>Thought I would direct everyone to an article given to me by our
>economist from the September-October 1996 issue of Challenge magazine
>by Timothy Smeeding on America's Income Inequality: Where do we stand
>which shows that of twenty five industrial nations, the US has the most
>unequal distribution of any country except the Soviet Union. It was kind
>of a show-stopper in our social problems class this morning.
In the issue of The Nation that goes to press this Wednesday, there will the first installment of a page of quarterly social indicators I'll be doing. The topic of the premiere is inequality and poverty, and there's a chart of income classes (low, middle, and high income, defined relative to the national median) based on the work of Smeeding & Co. at the Luxembourg Income Study. For those of you who don't read The Nation, a similar chart (less snazzy graphically, since it'll be done by me and not a real graphic artist) will be in LBO #89.
>Can someone direct me to more recent information concerning lifetime
>wealth and the estate tax data? I have an older write up of this (average
>income was $27,000 so it probably is a decade old). This is the data from
>the estate taxes filed with IRS which show lifetime wealth; 90 percent of
>all Americans have net wealth of only some $30,000 and half of this group
>(45 percent) have lifetime wealth of less than $3000 at the time of this
>earlier information. Anyone seen more recent data?
Estate tax data is essentially useless, since, as the saying goes, it's a voluntary tax. Rich people with good lawyers are able to dodge it very effectively, so some of those $30,000 estates may actually be cleverly designed $3 million estates.
Doug