“The Bottom 90 and Top 10 alike lost wealth during the Great Recession (figure 1, blue bars). However, the changes in wealth during the cumulative Great Recession and recovery period (figure 1, green bars) illustrate that the Bottom 90 and the Top 10 had vastly different experiences during the recovery. The Bottom 90 experienced little to no wealth gains, whereas the Top 10 experienced outsized gains. The remainder of this note will unpack some determinants and implications of families’ varied experiences in the Great Recession and subsequent recovery.”
The federal version, and the vermont version (and possibly other states) of UI tax is paid on employee wages up to a particular number per employee (currently less than $10K federal, about $17K vermont), don’t know about other states. So if you work existing employees longer hours, once they reach the cap it doesn’t cost you any more for UI. It’s like the FICA cap, only (apparently) lower. If you hire additional employees, you pay more until their number reaches the cap…
The top 5% did do better than the bottom 95%, and the top 1% did even better than the bottom 99%, but I’ll leave that research to you. That is the factual truth.
You can pick all the nits you want, but the bottom line is that the wealthiest Americans gained wealth over pre-recession numbers under Obama’s “recovery” whereas most American’s wealth did not recover to pre-recession levels.
I don’t often agree with you, but do actually agree with you on this issue. The problem I’m having here is with your framing - “The Obama ‘Recovery’”, as if he and Pelosi had full control of Congress for his entire two terms and they personally schemed to reward all those “Rich Democrat Donors” by reversing all of poor Georgie Bush’s myriad advances in Social Security, Health Care and free puppies.
C’mon, this is a direct result of years of Republican malfeasance and interference with Democratic initiatives. This “Blame the Dems” shtick is growing old in the face of the One Percenter Tax Cuts, faux wars in the Middle East and deaths at our border. Please, hit “Refresh” and try something new…
I think that we should expect Democrats to be more than just better than Republicans.
Obama supported the bailout of bankers and he did not prosecute the bankers and financial institutions who caused the great recession by over-leveraging bad loans.
I totally agree with you that the Republicans always make messes that the Democrats have to try to clean up. George W. Bush was a horrible President, but notice how the Democrats failed to bury him after he left office.
Democrats need to do better at politics. It was Obama/Biden’s achilles heel.
You’d probably be a better republican. Or a libertarian.
You lack nuance and depth. You never look deeper than the surface, then declare everyone ELSE is wrong and you’re right, after plumbing the depths of the kiddie pool.
The bottom line is that the wealthiest Americans (top 10%, top 5%, and top 1%) gained wealth over pre-recession numbers under Obama’s “recovery” whereas most American’s wealth did not recover to pre-recession levels (at least 90% of them).
The numbers don’t lie.
You can obfuscate all you want. The fact is that Obama’s recovery was great for the rich and not so great for everyone else.
In general, the President gets credit or blame for the economy during his term. The recovery bills were passed when there were strong Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. You will find that the term “Obama’s Recovery” is widely used to refer to the results of his economic policies, mostly in a positive way.
The first graph showed the end result; this graph shows the trends.
If you really want to believe that the wealth increase between top 90 and 95% equals or exceeds the combined -17%, -31%, and -35% wealth loss of the bottom 61-90%, 31-60% and 0-30%, respectively than you are free to believe it.
But you would be risibly wrong, and exhibiting pitiful innumeracy.
