.@KattyKayBBC and I had a great time doing this! Huge thank you to @TheAtlantic. pic.twitter.com/PCef68mWt8
— Claire Shipman (@ClaireShipman) April 15, 2014Social inequality -- that is, strong caste and class identification, and disparagement of all other (or "lesser," in the eyes of the class-obsessed person) castes and classes -- has gotten more pronounced over the past ten years.Yes "weaponized," as in Wagner's tweet Tuesday ridiculing the House Republican Conference chairwoman:
It is weaponized for politics. Sarah Palin quite plainly is not dismissed by the New Class merely because they disagree with her beliefs. Their disdain has a nasty personal edge to it -- they disapprove of her and the class she hails from. The New Class is not to content itself with disparaging Palin. They actively wish to include millions of Americans they've never even met inside the broad circle of their angry, arrogant disdain. The fact that they are not just attacking Palin but attacking millions of other people is not a bug, but a feature. The additional casualties of the attack are not regrettable collateral damage, but rather bonus damage to be celebrated.
Living room. Lady on a settee. Where's the needlepoint?
— Alex Wagner (@alexwagner) January 29, 2014For much of the debate it appeared the Bachmann and Sanders were talking simultaneously, while a seemingly helpless Blitzer sat on the sidelines choosing not to moderate in the traditional sense.
When Sanders said Republicans want to cut Social Security, Bachmann shot back with, “That is absolutely a lie. It’s brought up all the time and it’s a lie. Let’s face it, Senator Sanders. you shouldn’t be lying about what our position is.” When he asked her directly if she supports “chained CPI” and raising the minimum wage, Bachmann would not answer, choosing instead to direct the points she was trying to make straight towards Blitzer. Meanwhile, Bachmann had to pause several times throughout the conversation to tell Sanders to “calm down.”
The @cnn booker who put Michele Bachmann and Bernie Sanders on together should get a raise.
— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) January 27, 2014.@KTumulty VIDEO: Bachman: Obama created war on women: http://t.co/binHhp20nP #TCOT #TGDN
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 27, 2014Income inequality has soared under #Obama http://t.co/zXXX5G0BiH (See chart) #tcot #tlot pic.twitter.com/6Vp9L5rVMz
— Investors.com (@IBDinvestors) January 25, 2014Children growing up in America today are just as likely — no more, no less — to climb the economic ladder as children born more than a half-century ago, a team of economists reported Thursday.Keep reading.
Even though social movements have delivered better career opportunities for women and minorities and government grants have made college more accessible, one thing has stayed constant: If you are growing up poor today, you appear to have the same odds of staying poor in adulthood that your grandparents did.
The landmark new study, from a group led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty, suggests that any advances in opportunity provided by expanded social programs have been offset by other changes in economic conditions. Increased trade and advanced technology, for instance, have closed off traditional sources of middle-income jobs.
The findings also suggest that who your parents are and how much they earn is more consequential for American youths today than ever before. That’s because the difference between the bottom and the top of the economic ladder has grown much more stark, but climbing the ladder hasn’t gotten any easier.
Those findings add up to a surprising take on the status of the iconic American Dream, and they cast Washington’s roiling debate about the consequences of economic inequality in a new light.
The paper suggests that “it is not true that mobility itself is getting lower,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist and mobility scholar who was not one of the paper’s authors but has reviewed the findings. “What’s really changed is the consequences of it. Because there’s so much inequality, people born near the bottom tend to stay near the bottom, and that’s much more consequential than it was 50 years ago.”
Americans have always placed great faith in economic mobility, the idea that any child born into poverty can grow up to be middle class, or that a middle-class kid can grow up to be rich.
As the country struggles through the slow recovery from recession and decades of middle-class stagnation, politicians including President Obama and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have lamented that mobility is getting worse; that it is getting harder to climb out of poverty or into wealth.
Previous research has suggested that that might be true, particularly work by Bhash Mazumder, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who found mobility declined as inequality increased in the 1980s.
Chetty and his colleagues — Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Nicholas Turner of the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis — examined millions of anonymous earnings records and found that mobility has not changed appreciably since the 1970s.
(The authors looked at records for parents at a set age and for their children once they reached adulthood. For the most recent generation of children, many of whom have not yet started working, they measured college attendance, which correlates with higher earnings).
Incorporating results from a previous study dating back to the 1950s, the authors concluded that “measures of social mobility have remained remarkably stable over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States.”
