In yesterday’s KT, Korea’s income gap is 3rd Largest in OECD. However, guess who’s number 2?
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In yesterday’s KT, Korea’s income gap is 3rd Largest in OECD. However, guess who’s number 2?
Korea News via Google
36 Comments
America’s income gap is driven by insane, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars pay packets for CEOs, and billionaire-making company formations.
Korea’s income gap is driven by a profound lack of good jobs in the economy. I think if one were to compare the proportions of the two countries’ workforces trying to subsist on W800,000 a month, and compare the cost of living, America comes out as a much better place to live — if you’re brokety broke.
Still sucks to be poor in either place. But in Korea, if you’re poor, you live in a two-pyong hovel and pay $60/kg for meat.
That’s true Brendon. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans in America have essentially voted with their feet!
As Homer Simpson said, “Facts? Phfft! You can use them to prove anything.”
America’s income gap is driven by insane, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars pay packets for CEOs, and billionaire-making company formations
That’s only half the equation. 40% of Americans earn around 20,000 a year or less. Sure, the rich are very rich, but the poor - and increasingly, the lower-middle class, are poor.
Nothing new here. America, Mexico and Korea have had the largest income gaps in the world for some time.
As for America coming out as the better place to live if you’re broke - I’d beg to differ. Obviously a lot of factors come into play, but if I was concerned about my health I’d choose SK. Break your arm, you pay a few hundred bucks for a cast, x-rays etc. In the States you’re looking at a couple of grand easy. Cheap fresh food is pretty readily available too.
At least poor people in Korea have something to do. =D
Last I heard unemployment in Korea was lower than the US’s 2:1.
hoju_saram hit the nail on the head… the gap between rich and poor cannot just be judged by incomes but by cost of living… which includes things like healthcare and food.
…but get cancer or need a major operation in Korea and you’re SOL if you don’t have a lot of money.
What’s the minimum salary in the US?
I would bet that real income, when adjusted for inflation and the overall cpi, has progressed further in Korea than the US in the last 10 years even with the troubles they’ve had? Anyone?
redneck, the last US statistics I saw indicated massive gains in productivity among the workforce accompanied by stagnant income levels, whereas there were disproportionaltely large increases at the top of the executive ladder.
Though America’s always been a pretty cut-throat place, and though its poor do live far better than the poor in most other countries, the rise in income inequality directly corresponds with Bush’s presidency:
http://www.ombwatch.org/articl.....?TopicID=1
It’s also probably going to get a lot worse, as mortgages fall through on the bottom half of homeowners.
# 5,
Yep… it’s not income, it’s income relative to living expenses. $25k a year in Missouri? Living high on the hog. $25k in Manhattan? Dire poverty!
Um…25K in Missouri isn’t living high on the hog, I can tell you that much!
okay…
$35k in Missouri is living comfortabily and $35k in Manhattan is abject poverty.
You’re SOL in the US, too, unless you have excellent health insurance coverage, which most people don’t. I have okay coverage with a pretty high deductible and shelled out almost $2,000 for minor outpatient care in the emergency room. My insurance picked up the other two-thirds. Cancer or some other serious chronic illness would probably bankrupt me, and I’m lucky because I work for an employer who isn’t going to find an excuse to fire me if I get sick.
The gap, in America, has more to do with what you have
than what you make.
another socialist Korean, Park Hyun.
Park, why don’t we just raise the prices for commodities a little bit more, just so that your one dollar buys even less than it does now.
let’s try raising the minimum wage.
That’s right. Law mandates that we pay everyone a certain price, even though they are newbees to the job, even though they do a bad job, even though they honestly don’t deserve a pay raise.
Let’s do that.
wangkon, pawikirogi, jk, bumfromKorea, baduk, Park Hyun…are all Obama voters, and they should know they are voting against the interests of Korea and the KOR-US FTA, against stability in America, and they should be ashamed of themselves.
Hanbok to Hillary yielded a great return, didn’t it?
by the way, weren’t the corps hiring more people out of college, AFTER the Bush tax cuts?
your link is strange and stupid.
Having moved away from Missouri in 1989, I consider myself an expert on economic conditions there. I command you all (probably should have written “y’all” here, to be more authentically hillbillyish) to bow to my Missouri roots!
My guess is a family income of US$80,000 for a family of four — two wage earners bringing home the national median income of $40,000 a year each — is “comfortable” in suburban St. Louis County, Missouri. It ain’t living high on the hog, though.
You can still buy nice homes in the $250,000 range in St. Louis County, although not necessarily in the best parts of Kirkwood. The area I lived in before joining the Navy is full of stately homes that some characters now think they can pawn off for millions.
A healthy single person making $30,000 probably gets by well enough, if not saddled with student loans.
In rural Missouri, if you’re employed without having to drive 50 miles to the job (when I worked at Six Flags, I knew several people who drove in from Sullivan every day for that $6.50/hour), I would think $25,000, although not fat city, would be “enough”.
There sure are enough $60,000 houses out there.
W30,000,000 is the median family income in Korea. What kind of home can someone earning W30,000,000 afford here in Korea?
You missed the more important quote:
WJK,
Okay, you’re going to react by flaming and you say my link is “strange and stupid” for some unexplained reason. Did you bother to read what I read?
I know this is going to be hard to wrap your head around, so I’ll put it as simply as I can: Bush pushed for an “ownership society” that would allow everyone to own a home. Loopholes were put into mortgage plans so that “exotic mortgages” would let low-income buyers into the market. It did, and the market heated up and crashed. That disproportionately hurt the poor.
As does high oil prices.
As does massive tax cuts to the wealthy, corresponding with cuts in social welfare programs.
I didn’t say anything about the minimum wage, socialism (which I oppose), Obama or “the corps,” whatever that is.
If there’s anything strange and stupid here, it’s your response.
If you take a look at when the rates of “homeownership” took a sharp upward turn, it’s not from the election of George W. Bush.
It’s from 1994, a year in which I am convinced that George W. Bush, that bastard, had not yet been elected President. He didn’t become President until 2001. When George W. Bush proclaimed his policy objective of an “ownership society” in 2004, the homeownership rate had already risen from 64% in 1994 to 68% in 2004. At its peak, the homeownership rate topped out around 69.2%.
Thus, I don’t think all of this mess can be blamed on Dubya if you’re an honest person.
Okay, Brendan, you might be right. I’d like to see some links, but I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong. Nor do I think it can be entirely blamed on Bush - that would be dishonest - but I think his policies have definitely contributed to rising inequality in America.
See, WJK? That’s what reasoned debate looks like.
You’re right that health care is much more expensive in the US. Foodstuffs, however, are cheaper, including produce. What’s difficult is finding healthy and affordable restaurant fare.
One important difference in quality of life between Korea’s poor and North American poor is the safety and quality of the neighborhood and home/family environments. Poor Korean children don’t have to fear gunfire as they wait for a bus. When I first relocated back to a midwest college town in the US, I signed a lease for a cheap but decent apartment far from campus. While I was moving in, I noticed a lot of people coming and in and out of an apartment across the courtyard. Turns out that three of the apartments in the complex were dealing. I moved out before my lease was up after I was accosted in the parking lot by a customer. Right now, I’m house hunting, and small, affordable homes are generally located in older neighborhoods with many rentals, which means a transient population and higher crime risk. I’ll probably end up commuting from a Crackerland refuge of God and guns.
Squall, didn’t you say something once about how your dating options in America were so much better than they were in Korea?
Regarding income disparities - as hardyandtiny points out, there’s a difference between income and wealth. A good reference is Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
Income is reported year to year. Wealthy people tend to own assets that can produce income. They own property and rent it out, or they flip properties, or they own businesses, or make more sophisticated principal investments, as opposed to just buying mutual funds. So they might have millions in assets under ownership that produce tens or hundreds of thousands in annual income. This income, importantly, tends in most countries to benefit from a lot more loopholes that let the owner KEEP more of the current income.
Poor and middle class people tend to just make money off their jobs. There are few ways an accountant can minimize taxes on such income. And these people tend not to invest in good accountants who find ways to minimize their taxes anyway.
As for the proposition that America’s poor are suffering disproportionately right now…may well be so, but I think there’s a lot of data left to be gathered. We may well find in the next year or two that a lot of people from the top two quintiles have lost a lot of net worth and taken serious hits to their incomes, too. I’m sure a lot of people who took out NINJA mortgages never had credit ratings to begin with, and foreclosure therefore didn’t really set them back.
Here’s a report from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank to get you started. These two economists show how subprime lending got going in 1995, and was in full swing by 2001, just as George Bush became President.
Indeed, seeking to blame Dubya for subprime would be a distraction from criticizing him for the many things that are his fault.
Bottom line: America is much more affordable and much more livable than Korea in terms of the environment and general quality of life, and anyone with a good job has superior, affordable health care.
However, recent administrations have severely compromised the regulatory environment, and wreaked havoc with the economy, so there are serious challenges ahead.
But the fundamental philosophical difference between the US and European nations like Germany, is that the doctrine of personal responsibility rather than entitlement defines the American character, and has built the nation’s competitiveness and ingenuity.
Still, as the corporate govt has worked to erode both the social net and the economic base of the middle class, Americans are scratching their heads and looking for solutions.
What will it be - 4 more years of erosion under McCain’s corporate welfare or the promise and optimism of a new beginning with the more moderate policies of Obama?
One thing I can tell you. It takes a lot to get a huge engine started, and it takes a swift kick in the arse to get America re-energized from the Bush lethargy. Historically, hard times have been just the thing America needs to innovate and get on track.
With regard to the economy, there is a pretty clear choice - continue to sell the store, outsource jobs and disparage enterpreneurship by continuint to allow corporate interests free reign, or provide a framework to harness corporate interests for the common good through public policy that allows corporations to profit in a manner that uplifts the middle class as well.
This later choice is the framework of the moderate, which like the Buddha’s so-called “middle way” doesn’t come about without effort and structure.
Where I fault the current American political paradigm is that it frames the debate in narrowly defined Conservative and Liberal terms, both of which are smokescreens for the power play going on beneath the surface.
When the stars align, however, there are times of prosperity and progress, and for the most part this is cyclical and a function of free enterprise itself. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko greed can be good and to paraphrase Gandhi, it can also coexist with the greater good.
The profit motive has been the engine of growth in America, not some socialist scheme, such as the one South Korea seeks to establish as it looks with strange envy to its Northern brother state.
Whenever I hear the hate-monger conservative radio hosts spew their anti-Liberal rants, or flighty Liberal revisionism, I wonder how it is that both sides of this artificial spectrum have so thoroughly managed to miss the key to what drives a successful economy. Water seeks its own level. With balance comes prosperity.
This is the realization that informs a great my social criticisms of both Korea and the US.
When Americans call me an unpatriotic godless atheist, and Koreans accuse me of betraying the allegience to racial identity, I am encouraged to believe that I am on the right track.
Philosophical doggeral. There I said it myself.
More people need to seriously consider what commenters like Mizar say.
Too much polarization.
Jag, before someone accuses me of being a “Liberal” or an “Obamacan,” let me point out that Rocky Mountain Institute cofounder and Chief Scientist Amory Lovins has pointed out that there is simply no business case for drilling offshore or in Alaska, which McCain suddenly advocates. His perspective is that a partnership between business and govt can achieve a wise and environmentally friendly energy policy at a profit.
http://www.rmi.org/
The reason that the oil companies have refused to drill these areas for years even though they have the rights to them is that it would be unprofitable to do so. With today’s inflated costs, this is even more true. The Alaskan venture would be not only prohibitively expensive but unviable from a defense perspective, the pipeline being the easiest target for terror on the planet.
He argues that there is more oil under Detroit than under Saudi Arabia. What he means is that GM has developed model technologies for autos that demonstratively run far more efficiently than any hybrid car on the road today. If they can stay afloat for 18 more months, they can become part of the solution that breaks the dependence on imported oil.
So when Obama invokes “change”, this is not just a political slogan, but a necessity that can become the mother of invention, and when McCain and Bush say “drill”, this is empty political rhetoric designed to conceal the corporate socialism that has flourished under the past administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush.
Mizar,
You and I disagree about many things, but politically and economically, we are in the same camp.
We don’t need to drill for more oil. We need to start using less of it. Turn down the thermostat. Carpool. Combine errands into one trip. One tremendously valuable lifelong lesson I learned from the Chinese is energy conservation. They set their thermostats to 60 degrees and wear longjohns. They build schools and apartments with south-facing windows to maximize solar heat. They even defrost and unplug their fridges while on vacation. A beneficial side effect of higher gas prices is safer roads with more drivers going at or below the maximum speed limit.
I observe that we also hold similar views about diet and health, but why quibble? Let’s just agree to agree without being too agreeable.
“Let’s just agree to agree without being too agreeable.”
Love that line.
I’ll probably end up commuting from a Crackerland refuge of God and guns.
“Outer Whitelandia” (coined by AM radio host Curtis Sliwa) would be a more sensible way of putting it, no?
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