"America's Poor are Rich"

[Paul Henry Rosenberg]

Doug Henwood wrote:

> Margaret wrote:
> 
> >http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/business/DailyNews/cox990202.html
> >
> >The idiot will be online at 1pm Eastern-US time on
> >Thursday.   Sounds like a wonderful chance to pin a
> >tail on a donkey.
> 
> Ah, Michael Cox. He and his sidekick, Richard Alm, have been pumping out
> apologies for the U.S. income distribution for the Federal Reserve Bank of
> Dallas for years now. They're the authors of one of the most devious pieces
> of economic "research" I've ever seen - the Dallas Fed's 1995 annual report
> essay on upward mobility. Cox & Alm have a new book out, and this is part
> of the publicity campaign. I'm going to record an interview with Cox in
> about 10 days for later radio broadcast; it's going to be fun to give him a
> hard time.

If America's poor are rich, then the poor in Western Europe (almost all
of it, anyways) are kings.

This is from "Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper No. 188: Do
Social-Welfare Policies Reduce Poverty? A Cross-National Assessment" by
Lane Kenworthy, accessible in PDF format from the online list of
Luxembourg Income Study Working Papers at
http://lissy.ceps.lu/wpapersentire.htm.

NOTE: These are ALL comparisons to US.

TABLE 1: Post-Tax/Transfer Absolute Poverty Rates (%), circa 1991 a
¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾
		Percent of the U.S. post-tax/transfer
		median at which the poverty line is set
		¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾
	Year	50%	40%	30%
¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾
Australia	1989	20.1	11.9	5.6
Belgium	1992	14.2	6.0	2.2
Canada	1991	11.3	6.5	3.1
Denmark	1992	13.5	5.9	3.4
Finland	1991	8.1	3.7	1.4
France	1989	19.7	9.8	4.8
Germany	1989	11.5	4.3	2.1
Ireland	1987	43.7	29.4	15.6
Italy	1991	26.1	14.3	5.6
Nether.	1991	16.0	7.3	4.2
Norway	1991	4.0	1.7	0.7
Sweden	1992	11.0	5.8	3.1
Switz.	1982	6.2	3.8	2.7
UK	1991	27.0	16.8	6.1
US	1991	17.7	11.7	6.6
¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾¾
Note. Data are author’s calculations from the LIS database.
a Percentage of individuals in households with post-tax/transfer incomes
(adjusted for household size) below poverty line in 1991 U.S. dollars.
For
method of calculation, see text.

The author writes: 

"These absolute poverty rates are shown in Table 1. Despite the fact
that it is the richest nation and has the highest median income, the
United States does not have a low rate of absolute poverty. Instead, it
has one of the highest, exceeded only by those of Italy and three other
'Anglo' countries:  Ireland, Australia, and the United Kingdom.  The
lowest rates are found in Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Germany,
with Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and Canada not far behind. The rate for
any given country varies considerably depending upon the particular
income level selected as the poverty line (50% or 40% or 30% of the U.S.
median), but the differences across countries vary only minimally: the
three measures correlate between .85 and .96 with one another."


-- 
Paul Rosenberg
Reason and Democracy
rad at gte.net
 
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"