The Economy’s Main Squeeze

Many thanks to those who joined Franklin Street Policy Group for our policy cocktail hour focused on The Economy’s Main Squeeze. We loved gathering with our regular policy-minded folks as well as meeting and hearing from so many new people! 

We played with a new format that emphasized more mingling with a brief interlude for discussion. Good acoustics are always our biggest foe around the table, but we managed to:

• Address some key themes of the topic — More jobs with living wages, vocational education and skilled trades must make a major comeback, and the tax structure could be the big ticket to meaningfully addressing income inequality at scale.

• Share personal experiences — Remember when a high school diploma and a skilled trade could raise a family comfortably? Our dads do, but not so much for Generations X through now… 

• Suggest remedies from the professional backgrounds represented that night — Elected officials at subnational levels may hold the key to push immediate action to combat income inequality at the community level. 

Below are the articles that informed our topic:

• Lets have fewer ninjas and rockstars, and more people helping each other
  There used to be a time when our instinct was to help—when society was oriented towards a strong family and strong community. But over the years we have moved away from this idea. In this period of disruptive change, it seems a lot of people are being left behind, and the need for community building has never been greater.

• Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows
  In the midst of the nation’s longest economic expansion, the separation between rich and poor is at a five-decade high. The Gini indicator—a measure of wealth inequality— has been rising steadily for several decades. When the Census Bureau began studying income inequality in 1967, the Gini index was 0.397. In 2018, it climbed to 0.485. 

• Seven reasons to worry about the American middle class
  There is a great deal of work to be done to improve the prospects of the American middle class in the face of changes in trade and technology that are destroying some jobs while creating others, yawning racial disparities, uneven economic growth from one place to another, and massive changes in gender roles and the family.

• As cities gentrify and schools diversify, PTOs grapple to ensure all parent voices are heard
  As cities across the country gentrify — and schools in those cities slowly begin to diversify — communities are struggling to ensure that all parents have an equal voice. Parent organizations have emerged as a striking, and consequential, example of the cultural, economic and language divides among families.

• When Hurricane Dorian blew through the Bahamas, it exposed one of the world’s great fault lines of inequality
  Climate change is visibly exposing the divide between the rich and the poor. In one of the Bahamas’ most exclusive communities, celebrity homeowners arrived in private jets while the cooks and cleaners and construction workers caught the ferry from a nearby settlement. In the wake of Hurricane Dorian, a devastating human toll has exposed a precarious economic dependency.

• For the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year 
  in 2018, the average effective tax rate paid by the richest 400 families in the country was 23 percent, a full percentage point lower than the 24.2 percent rate paid by the bottom half of American households. In 1980, by contrast, the 400 richest had an effective tax rate of 47 percent. In 1960, that rate was as high as 56 percent. The effective tax rate paid by the bottom 50 percent, by contrast, has changed little over time.

We are always interested to hear your suggestions for topics, venues, or formats that you would like to see in the future. Please drop us a line with your thoughts!

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