83, when the jobless rate spiked above 10% and wage gains briefly decelerated to 16%. - Investor's Business Daily
LOWEST TAX RATE for OVER 50 YEARS
Twelve of the nations largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid an effective tax rate of negative 1.5%.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Not only have these twelve companies paid zero in taxes for the years 2008-2010, they actually received tax subsidies that added $62.4 billion to their bottom lines....had just these twelve companies paid at the actual 35% tax rate the GOP is telling us they are chaffing under, the sum would have added a full 12% to the totals the United States of America’s treasury received through corporate taxes. Forbes
Taxes as a percentage of GDP are the lowest among OECD members, Taxes as a percentage of GDP were higher in the 50's. Forbes
Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found. Federal, state and local income taxes consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010. USAToday
Growing Number of Children Living in Poverty, Homeless
Nationwide, 14 million children were in poverty before the Great Recession. Now, the U.S. Census tells us its 16 million - up two million in two years. That is the fastest fall for the middle class since the government started counting 51 years ago. 60 Minutes
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