Income Gap

When Mitt Romney was talking about his money the other day - a very rich topic, as it were - he casually remarked, "I get speakers' fees from time to time, but not very much. " Care to learn how Romney defines "not very much"? Between February 2010 and February 2011, his speaking gigs totaled $374,327. This guy clearly dwells in a rarefied realm far removed from the average Joe. What he dismisses as chump change is enough to send seven kids to top-notch colleges. His gig earnings also trump the median American family's annual income, which happens to be $60,088.

President Bush signed his $1.35 trillion dollar tax cut Thursday. He sees it as an economic steroid that should help pump up the financial muscle of one and all. Opponents tried to block this tax bonanza as being too darn big - a reckless impediment to saving Medicare and Social Security for the long term and to investing more in education, prescription drugs, debt reduction and other priorities. Equally important, this tax-cut package does nothing to reduce America's income chasm between rich and poor.

The income gap between rich and poor and rich and middle class is at its widest since the end of World War II, the Census Bureau reported yesterday. The poorest one-fifth of families received 4.6 percent of the total national family income, the survey found, their lowest share since 1954. The share going to the middle class - those families midway between the richest and poorest - was 16.7 percent, the lowest recorded since 1947. Those in the richest category, the top fifth, received 44 percent, the new statistics show.

A giddy optimism surrounds the current economy - 83 percent of Americans tell pollsters things are great, just great. Yet the typical American household spends more than it earns. You thought yours was the only one? While new millionaires are being created by a record-breaking stock market, and consumers are buying luxury goods at a dizzying rate, the majority of Americans are getting less from the economy than they've put into it. Productivity grew by 46.5 percent over the last 25 years, but the wages of lower and middle income Americans grew hardly at all. In fact, if their pay had kept up with the wealth they produced, the median wage would be $17.29 an hour - not the current $11.29.

Everywhere we turn, we see and hear quantitative data and conclusions derived from them: Four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum. Gore leads Bradley by so many points in the latest poll. How can we be critical consumers of all this information? For example, the report on income disparities done by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute seems to depict a crucial trend on the American scene. But where did the report's authors get their data and how reliable are they?

Hardly a week goes by that we don't hear more good news about the U.S. economy's robust growth. But Americans have a sharp instinct for the uneasy truth behind the happy numbers. Three out of four respondents to a recent Harris poll said they felt that the benefits of economic growth were not being evenly distributed. To determine who is benefitting from the current prosperity and who is being left behind, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute recently analyzed state-by-state trends in income growth in a study called "Pulling Apart.

When economic times are bad, it is usually the little guy who gets hit the hardest. When times are good, however, it has often been the case that the opposite is true. Low unemployment usually helps the folks on the bottom rung the most. Riding one of the most astonishing economic booms in our history, we might expect to see significant improvement in the relative position of the poor. Surprisingly, a new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute that the problem of income inequality has been getting much worse in recent years.

However wide the policy gulf between Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate candidates, Republican Tom Smith and incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, it is dwarfed by the gap in their personal finances. Smith, who has been buying millions of dollars in TV ads with his own money, reported total income of almost $22 million in 2010, the year he sold his main coal-mining businesses, according to federal tax returns he has released to The Inquirer. Smith made far less - about $265,000 - last year, his returns indicated.

Remember when candidate Bill Clinton complained in 1992 that average folks were "working harder for less"? Remember when he charged that "the rich get the gold mine, and the middle class gets the shaft"? You don't hear the incumbent talking like a populist in campaign '96. In fact, nary a substantive word has been uttered lately about wage stagnation, the erosion of the middle class, or the income gap between rich and poor. A year ago, it seemed almost inevitable that the presidential campaign would turn on how the candidates addressed the nation's underlying economic anxieties.

And so the Class of 2000 gets ready to invade campuses from coast to coast next fall. But what about the 18-year-olds who aren't going to college? The picture, always grim, is getting grimmer. A new analysis of 1994 U.S. Census Bureau data shows that the income gap between the well-educated American and the less-educated is widening - fast. In 1978, a family headed by a person with five or more years of college earned, on average, nearly twice as much as the family of a high school dropout.

However wide the policy gulf between Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate candidates, Republican Tom Smith and incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, it is dwarfed by the gap in their personal finances. Smith, who has been buying millions of dollars in TV ads with his own money, reported total income of almost $22 million in 2010, the year he sold his main coal-mining businesses, according to federal tax returns he has released to The Inquirer. Smith made far less - about $265,000 - last year, his returns indicated.

EXACTLY one year ago, Fishtown's Dustin Slaughter was one of a couple of hundred protesters who - turned away from New York's Wall Street by a thick blue wall of cops - streamed into a then-unknown corner of real estate called Zuccotti Park to spend the night. Virtually no one noticed. Over the next few months, Slaughter, 33, a filmmaker and alternative journalist, became a virtual Zelig of the movement soon known as Occupy Wall Street - always in the picture. He was there when 700 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge and when Occupy Philly took root in Dilworth Plaza.

When Mitt Romney was talking about his money the other day - a very rich topic, as it were - he casually remarked, "I get speakers' fees from time to time, but not very much. " Care to learn how Romney defines "not very much"? Between February 2010 and February 2011, his speaking gigs totaled $374,327. This guy clearly dwells in a rarefied realm far removed from the average Joe. What he dismisses as chump change is enough to send seven kids to top-notch colleges. His gig earnings also trump the median American family's annual income, which happens to be $60,088.

It was as if Oliver Stone had written a Mitt Romney sound bite when this week the candidate was quoted as saying, "I like firing people. " After all, Stone directed Michael Douglas, as Gordon Gekko, saying similar things in the 1987 movie classic Wall Street . Men in their 40s and 50s still quote Gekko: "Lunch is for wimps"; "I create nothing. I own"; "What's worth doing is worth doing for money"; "If you're not inside, you're outside"; and of course, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Has income inequality exacerbated the financial crisis or slowed a recovery? How should "fairness" be addressed? The issue has many facets in this election year and needs to be sorted out. "Breaking down the income gap into real terms," at money.usnews.com, gives the income gap historical perspective, with notes on a so-called "great compression" of the income scale for decades after the Great Depression, and the subsequently unfolding "great divide"...

The years-long fight between Cherry Hill Township and the Fair Share Housing Center, a low-income-housing advocacy group, is to return to court Monday, with the dispute this time focusing on the township's accounting of its court-mandated, low-income-housing fund. In the latest development from Fair Share's 2001 lawsuit, Superior Court Judge Robert J. Millenky is to consider the group's allegation that Cherry Hill misspent more than $500,000 in development fees instead of setting the money aside for affordable housing.

Burials at home for crash victims CHICAGO - Seven members of an extended family who died in a crash on the Indiana Toll Road will be buried in their home country, Alberto Rebelo, a spokesman for the Ecuadoran Consulate in Chicago said Saturday. He said the consulate is offering relatives of the victims as much information as possible, including financial and legal help and how to have the bodies properly transported back to Ecuador. Ten members of the family were in a minivan heading east on the toll road about 8 p.m. Thursday when it hit a deer and slowed down or stopped, authorities said.

By Robert A. Pastor Washington focuses on the urgent and has little time for the important. As a result, it faces chronic problems and cannot plan for the future. There is no better illustration of this than the idea that was missing from President Obama's recent jobs address: North America. Had he grasped it, he would have amplified some of his proposals in a way that would help achieve his job goals and two others: doubling exports and limiting undocumented immigration.

Two scenarios for a new Egypt There are two future scenarios for Egypt ("Mubarak sees fall exit," Wednesday). Egypt could be a force for moderation and freedom, demonstrating the related social and economic benefits to other Arab countries. The likely result would be increased peace and decreased tensions in the Middle East, and between Islam and the West. Or Egypt could become the powerful and rich leader of the fanatics who hate the West and are willing to die to make their point.

Ben Bernanke's maiden congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn't put a foot wrong on monetary or fiscal policy. But Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) about income inequality, he declared that "the most important factor" in rising inequality "is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education. " That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society.