How Americans spread the wealth

[cachukis]

Source: St. Petersburg Times

How Americans spread the wealth
By Robert Trigaux, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, October 3, 2010

Amid raucous political debate over tax cuts for the rich and who owns most of America's wealth, university researchers have found at least one reason why we suffer such bruising public policy stalemates in this country.

When it comes to wealth inequity in the United States, we just don't know what we're talking about.

Two professors, psychologist Michael Norton from Harvard Business School and behavioral economist Daniel Ariely at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, surveyed more than 5,500 Americans who had been chosen at random to create a nationally representative sample. Those surveyed were asked to do two things.

First, they had to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States. And second, they were asked to "build a better America" by spreading the nation's wealth among five quintiles, poorest to richest, based on their own, ideal or optimal level of inequality.

Key findings appear in Norton-Ariely's forthcoming paper for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science: "Building a Better America — One Wealth Quintile at a Time." The results are startling and should raise a red flag in today's ill-informed national policy struggles over taxes, the federal budget and even the role of the government.


Read more: http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/how-americans-spread-the-wealth/1125343

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Where is the leadership? I guess in some pocket in some long ago closet.

[whyverne]

1. "Income redistribution" needs a make over.

Too many people hear it as giving money to the indigent. Limbaugh and his ilk tell Joe the Plumber that the poor are taking all the money. We need a new term.

[Quixote1818]

2. K and R

[Bitwit1234]

3. I just read an article at Huffington Post and I am still crying

It tells of how some families wait til close to midnight on the last day of the month to goto stores like WalMart to do their grocery shopping. Because the first of the month they get their checks and their subsidies for children. It told of one family that buys mostly mac and cheese and cereal, diapers and baby forum ula. They are not dead beats, the father has two low paying jobs and the mother also works. But they live paycheck to paycheck.

I get so G.D. sick of the smirking self righteous tea bags and republicans in the congress who sit on their well fed ass and automatically block and disapprove any and every bill that would create jobs and help unemployed. And they are not doing it for what they believe in, they are doing it to make it look bad and to stop Obama and the Democrats from bringing this country back from the mess Bush with their enablement has done to it.

When I read stuff like that I feel like walking into the office of Demented, Coburn and the rest of the republicans and stuffing the sh*t they spew right back down their throats. I am not a violent person but I get upset with stuff like this. And I get upset at a country full of tea bags and radical republicans who let it get like this. Because of money for the richest corporations and tax cuts for the richest Americans they have sent this country into a spiral of poverty and joblessness we will never get out of.

Yes I am thinking we need detention camps. Round up the callous smirking racist S.O.B. and put them in it for a couple of months. Let them live on mac and cheese and canned beans and see how they like it. Especially that drug popping piece of trash that is fouling up everything around him RUSH.

[sam sarrha]

4. the Facts ARE... the richest 1% has 42% of all Financial Wealth, the Bottom 80% has 7% >LINK>

so the real WEALTH RE-DISTRIBUTION is seriously ^UPWARD^

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

THE RICHEST 1% has --6 Times-- the Financial Wealth as the POOREST 80% who also have 72% of debt, this is why there is a Recession, and no jobs.. the monet is stagnating at the top. same thing happened before the Great Depression. there was work but no money in the system.

[4dsc]

5. Sad testiment to 30 years of conservative economic policy

Now we know that 'trickle down' isn't working too well but most republicans refuse to believe.

[Phlem]

6. 'trickle down' isn't working too well

For me that sentence would have required 100% of personal restraint to complete.

But yes, I agree with you.

Now please tell everyone you, spread the word!!

-p

[sam sarrha]

7. it's work'n Great for the ReThuglickers. no one is the least little bit pissed off either, except

me.. i post that all the time and have only got a couple replys..