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February 18, 2013 |
How much will you need for medical expenses in retirement? What does
it cost to keep 2.5 million Americans behind bars? Here are a few facts
and figures that might surprise you.
1. Recovery for the rich, recession for the rest.
Economic
recovery is in rather limited supply, it seems. Research by economist
Emmanuel Saez shows that the top 1 percent has enjoyed income growth of
over 11 percent since the official end of the recession. The other 99 percent hasn’t fared so well, seeing a 0.4 percent decline in income.
The
top 10 percent of earners hauled in 46.5 percent of all income in 2011,
the highest proportion since 1917 – and that doesn’t even include money
earned from investments. The wealthy have benefitted from favorable tax
status and the rise in stock prices, while the rest have been hit with a
continuing unemployment crisis that has kept wages down. Saez believes
this trend will continue in 2013.
2. Half of us are poor or barely scraping by.
The
latest Census Bureau data shows that one in two Americans currently
falls into either the “low income” category or is living in poverty.
Low-income is defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of
the poverty level. Adjusted for inflation, the earnings for the bottom
20 percent of families have dropped from $16,788 in 1979 to just under
$15,000. Earnings for the next 20 percent have been stuck at $37,000.
States
in the South and West had the highest proportion of low-income
families, including Arizona, New Mexico and South Carolina, where
politicians are eagerly shredding the social safety net.
3. Unhappy meal.
46.7
million Americans must now use food stamps in order to get a meal, and
many aren’t old enough to earn money for themselves.
Almost half
of all U.S. children will be on food stamps during some part of their
childhood. For black children, that number is 90 percent. Eight percent
of those receiving food stamps are
seniors.
The average monthly
SNAP benefit (food stamps) per person is $133.85. That’s less than $1.50 per person, per meal. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
in 2011, a gallon of milk cost $3.50 on average in the U.S. while a
pound of stew beef cost $4.30. Food prices are expected to increase as
much as
3 percent in 2013.
4. Old age and poverty.
According to economist Kenneth Thomas, the U.S. has the dubious honor of having the
highest elder poverty rate
of any industrialized nation larger than Ireland. If poverty is
measured as 50 percent of the median income, a whopping 25 percent of
elderly Americans are considered poor.
Research shows that an increasing number of Americans are
entering poverty in old age.
The percentage of Americans ages 75 to 84 new to poverty doubled in
2009 from the 2005 figure. Most elderly Americans living in poverty have
serious medical problems.
5. Incarceration nation.
Two
and a half million Americans are currently under lock and key. That’s
more than the population of Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix or Dallas.
More than the entire state of New Mexico. The U.S. has 5 percent of the
world's population, but we have 25 percent of the world's prisoners.
The
cost to taxpayers
for keeping all these people behind bars is $63.4 billion a year. In
some states, the cost of keeping a single prisoner is as much as $60,000
per year – about as much as it would take to pay for workers axed by
austerity policies – like teachers, for instance.
6. The cost of gender inequality.
The National Partnership for Women and Families has found that women in the U.S. earn
$10,784 less
than their male counterparts each year. According to their
calculations, if women earned equal pay for equal work, they could
purchase 1.7 years worth of groceries in Washington state, an additional
2,746 gallons of gas in Colorado, and 3.7 extra years of health
insurance premiums in Connecticut.
7. College degrees still pay off, big-time.
Today, 31 percent of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree, and the
financial gap
between haves and have-nots is huge. A 2012 report by the Association
of State Higher Education Executive Officers showed that people who get a
bachelor’s degree have a median income of $50,360, while those with
only a high school diploma earn a mere $29,423 on average. An
associate’s degree bumps you up to a median income of $38,607. If you
get a graduate degree, your median income is $68,064. That's 35.2
percent more than those with a bachelor’s degree.
According to the
U.S. Treasury Department, if you are born into the poorest fifth of
U.S. families and get a college degree, you have an 80 percent chance of
improving your economic status over the course of a lifetime. The odds
drop to 55 percent without a college diploma.
8. A retired couple needs a quarter million for retirement – just for healthcare.
In 2011, 53 percent of Americans
feared they wouldn’t have enough money to live comfortably in retirement, up from only 41 percent in 2004.
They
have good reason. Research from 2010 shows that soaring healthcare
costs indicate that a couple must sock away $250,000 for
medical expenses,
taking into consideration Medicare premiums, copayments and
deductibles, out-of-pocket prescription costs, and a life expectancy of
85 for women and 82 for men.
9. The looting of America.
American
capitalism as currently practiced clearly redistributes income upward.
According to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the richest 1 percent of
Americans now hold 25 percent of the country's wealth.
The total income share for the 1 percent has
jumped
more in the U.S. than in any other major Western country since 1960,
according to new research by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The top 1
percent's share of income dipped in some European countries and
increased by up to 4 percentages elsewhere, but in the good old U.S.,
land of opportunity, it soared over 9 percentage points.
Lynn Parramore is an
AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding
editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt
in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in
English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing
and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue
Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
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