On Tuesday The [Lowell] Sun had a front page article, "UMass salary spurs protest". While the former President of the UMass System, Mr Jack Wilson, wouldn't have been in the top 1% in Lawrence, he would have been in Lowell, with his salary of $425Gs. And, he is getting that salary during his one year sabbatical, before he comes to UMass Lowell to teach, for only $261,000 pa. The "Top 1%" isn't just Wall Street scoundrels. It is more ordinary people, earning less that $1,000,000 per household per annum. Funny, that isn't how I envisioned it.
More interesting, per Sunday's New York Times, nation wide, you have to earn more than $380,000 (household income) to be in the top 1% Mr Wilson is in by about $45,000, which is just under the $50,000 median income of the famed 99%.♠
For Lowell, the number to put you in the top 1% is $336,000.
Not mentioned in the article, by Reporter Chris Camire, is that Adjunct Professor Nural Aman and others are represented by the UAW, a Labor Union. There is nothing wrong with that and maybe something good (we will have to ask George Anthes some time on "City Life"). I raise the point because the story is incomplete.
Regards — Cliff
♠ I am guessing that number would be a lot lower if it was the bottom 90%, rather than the bottom 99%.
2 comments:
I think our national innumeracy attracts people to the round convenience of "1%", but the real wealth in this country is concentrated at far smaller a level, as your looking at the census figures descries. It's not the 99%, but, rather, the 99.5% or even the 99.9% who are on the outside. The concentration of wealth at the very top, where a presidential candidate can refer to upwards toward $400,000 in annual speaking fee income as "not very much", is beyond our normal ability to perceive the scale.
According to the WSJ, in 2007, the nation's top 0.1% (.001 of the population) enjoyed incomes over $5M per year. Not sure where that number has gone in the last five years, but it's in wealth where the real disparity lies. These charts from the NYT show how much more heavily concentrated wealth is these days: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/inequality-is-most-extreme-in-wealth-not-income/ The bottom 80% of us are cumulatively approaching a mere 10% of the nation's wealth. Many rightfully object to the socialist implications of "redistribution", but I would point to the growing disparity as a symptom of an economic disease, where we are losing the ability for larger and larger portions of the population to provide for itself. This won't end well if something is not done to re-balance the economic engine from which we all derive our national strength.
I totally agree with kad barma's comments. It's the growing disparity because of more and more people slipping downward from what we call middle class, and because more and more people work hard but can't reach middle class economic standards, that should be the focus for action in this and the next administration.
Post a Comment