Digby writes about the NYT census/google map and what it helps reveal about the Versailles elite and the rest of us:
Click on the two maps and you will see that average Americans are living very differently than the beltway celebrity millionaires and realistically are as likely to just "go out and get some of that wealth" (as Roger Simon says they should do) as they are to become an Olympic swimmer or a ballerina. Sure, it's possible, but unless you are a really, really great athlete, constructing your future around it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I think it's particularly illuminating to look at DC in context, using the map option that displays income change over the past decade. This is the first decade in like, forever that incomes generally went down (not for the top 1%, of course, but for just about everyone else). But this wasn't universally the case, and the geographic distribution is most revealing. Let's start by looking at DC in a broad, more-than-half-of-the-country overview, and then zoom in:
Now let's look at the census tract figures for four census tracts close to the seats of power:
And five more tracts:
Now, if you lived in this kind of economic environment, how out of touch with average Americans would you be?
Now add on 24/7 corporate propaganda, and more lobbyists per square inch than anywhere in at least 10 light years or so, and, well, you get the picture. There's just no way these people can possibly have a clue... that they don't have a clue.
One symptom of the total dysfunction of our political system is the fact that we just suffered a catastrophic economic system failure without anything remotely approaching a coherent political response. Although the economy as a whole shows signs that it may soon bottom out and begin to recover, jobs will continue to be lost for some time, and there is no assurance that we will not see another severe downturn in the near term, given that the systemic problems behind the recession have not yet been fathomed, much less addressed.
Still, at least we know that there is a recession, and that its orgins lie in the financial sector and its facilitation--if not outright creation--of the housing bubble, as discussed in the previous diary. But is that simple fact itself a distraction from even more fundamental problems? I would argue yes, on two counts: First, that the Bush economy was already a miserable failure compared to the Clinton economy before it. Second, that the Clinton economy was actually much, much better for those at the very top levels, and thus was not substantially any different than the Bush economy, when viewed in comparison to the pre-1970s economy, for example. Indeed, it was during the Clinton economy that housing bubble got its start. One can, in a sense, see the Bush economy as an outgrowth of the Clinton economy, in which all the flaws of the latter are heightened, while a whole new round of flaws are larded on top. This was visible first in the recession, then the incredibly anemic employment recovery, and then the income data--all before the ultimate crash.
In this diary, I only look at data through 2007, so there's only the impact of the early slowdown to be seen--nothing of disastrous crash.
We begin by looking at the income levels for the top of the first four quintiles, plus the bottom of the top 5%, collected by Census Bureau, and published in the H1 Table. The second part of the diary will look at the high-end income data--up to the top 0.01% of income-earners--compiled by Dr. Emmanual Saez of UC Berkeley (Excel spreadsheet here). A simple visual inspection is enough to see that growth of all income levels in the census data came to a virtual stand-still during the Bush years:
Here's the underlying data:
As can be seen, income growth basically stopped for just about everyone. Those on the bottom lost a substantial amount, however. Does the phrase "worst President ever" ring any bells?
Removing the top 5% allows us to rescale the first graph, for a clearer view of what's happening with the lower quintiles:
[TOM] DELAY: Excuse me, but the economy from 2001 to 2007 was going quite well, thank you, but people were pushing especially Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into loaning-making loans to people that couldn't afford them. That caused the housing strike (ph). And we can all go through that. But the economy most of the years of Bush was going just fine and we were fighting a war on terror in two different countries and we were keeping the homeland safe and we were not on a spending spree, like Obama is putting us on with his budget.
Economy going quite well, thank you? Er, not so much (all in constant dollars):
As can be seen above, the economic growth experienced by all income groups during the Clinton years came to a screeching halt when Bush took office. Incomes stagnated completely, all across the board. Numbers on the flip.
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