Official Protest Thread...
- Thread starter Camille
- Start date
he needs to have a permit, you can't just be on private property selling items.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksh...it-zero-before-the-centurys-end/#6deeeb5d50f6
Income inequality has been getting worse, which suggests that the wealthiest, typically meaning Whites, are getting wealthier. According to a new study, the imbalance will shift so far that median Black and Latino households will lose the little relative wealth they have by about the time people of color form a majority of households in the U.S.
By 2053, Black households will have a median wealth of zero. It will take Latino households another 20 years to drop to the same level, according to an analysis by non-profits Prosperity Now (formerly CFED) and the Institute for Policy Studies.
As I've mentioned before, income inequality often captures attention, but wealth inequality is even more insidious.
That wealth becomes the head start in a race, like setting putting someone on the putative starting line and another, on the 90 meter mark in a 100-meter dash. By talking almost completely about income inequality, the country essentially pretends that a problem made over decades can be addressed on a single year's scale. It can't mathematically work.
Talking of wealth inequality in terms of a footrace is unfair. The race is over in a matter of seconds; only a few if someone is that far down the line. Wealth inequality lasts generations — forever, for all practical considerations.
One problem is that when wealth inequality increases much faster than the economy, the extra wealth has to come from somewhere. Someone loses it. I understand people don't like hearing this, but it comes down to basic arithmetic. If the economy grows at 2%, for example, and someone's share grows at 5%, the extra is something that otherwise would have gone to another.
The two factors — wealth transfer and the advantages wealth provides — come together in ugly ways. We typically describe middle class status in terms of income. But, if you change the definition to wealth, meaning you'd need between $68,000 and $204,000 in household wealth — middle quintile White households have nearly 8 times as much wealth as median Black households and 10 times as much as Latino households. Black and Latino families now have to earn two to three times as much as White families to catch up.
And then the time value of wealth comes into play:
Between 1983 and 2013, the wealth of median Black and Latino households decreased by 75% (from $6,800 to $1,700) and 50% (from $4,000 to $2,000), respectively, while median White household wealth rose by 14% (from $102,200 to $116,800). If current trends continue, by 2020 median Black and Latino households stand to lose nearly 18% and 12%, respectively, of the wealth they held in 2013. In that same timeframe, median White household wealth would see an increase of 3%. Put differently, in just under four years from now,median White households are projected to own 86 and 68 times more wealth than Black and Latino households, respectively.
These trends over time show the power of compound interest, whether positive or negative. Should the trends continue as they are, in absence of anything to reduce their power or even increase it, Black and Latino households will have nothing other than current income to call their own.
A number of practices contribute to and support these trends. One is the tax code. Many popular practices, like deductions for mortgage interest and lower taxes on capital gains, benefit Whites far more than Blacks and Latinos.
Median wealth of black Americans 'will fall to zero by 2053', warns new report
Study predicts huge and growing gulf between white US households and everyone else could be disastrous for future of America’s middle class
‘I dare not pass this knowledge down to my kids’: Mysia Hamilton with her five sons. Photograph courtesy Mysia Hamilton
Wednesday 13 September 2017 07.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 13 September 2017 12.53 EDT
Growing up in the projects of Baltimore in the 1980s, things like savings accounts, stocks and bonds were completely foreign to Mysia Hamilton. Asked if her parents could have passed along some money to help her buy a car, go to school or put into a house, she can’t help but chuckle.
“No, that wasn’t there. There was no wealth. My mother was working, she was providing – we weren’t on the street begging – but there was no money in terms of ‘here you go’. No money to pass down.”
Now 48, Hamilton is on the path to a different reality. Working as a medical office manager and earning her college degree, the mother of five manages to squelch away $50 a month by furiously clipping coupons and being “extremely frugal”.
“$50 is definitely not my goal, but it’s all I can do with the money that’s going out,” Hamilton said. And it’s working: a decade after she began working with a financial coach, she is on track to have a positive net worth by March 2018. “I’m so driven to do that. It’s important to me.”
But Hamilton is in the minority, in execution if not intention. A new report calculates that median wealth for black Americans will fall to $0 by 2053, if current trends continue. Latino-Americans, who are also experiencing a sustained downward wealth slide, will hit $0 about two decades later, according to the study by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies.
“By 2020, median black and Latino households stand to lose nearly 18% and 12% of the wealth they held in 2013 respectively, while median white household wealth increases by 3%,” the report states. “At that point – just three years from now – white households are projected to own 86 times more wealth than black households, and 68 times more wealth than Latino households.”
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Source: Edward N Wolff, Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962-2013. Figures are in 2013 dollars and exclude durable goods
With the US set to become “majority minority” by 2044, researchers say this spells major economic peril for the nation. “If the racial wealth divide continues to accelerate, the economic conditions of black and Latino households will have an increasingly adverse impact on the economy writ large, because the majority of US households will no longer have enough wealth to stake their claim in the middle class.”
The authors cite the legacy of discriminatory housing policies, an “upside down” tax system that helps the wealthiest households get wealthier, and the economic effects of mass incarceration as among the root causes for the discrepancy.
“The middle class didn’t just happen by market forces, and the whiteness of the middle class didn’t just happen by market forces. Both were intentional,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, a senior fellow at Prosperity Now and one of the report’s authors.
Take homeownership, which has long been the primary means by which Americans of modest and middle-class income are able to build generational wealth. After the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to newly freed slaves, virtually nothing was done to endow black Americans with a share of the wealth generated by centuries of slave labour – the same labour that, directly or indirectly, helped to build most of the wealth enjoyed by white Americans.
So black Americans started off generations behind, only to encounter the redlining and racially restrictive housing covenants of the early-to-middle 20th century, which prevented the sale of many homes to black Americans, and isolated them together in communities that lost value as white residents fled to the suburbs.
“The majority of white Americans weren’t middle class until the 1930s or 40s,” Asante-Muhammad told the Guardian. “Then there was mass investment to create an American middle class – but it was a white American middle class.”
Programs such as the GI bill, which offered returning WWII veterans generous lending terms to buy houses, helped turn the US into a home-owning middle class society – from which black Americans were functionally excluded. In his 2005 book When Affirmative Action was White, Ira Katznelson notes that of the first 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill, fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white people.
Recent economic crises have widened this wealth gap, according to the report, as communities of colour took the brunt of the economic hit. Black median wealth has never recovered from the 2001 recession, nor Latino median wealth from the 2008 financial collapse. White median wealth, on the other hand, was left unaffected in 2002, and began rebounding just two years after the speculative housing bubble began to implode.
“Unfortunately home values don’t come back in the same way in black communities when things happen,” said Althea Saunders-Ranniar, a financial coach and advisor in Baltimore, Maryland, where about 95% of her clients are black.
One of the things Asante-Muhammad and his co-authors found extremely important was focusing on inequality of wealth as opposed to income, because they felt it was a more accurate test of middle-class status.
“You find first-generation, even second-generation African-American and Latino households that have professional jobs and are making ‘middle-income money’ – but they have the wealth of a white high-school dropout,” Asante-Muhammad said. “They’re not truly part of a middle class – which would mean financial stability, money to weather challenging economic situations, or money to invest in the economic opportunities of their children.”
The solution, he said, is to “invest in a 21st-century American middle class. We need to make sure, for the first time, that we are investing in a middle class that includes communities of colour. This generally hasn’t been done before.”
Despite all the institutional and historical barriers, Hamilton remains determined to make the lift – even if those investments never come. “I’m mad because I didn’t start 20 years ago, but it’s OK. I dare not be selfish and not pass this knowledge down to my kids – ones who I know have a chance.”
She hopes to pass more than simply knowledge down, and is on track to come up with a down payment for a modest home by late 2018. “In 20-30 years, even if they still have to pay the mortgage, I can tell them: ‘It’s yours. This is yours.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/inequal...ns-will-fall-to-zero-by-2053-warns-new-report
Study predicts huge and growing gulf between white US households and everyone else could be disastrous for future of America’s middle class
‘I dare not pass this knowledge down to my kids’: Mysia Hamilton with her five sons. Photograph courtesy Mysia Hamilton
Wednesday 13 September 2017 07.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 13 September 2017 12.53 EDT
Growing up in the projects of Baltimore in the 1980s, things like savings accounts, stocks and bonds were completely foreign to Mysia Hamilton. Asked if her parents could have passed along some money to help her buy a car, go to school or put into a house, she can’t help but chuckle.
“No, that wasn’t there. There was no wealth. My mother was working, she was providing – we weren’t on the street begging – but there was no money in terms of ‘here you go’. No money to pass down.”
Now 48, Hamilton is on the path to a different reality. Working as a medical office manager and earning her college degree, the mother of five manages to squelch away $50 a month by furiously clipping coupons and being “extremely frugal”.
“$50 is definitely not my goal, but it’s all I can do with the money that’s going out,” Hamilton said. And it’s working: a decade after she began working with a financial coach, she is on track to have a positive net worth by March 2018. “I’m so driven to do that. It’s important to me.”
But Hamilton is in the minority, in execution if not intention. A new report calculates that median wealth for black Americans will fall to $0 by 2053, if current trends continue. Latino-Americans, who are also experiencing a sustained downward wealth slide, will hit $0 about two decades later, according to the study by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies.
“By 2020, median black and Latino households stand to lose nearly 18% and 12% of the wealth they held in 2013 respectively, while median white household wealth increases by 3%,” the report states. “At that point – just three years from now – white households are projected to own 86 times more wealth than black households, and 68 times more wealth than Latino households.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Source: Edward N Wolff, Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962-2013. Figures are in 2013 dollars and exclude durable goods
With the US set to become “majority minority” by 2044, researchers say this spells major economic peril for the nation. “If the racial wealth divide continues to accelerate, the economic conditions of black and Latino households will have an increasingly adverse impact on the economy writ large, because the majority of US households will no longer have enough wealth to stake their claim in the middle class.”
The authors cite the legacy of discriminatory housing policies, an “upside down” tax system that helps the wealthiest households get wealthier, and the economic effects of mass incarceration as among the root causes for the discrepancy.
“The middle class didn’t just happen by market forces, and the whiteness of the middle class didn’t just happen by market forces. Both were intentional,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, a senior fellow at Prosperity Now and one of the report’s authors.
Take homeownership, which has long been the primary means by which Americans of modest and middle-class income are able to build generational wealth. After the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to newly freed slaves, virtually nothing was done to endow black Americans with a share of the wealth generated by centuries of slave labour – the same labour that, directly or indirectly, helped to build most of the wealth enjoyed by white Americans.
So black Americans started off generations behind, only to encounter the redlining and racially restrictive housing covenants of the early-to-middle 20th century, which prevented the sale of many homes to black Americans, and isolated them together in communities that lost value as white residents fled to the suburbs.
“The majority of white Americans weren’t middle class until the 1930s or 40s,” Asante-Muhammad told the Guardian. “Then there was mass investment to create an American middle class – but it was a white American middle class.”
Programs such as the GI bill, which offered returning WWII veterans generous lending terms to buy houses, helped turn the US into a home-owning middle class society – from which black Americans were functionally excluded. In his 2005 book When Affirmative Action was White, Ira Katznelson notes that of the first 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill, fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white people.
Recent economic crises have widened this wealth gap, according to the report, as communities of colour took the brunt of the economic hit. Black median wealth has never recovered from the 2001 recession, nor Latino median wealth from the 2008 financial collapse. White median wealth, on the other hand, was left unaffected in 2002, and began rebounding just two years after the speculative housing bubble began to implode.
“Unfortunately home values don’t come back in the same way in black communities when things happen,” said Althea Saunders-Ranniar, a financial coach and advisor in Baltimore, Maryland, where about 95% of her clients are black.
One of the things Asante-Muhammad and his co-authors found extremely important was focusing on inequality of wealth as opposed to income, because they felt it was a more accurate test of middle-class status.
“You find first-generation, even second-generation African-American and Latino households that have professional jobs and are making ‘middle-income money’ – but they have the wealth of a white high-school dropout,” Asante-Muhammad said. “They’re not truly part of a middle class – which would mean financial stability, money to weather challenging economic situations, or money to invest in the economic opportunities of their children.”
The solution, he said, is to “invest in a 21st-century American middle class. We need to make sure, for the first time, that we are investing in a middle class that includes communities of colour. This generally hasn’t been done before.”
Despite all the institutional and historical barriers, Hamilton remains determined to make the lift – even if those investments never come. “I’m mad because I didn’t start 20 years ago, but it’s OK. I dare not be selfish and not pass this knowledge down to my kids – ones who I know have a chance.”
She hopes to pass more than simply knowledge down, and is on track to come up with a down payment for a modest home by late 2018. “In 20-30 years, even if they still have to pay the mortgage, I can tell them: ‘It’s yours. This is yours.’”
- Share your experiences of wealth inequality, wherever you live, by emailing inequality.project@theguardian.com – or follow us on Twitter here
https://www.theguardian.com/inequal...ns-will-fall-to-zero-by-2053-warns-new-report
Median wealth of black Americans 'will fall to zero by 2053', warns new report
Study predicts huge and growing gulf between white US households and everyone else could be disastrous for future of America’s middle class
‘I dare not pass this knowledge down to my kids’: Mysia Hamilton with her five sons. Photograph courtesy Mysia Hamilton
Wednesday 13 September 2017 07.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 13 September 2017 12.53 EDT
Growing up in the projects of Baltimore in the 1980s, things like savings accounts, stocks and bonds were completely foreign to Mysia Hamilton. Asked if her parents could have passed along some money to help her buy a car, go to school or put into a house, she can’t help but chuckle.
“No, that wasn’t there. There was no wealth. My mother was working, she was providing – we weren’t on the street begging – but there was no money in terms of ‘here you go’. No money to pass down.”
Now 48, Hamilton is on the path to a different reality. Working as a medical office manager and earning her college degree, the mother of five manages to squelch away $50 a month by furiously clipping coupons and being “extremely frugal”.
“$50 is definitely not my goal, but it’s all I can do with the money that’s going out,” Hamilton said. And it’s working: a decade after she began working with a financial coach, she is on track to have a positive net worth by March 2018. “I’m so driven to do that. It’s important to me.”
But Hamilton is in the minority, in execution if not intention. A new report calculates that median wealth for black Americans will fall to $0 by 2053, if current trends continue. Latino-Americans, who are also experiencing a sustained downward wealth slide, will hit $0 about two decades later, according to the study by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies.
“By 2020, median black and Latino households stand to lose nearly 18% and 12% of the wealth they held in 2013 respectively, while median white household wealth increases by 3%,” the report states. “At that point – just three years from now – white households are projected to own 86 times more wealth than black households, and 68 times more wealth than Latino households.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Source: Edward N Wolff, Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962-2013. Figures are in 2013 dollars and exclude durable goods
With the US set to become “majority minority” by 2044, researchers say this spells major economic peril for the nation. “If the racial wealth divide continues to accelerate, the economic conditions of black and Latino households will have an increasingly adverse impact on the economy writ large, because the majority of US households will no longer have enough wealth to stake their claim in the middle class.”
The authors cite the legacy of discriminatory housing policies, an “upside down” tax system that helps the wealthiest households get wealthier, and the economic effects of mass incarceration as among the root causes for the discrepancy.
“The middle class didn’t just happen by market forces, and the whiteness of the middle class didn’t just happen by market forces. Both were intentional,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, a senior fellow at Prosperity Now and one of the report’s authors.
Take homeownership, which has long been the primary means by which Americans of modest and middle-class income are able to build generational wealth. After the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to newly freed slaves, virtually nothing was done to endow black Americans with a share of the wealth generated by centuries of slave labour – the same labour that, directly or indirectly, helped to build most of the wealth enjoyed by white Americans.
So black Americans started off generations behind, only to encounter the redlining and racially restrictive housing covenants of the early-to-middle 20th century, which prevented the sale of many homes to black Americans, and isolated them together in communities that lost value as white residents fled to the suburbs.
“The majority of white Americans weren’t middle class until the 1930s or 40s,” Asante-Muhammad told the Guardian. “Then there was mass investment to create an American middle class – but it was a white American middle class.”
Programs such as the GI bill, which offered returning WWII veterans generous lending terms to buy houses, helped turn the US into a home-owning middle class society – from which black Americans were functionally excluded. In his 2005 book When Affirmative Action was White, Ira Katznelson notes that of the first 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill, fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white people.
Recent economic crises have widened this wealth gap, according to the report, as communities of colour took the brunt of the economic hit. Black median wealth has never recovered from the 2001 recession, nor Latino median wealth from the 2008 financial collapse. White median wealth, on the other hand, was left unaffected in 2002, and began rebounding just two years after the speculative housing bubble began to implode.
“Unfortunately home values don’t come back in the same way in black communities when things happen,” said Althea Saunders-Ranniar, a financial coach and advisor in Baltimore, Maryland, where about 95% of her clients are black.
One of the things Asante-Muhammad and his co-authors found extremely important was focusing on inequality of wealth as opposed to income, because they felt it was a more accurate test of middle-class status.
“You find first-generation, even second-generation African-American and Latino households that have professional jobs and are making ‘middle-income money’ – but they have the wealth of a white high-school dropout,” Asante-Muhammad said. “They’re not truly part of a middle class – which would mean financial stability, money to weather challenging economic situations, or money to invest in the economic opportunities of their children.”
The solution, he said, is to “invest in a 21st-century American middle class. We need to make sure, for the first time, that we are investing in a middle class that includes communities of colour. This generally hasn’t been done before.”
Despite all the institutional and historical barriers, Hamilton remains determined to make the lift – even if those investments never come. “I’m mad because I didn’t start 20 years ago, but it’s OK. I dare not be selfish and not pass this knowledge down to my kids – ones who I know have a chance.”
She hopes to pass more than simply knowledge down, and is on track to come up with a down payment for a modest home by late 2018. “In 20-30 years, even if they still have to pay the mortgage, I can tell them: ‘It’s yours. This is yours.’”
- Share your experiences of wealth inequality, wherever you live, by emailing inequality.project@theguardian.com – or follow us on Twitter here
https://www.theguardian.com/inequal...ns-will-fall-to-zero-by-2053-warns-new-report
This is SO f*cking IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!