iwillspankyou wrote:It could very well be that you have no sympathy for the poor ppl in USA or even the struggling middle class, But I would say, it does matter, for us all. USA is the biggest locomotive in the global economy, and when a large percent of the ppl there, are struggling harder and harder, it will hit us all, sooner or later.
Should I have more sympathy if Americans themselves don't? You can't live sympathising with every possible unfortunate outcome on this planet, or else you go insane. As I said earlier in this thread, Americans view poverty as a result of the poor's bad choices or lack of work ethic. They think that if you're poor in the USA, it must be because you're not willing to work hard, you just want to live off welfare or whatever resources you manage to leech. The fact that they have so much economic inequality in the USA is not an accident, it's the logical and intended result of how they organised their social system. They think poverty is basically social punishment for someone's unwillingness to work hard and lift themselves up from a worse condition. It also explains why they don't believe in universal healthcare, because they think social services are not something you deserve by default, it's something you gain, depending on your financial success. The higher you get, the more you deserve. Very different mentality from how Europe thinks about the subject. It's surely not the result of just Trump's policies or the Republicans' policies, it's the other way around. These people (Trump and Repubs) are the exponents of a prevalent current of opinion in the American society.
Trump has bragged about how well the economy is doing, based on stock markets. They got an artificial injection by massive tax cuts to the corporations - who in turn used the tax cuts to buy back their own stocks. With all the economic unrest his trade wars have made, it's just not enough to uphold the stocks anymore, so they are now set back to the value they had late 2017.
Trump will brag about whatever makes him look good in the media and in the voters's eyes and will dismiss whatever fact puts a dent in his rosy outlook on his performance as a president. His tax cuts reflect the mentality I described a few times in this thread, he thinks the government should incentivise companies and the rich because, according to his worldview, these big boys are making the world go around. They are the ones creating jobs, employing large numbers of people and paying huge amounts of taxes. Even though, the devil is in the details, obviously. There are plenty of such big companies and rich people dodging taxes (in fact, the richer you get the more expensive legal advice to avoid paying taxes you can afford), there are plenty of such big companies outsourcing big parts of their operations and using automation to remove salaried work from their operational costs, etc. But well, if you're born in a rich family, I bet you see things differently, you think everyone else can still breath thanks to your and your family's existence.
You copied a statistic in your post above; I would think this one gives a better picture of what we are talking about (it's from the same article)
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https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/10/16/u-s-household-incomes-a-51-year-perspective
Yes, I quoted some stats from sites of financial analysis, because it's very hard to find the right information from sites of US institutions. Very often they just publish them in one big lump, one document which doesn't break down the figures in more interesting correlations. Such as looking at the percentage of people in particular age brackets and income brackets. You can only find stats which present either one or the other, but not both, in conjunction. Which makes it difficult to draw conclusions on which age brackets are benefiting most from particular policies.
And, yes, this graph confirms that things in the USA are running as intended: those from higher income brackets are seeing more income growth and those from the bottom are seeing only a slight increase in their real, inflation-adjusted income, sometimes the graphs lines for lower-income brackets simply flatline.