Picketty's book

Commonweal did a book review of Picketty's new book. It cites median retirement savings at age 65 of $58K. The average is $193K according to the same source (Vanguard). Averages are always an inappropriate figure in income economics. This is because income is so skewed. White upper middle income retirees are among those with low AGI but high assets. The working class falls in the median.

There is another way to look at medians, that is, the median dollar. Our economy is so skewed that if you split up all adjusted gross income into two piles, 90% of tax filers would get one pile and the top 10% would get the other. The top 1% have 25% of income. Can it get any worse?

Much of that income is monopoly money. It mainly provides leverage to control workers and create sociopathic children, like Trump.

The top 2.5% of income means pays about half the income taxes, which means owing more than half the public debt. Aside from government held retirement trust funds, the rich also hold the vast majority of assets holding the public debt. This is why the wealthy always call for entitlement reform. They are in the hook for paying back the trust funds but get little of the benefit.

The solution to more fiscal equality is to take leverage over workers away from the rich by ending capitalism. That turns all that cash into toilet paper (which might be very valuable next week once SARS2 death rates come back with a vengeance).

And lets not forget race: