Inequality and Women's Health

                                                http://www.mirror.co.uk/

A number of studies have documented how income inequality is bad for your health. If you're someone who used to work in North American manufacturing or a person of colour, that's been obvious for a long time. But a new study, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, demonstrates that inequality has deleterious effects on middle class white women. Crawford Killian writes:

"The post-1999 episode in midlife mortality in the United States is historically and geographically unique, at least since 1950," Case and Deaton say. During the same period, mortality in the same age cohort in six rich countries (and in American Hispanics), continued to fall. The same cohort of Canadians suffered less mortality than anyone but the Swedes and Australians.

What was the difference? Three causes: "Suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning... and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis."

And who was dying? "The turnaround in mortality for white non-Hispanics was driven primarily by increasing death rates for those with a high school degree or less." Some post-secondary but no degree? Little improvement. A B.A. or more? "Death rates fall by 57 per 100,000."

"Although all three educational groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings," Case and Deaton say, "and an overall increase in external cause mortality, increases were largest for those with the least education."

These are precisely the people who were hit hardest by The Great Recession. And they are the people whose incomes have been falling ever since. But white women are now bearing the brunt of our brave new economy:

The report has predictably caused a stir, and one analyst, social-science blogger Andrew Gelman, has gone deeper into the numbers. He finds that the increase in deaths stopped in 2005: "Since 2005, mortality rates have increased among women in this group but not men."

"Actually what we see," Gelman says, "is an increasing mortality among women aged 52 and younger -- nothing special about the 45-54 group, and nothing much consistently going on among men."

Other researchers confirm the problem for women. A 2012 study found that white women without a high school diploma "lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008," by which time equally educated black women were outliving them. Earlier this year the Urban Institute published similar findings.

It's tough out there for everybody -- except those at the top of the economic pyramid. However, they haven't noticed the rebellion that is bubbling down below.

On the QT

                                              https://www.policyalternatives.ca/

Canadians like to think that income inequality is an American problem. But, Linda McQuaig writes, on that meme, Canada is a close second behind the United States:

It’s true that the U.S. has the most extreme inequality, but a recent OECD report noted that Canada has the second-largest share of income growth going to top earners.

However, even that OECD report understates the drift of wealth to the top in Canada — according to dramatic data from a recent academic study which received relatively little attention.

That study presents some pretty stark numbers:

It shows that billions of dollars in income received by the very richest Canadians have not been included in calculations of their income. That’s because the wealthy funneled this money through private corporations in order to legally reduce their taxes — a practice that is more widely used in Canada than the U.S.

Once this income — amounting to an astonishing $48 billion in 2010 — is added to their reported personal incomes, Canada’s rich are considerably richer than we’ve been led to believe.

For example, according to commonly-used data, the average income for Canadians in the top 1 per cent is $359,900. However, this doesn’t include money channeled through their private corporations. Once we include this additional income, the actual average income of these high-rollers rises to a much heftier $500,200.

And, remember, all of this has been happening while 37,000 civil servants have lost their jobs, while medicare funding has been cut and while veterans affairs offices have been closed:

The study also shows that the share of Canada’s national income going to the top 1 per cent — commonly believed to be 10 per cent — is actually 13.3 per cent, once private corporation income is included. This share has been rising, from 12 per cent in 2009 to 13.3 per cent in 2011 (the latest year available).

Meanwhile, the OECD has warned that:

 “Recent empirical work finds that high levels of inequality are harmful for the pace and sustainability of growth.”

The rich keep getting richer -- but our politicians want to keep it on the QT

What To Do With The Surplus?

                                             https://www.policyalternatives.ca/

There's going to be one. And, if the Harper government gets its way, it will go to tax cuts. That happened under the Liberals, too. Linda McQuaig writes:

The trick is to make surpluses disappear quickly by doling them out in tax cuts — before there’s time for a serious national debate about what the electorate actually wants to do with their money.
So when Ottawa started generating big surpluses in the late 1990s, it quickly began slashing taxes — particularly on corporations and high-income earners. As a result, Ottawa now collects about $50 billion less in taxes per year than it would have if it hadn’t done all that tax-cutting, according to labour economist Toby Sanger. That has deprived governments of the revenue they’d need to provide the kind of enhanced public programs many Canadians probably would like. 

That's what right wing think tanks are advocating.  The International Monetary Fund, however has suggested that now is the time to spend on infrastructure. Scott Clark and Peter Devries write:

“The time is right,” says the International Monetary Fund in its latest World Economic Outlook, “for an infrastructure push.”

“In many advanced economies,” says the report, “there is still substantial slack … Robust demand momentum has not yet taken hold … There are now worries that demand will remain persistently weak — a possibility that has been described as ‘secular stagnation’.”

Yet the Harper government insists that the way to grow an economy is to create supply, not demand. Which raises the question, who was all this austerity for? Not for ordinary folks. Consider what has happen to medicare funding, writes McQuaig:

When medicare was established in the late 1960s, Ottawa covered 50 per cent of the costs. Today, Ottawa contributes just 20 per cent — and this will fall to a mere 12 per cent over the next few decades under the new health care funding formula unilaterally imposed on the provinces by the Harper government in 2011.

The money which used to fund medicare has gone into the pockets of the wealthy, a trend which will continue if the Harper government introduces income splitting:

This is, of course, exactly what the Harper government is planning to do. It has promised to introduce income-splitting — a costly and deeply unfair tax cut which would see almost all of the benefits go to well-heeled families with stay-at-home mothers.

If you're a politician these days, it pays to look after the rich. they'll look after you in your retirement. The surplus benefits the wealthy and those who serve them.

Not Seeing The Other Half

For some time now, Robert Reich writes, the United States has been devolving into a We and Them Society -- as in, Why should we pay for them? He sites several examples:

The middle-class and wealthy citizens of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, for example, are trying to secede from the school district they now share with poorer residents of town, and set up their own district funded by property taxes from their higher-valued homes.

Similar efforts are underway in Memphis, Atlanta, and Dallas. Over the past two years, two wealthy suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, have left the countywide school system in order to set up their own.

One reason for the divide is -- and has always been -- race. But in the three decades following World War II, when incomes were rising for everyone, there was a notion that we are all in this together. As income inequality has increased, so has the notion that it is every man and woman for him or her self.

Now Americans can choose whether or not they wish to see their neighbours:

Being rich in today’s America means not having to come across anyone who isn’t. Exclusive prep schools, elite colleges, private jets, gated communities, tony resorts, symphony halls and opera houses, and vacation homes in the Hamptons and other exclusive vacation sites all insulate them from the rabble.

America’s wealthy increasingly inhabit a different country from the one “they” inhabit, and America’s less fortunate seem as foreign as do the needy inhabitants of another country.

In Third World countries, the wealthy build high walls, topped with shards of glass, to make sure that "they" can't get in. Is this what America has become -- a nation where half of the country doesn't even see the other half?

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Regression

The Conference Board keeps churning out reports which should embarrass the Harper government. The Board's latest report ranks Canada 7th out of 17 developed countries in terms of quality of life. It's interesting that, in terms of falling crime rates, we are doing very well -- although, if you believe what the government tells us, it's not well enough.

But what is truly disturbing is the growing rate of income inequality:

In Canada, the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past 15 years, and the board says all age groups have felt the change -- with both child and elderly poverty on the rise.

And in one of the most troubling signs, the working-age poverty rate rose to 11.1 per cent in the late 2000s from 9.4 per cent in the mid-1990s. Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, the overall share of low income Canadians has increased as well -- from 12.4 per cent in 2007 to 13 per cent in 2010, the report found.

Add that a truly disturbing rise in child poverty --  Canada’s child poverty rate is 15.1 per cent, up from 12.8 per cent in the mid 1990's -- and you get a picture of a country in regression.

Perhaps, most notably, the country at the bottom on all measures was the United States, which the Harper government has taken as its model.

We are racing to get to the bottom as fast as we can.