"Eleven charts that explain everything' about Inequality

It's the Inequality, Stupid

Eleven charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.

By Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot | March/April 2011 Issue

LINK

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1%, in contrast, had just 10%. The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the superrich.

The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains.

A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States. Most thought that it’s more balanced than it actually is. Asked to choose their ideal distribution of wealth, 92% picked one that was even more equitable.

Why Washington is closer to Wall Street than Main Street.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)	$451.1 million
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.)	$435.4 million
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.)	$366.2 million
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)	$294.9 million
Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.)	$285.1 million
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)	$283.1 million
Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.)	$231.2 million
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas)	$201.5 million
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)	$136.2 million
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)	$108.1 million

Congressional data from 2009. Family net worth data from 2007. Sources: Center for Responsive Politics; US Census; Edward Wolff, Bard College.

For a healthy few, it's getting better all the time.

How much income have you given up for the top 1 percent?

Sources

Income distribution: Emmanuel Saez [1] (PDF)

Net worth: Edward Wolff [2] (PDF)

Household income/income share: Congressional Budget Office [3]

Real vs. desired distribution of wealth: Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely [4] (PDF)

Net worth of Americans vs. Congress: Federal Reserve [5] (average); Center for Responsive Politics [6] (Congress)

Your chances of being a millionaire: Calculation based on data from Wolff [2] (PDF); US Census (household [7] and population[8] data)

Member of Congress' chances: Center for Responsive Politics [9]

Wealthiest members of Congress: Center for Responsive Politics [10]

Tax cut votes: New York Times (Senate [11]; House [12])

Wall street profits, 2007-2009: New York State Comptroller [13] (PDF)

Unemployment rate, 2007-2009: Bureau of Labor Statistics [14]

Home equity, 2007-2009: Federal Reserve, Flow of Funds data, 1995-2004 [15] and 2005-2009 [16] (PDFs)

CEO vs. worker pay: Economic Policy Institute [17]

Historic tax rates: Calculations based on data from The Tax Foundation [18]

Federal tax revenue: Joint Committee on Taxation [19] (PDF)

Read also: Kevin Drum on the decline of Big Labor, the rise of Big Business, and why the Obama era fizzled so soon. [20]

More Mother Jones charty goodness: How the rich get richer [21]; how the poor get poorer [22]; who owns Congress? [23]

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Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Links:
[1] http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/%7Esaez/pikettyqje.pdf
[2] http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf
[3] http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2010/all_tables.pdf
[4] http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf
[5] http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss2/2007/scf2007home.html
[6] http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/overview.php?type=W&year=2009&filter=C
[7] http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ACSSAFFFacts?_event=&geo_id=01000US&_geoContext=01000US&_street=&_county=&_cityTown=&_state=&_zip=80247&_lang=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_submenuId=factsheet_1&ds_name=DEC_2000_SAFF&_ci_nbr=null&qr_name=null&reg=&_keyword=&_industry=
[8] http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-ds_name=PEP_2009_EST&-mt_name=PEP_2009_EST_G2009_T001
[9] http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/11/congressional-members-personal-weal.html
[10] http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/index.php
[11] http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/111/senate/2/276?ref=politics
[12] http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/111/house/2/647
[13] http://osc.state.ny.us/osdc/rpt10-2011.pdf
[14] http://www.bls.gov/cps/prev_yrs.htm
[15] http://www.federalreserve.gov/RELEASES/z1/Current/annuals/a1995-2004.pdf
[16] http://www.federalreserve.gov/RELEASES/z1/Current/annuals/a2005-2009.pdf
[17] http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/view/17
[18] http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html
[19] http://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=3719
[20] http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline
[21] http://motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/look-numbers-how-rich-get-richer
[22] http://motherjones.com/politics/2006/07/poor-losers
[23] http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/09/congress-corporate-sponsors

Cue Carlos Santana

Separate but unequal: Charts show growing rich-poor gap

By Zachary RothWed Feb 23, 5:13 pm ET

The Great Recession and the slump that followed have triggered a jobs crisis that's been making headlinessince before President Obama was in office, and that will likely be with us for years. But the American economy is also plagued by a less-noted, but just as serious, problem: Simply put, over the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm.

Gradual developments like this don't typically lend themselves to news coverage. But Mother Jones magazine has crunched the data on inequality, and put together a group of stunning new charts. Taken together, they offer a dramatic visual illustration of who's doing well and who's doing badly in modern America.

Here are three samples:

• This chart shows that the poorest 90 percent of Americans make an average of $31,244 a year, while the top 1 percent make over $1.1 million:

• According to this chart, most income groups have barely grown richer since 1979. But the top 1 percent has seen its income nearly quadruple:

• And this chart suggests most Americans have little idea of just how unequal income distribution is. And that they'd like things to be divvied up a lot more equitably:

To see the rest of these fascinating charts, click on over to Mother Jones.

Pro-choicers on unsteady ground

Abortion rights are under attack, and pro-choice advocates are caught in a time warp

By Frances Kissling
Friday, February 18, 2011; 7:54 PM

The Washington Post LINK

In the nearly four decades since the Supreme Court ruled that women have a fundamental right to decide to have an abortion, the opposition to legal abortion has increased dramatically. Opponents use increasingly sophisticated arguments - focusing on advances in fetal medicine, stressing the rights of parents to have a say in their minor children's health care, linking opposition to abortion with opposition to war and capital punishment, seeking to make abortion not illegal but increasingly unavailable - and have succeeded in swinging public opinion toward their side.

Meanwhile, those of us in the abortion-rights movement have barely changed our approach. We cling to the arguments that led to victory in Roe v. Wade. Abortion is a private decision, we say, and the state has no power over a woman's body. Those arguments may have worked in the 1970s, but today, they are failing us, and focusing on them only risks all the gains we've made.

The "pro-choice" brand has eroded considerably. As recently as 1995 it was the preferred label of 56 percent of Americans; that dropped to 42 percent in 2009 and was 45 percent in 2010, according to Gallup polls. And abortion rights are under attack in Congress. The House passed a bill on Friday that would strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, one of the most important providers of reproductive health services for poor women. Another proposed House measure would make it impossible to buy private insurance covering abortion. Anti-choice Republicans are so secure that Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, a leader of this wing, has introduced an act which will allow hospitals to deny an abortion even if the pregnant woman's life is at risk. Meanwhile, 29 governors are solidly anti-abortion, while 15 states passed 39 laws, most of them restrictive, relating to abortion in 2010 alone.

Pro-choice advocates have good reason to oppose legislation that restricts abortion in any way, but unfortunately we're not going to regain the ground we have lost. What we must do is stop holding on to a strategy that isn't working, and one that is making the legal right to abortion more vulnerable than ever before.

We can no longer pretend the fetus is invisible. We can no longer seek to banish the state from our lives, but rather need to engage its power to improve women's lives. We must end the fiction that an abortion at 26 weeks is no different from one at six weeks.

These are not compromises or mere strategic concessions, they are a necessary evolution. The positions we have taken up to now are inadequate for the questions of the 21st century. We know more than we knew in 1973, and our positions should reflect that.

The fetus is more visible than ever before, and the abortion-rights movement needs to accept its existence and its value. It may not have a right to life, and its value may not be equal to that of the pregnant woman, but ending the life of a fetus is not a morally insignificant event. Very few people would argue that there is no difference between the decision to abort at 6 weeks and the decision to do so when the fetus would be viable outside of the womb, which today is generally at 24 to 26 weeks. Still, it is rare for mainstream movement leaders to say that publicly. Abortion is not merely a medical matter, and there is an unintended coarseness to claiming that it is.

We need to firmly and clearly reject post-viability abortions except in extreme cases. Exceptions include when the woman's life is at immediate risk; when the fetus suffers from conditions that are incompatible with a good quality of life; or when the woman's health is seriously threatened by a medical or psychological condition that continued pregnancy will exacerbate. We should regulate post-viability abortion to include the confirmation of those conditions by medical or psychiatric specialists.

Those kinds of regulations are not anti-woman or unduly invasive. They rightly protect all of our interests in women's health and fetal life.

Even abortions in the second trimester, especially after 20 weeks, need to be considered differently from those that happen early in pregnancy. Women who seek abortions in the second trimester generally have special needs and would be helped by more extensive counseling than that available at most abortion clinics. Women who discover their fetuses have anomalies, teens who did not recognize they were pregnant, women who could not make up their minds - these are not routine circumstances. Mandating and funding non-directive counseling on all options is a good thing.

Finally, the abortion-rights movement needs to change the way it thinks about the state. Right now government is mainly treated as the enemy - and it does neglect women's needs. The new ultra-conservative members of Congress are fighting to get rid of the legal right to choose abortion. The public is ambivalent about abortion. It wants it to be legal, but will support almost any restriction that indicates society takes the act of abortion seriously. For the choice movement to regain popular support and to maintain a legal right to abortion, it has to work with the state. Society and the state do have a stake in abortion policy. Reproduction is a private matter with public consequences. Women get to decide, but we all get to weigh in on what the policy should look like.

We need to fight to get government to provide resources that women need, from subsidized birth control to better prenatal care. We also need a real effort to reduce maternal mortality and pregnancy complication rates in this country, which Amnesty International has called "shocking."

If the state wants to weigh in with advice and information on abortion, the least it can do is emulate the European system, which has some regulations but then pays for women's abortions and offers good alternatives such as child care, parental leave and health care. We have been demanding that the state mind its own business. That lets government abdicate all responsibility for funding reproductive health care.

We need more responsible and compassionate state policies. But respect for fetal life also requires that men and women take every step possible not to create fetuses they will have to abort. Too often, the movement sounds as we think women have only rights and the state has only responsibilities.

The moral high ground on abortion is not to be found in asserting an absolute right to choose. Instead, it is to be found in the movement's historic understanding that when abortion is illegal, it is poor women who suffer. The abortion-rights movement needs to focus our work on restoring federal and state funds for abortion for women in the military and on Medicaid, a benefit that Congress cut off as early as 1976. We should also work to sensibly regulate abortion facilities - not to prohibit access, but to ensure safety.

Some of my colleagues in the abortion-rights movement will resist even this modest shift on post-first trimester abortions, fearing that any compromise reflects weakness. Give the opposition an inch and they will take a yard. I believe most in the movement share my concerns and hold more moderate positions on abortion than their rhetoric or silence implies. These shifts I am suggesting are not about compromising or finding common ground with abortion opponents. Compromise assumes that there are two parties prepared to give up something in return for settling an issue. Neither opponents nor advocates of legal abortion are willing to do that. But, for pro-choice advocates, standing our ground will mean losing ground entirely.

For too long, abortion has been treated in black and white. Any discussion that deviates from legal or illegal, women or fetus, faces criticism from the twin absolutes of choice or life. If the choice movement does not change, control of policy on abortion will remain in the hands of those who want it criminalized. If we don't suggest sensible balanced legislation and regulation of abortion, we will be left with far more draconian policies - and, eventually, no choices at all.

fkissling@gmail.com

Frances Kissling is the former president of Catholics for Choice and a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Beck Lies About NYT

Glenn Beck Lies About The NY Times and Mussolini

February 09, 2011 6:13 pm ET by Simon Maloy of Mediamatters.org LINK

Earlier tonight on his Fox News program, Glenn Beck was trying to make a point about how when the free market "allegedly" collapses, people rush to declare capitalism dead, just like in the 1920s. Beck's evidence was a New York Times article from 1923 which, according to Beck, "heaped praises" on Benito Mussolini. Note, as you watch the video, the presence of an ellipsis at the end of the quote Beck presents:

I think you know what's coming.

The full October 7, 1923, New York Times article (behind the Times' paywall) was actually quoting "American magazine writer" Isaac F. Marcosson, who had "just returned from a four months' trip through the Near East and Europe." Marcosson's assessment of Mussolini was not nearly as charitable as Beck led his viewers to believe.

The italicized portion is what Beck chose to leave out when making his accusation:

"Mussolini is a Latin Roosevelt who first acts and then inquires if it is legal. He has been of great service to Italy at home, but as an international factor Mussolini is just as great a danger to the peace of Europe as the Kaiser's sword used to be at Berlin. In my opinion the Corfu incident was a death blow to the League of Nations. If the League had acted peremptorily and insisted on arbitration instead of permitting Mussolini to bring Europe to the brink of another war its prestige would have been assured."

So to recap, Beck attributed a quote to the New York Times when, in fact, it was the New York Timesquoting someone else. And the quote, which he truncated to claim was laudatory of Mussolini, actually cast the Italian fascist as a warmonger and the greatest threat to European peace since World War I.

This isn't an innocent mistake. Beck is a liar, and for all his exhortations that his audience "do their own research," he seems pretty comfortable assuming that they're too lazy to actually do so.

Obama lowered income taxes

For 3rd Straight Year, Americans Paying Less In Federal Taxes Than They Did Under Bush

By Ben Armbruster on Feb 8th, 2011 at 9:50 am LINK

The rise of the Tea Party — “Tea” standing for “Taxed Enough Already” — was inspired by the myth that Americans were suffering under an oppressive tax-raising regime of President Obama. Yet the reality is quite the opposite. As Obama noted in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly on Sunday, “I didn’t raise taxes once. I lowered taxes over the last two years.” Yesterday, the Congressional Budget office provided the numbers to back that claim up, the AP reports:

[A]s a share of the nation’s economy, Uncle Sam’s take this year will be the lowest since 1950. [...] And for the third straight year, American families and businesses will pay less in federal taxes than they did under former President George W. Bush, thanks to a weak economy and a growing number of tax breaks for the wealthy and poor alike. [...]

But in the third year of Obama’s presidency, federal taxes are at historic lows. … in the current budget year, federal tax receipts will be equal to 14.8 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, the lowest level since Harry Truman was president.”

The AP adds that even though federal income tax rates have remained unchanged, “many taxpayers are seeing their bills drop under Obama because of more generous tax credits for college students, working families, homebuyers and the working poor.”

Teacher Training Emphasized in Top Countries

Scaling Up Success

Randi Weingarten

President, American Federation of Teachers

Posted: December 20, 2010 02:23 PM LINK

One of the great frustrations with America's public education system is that our success stories are rarely scaled up so that more students can benefit. To our children's detriment, decision-makers are more likely to chase fads, shift course or choose "reforms" lacking evidence of effectiveness than they are to adopt and expand educational approaches that have been proven successful.

Unfortunately, this is true on many levels. Accomplished teachers rarely have opportunities to share their craft with colleagues or to mentor new teachers. The "secrets" of successful schools too often remain a mystery, even to schools close by. And rather than replicate the practices of high-performing school districts for the benefit of far more students, many superintendents seem intent upon putting their own imprint on a school system -- evidence be damned.

The results of an international assessment released earlier this month show the consequences of America's failure to build on what works in education. American students ranked in the middle of countries participating in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. Underlying the results are the stark differences between practices in the top-performing countries and the prevailing approaches to education in the United States.

President Obama has said the countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow. Unfortunately for U.S. children, the top-down, test-driven, evidence-free approach to education that dominated this past decade has failed to put the United States on the path that high-achieving nations have followed.

Simply put, the highest-achieving countries in the world out-prepare, out-invest, out-respect and, as a result, outperform the United States.

The top-performing countries on PISA -- Finland, Singapore and South Korea -- place a heavy emphasis on teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration. They de-emphasize standardized tests, and each has a well-rounded curriculum that teachers can tailor. In Finland, which I recently visited, teacher training is demanding, rigorous and extensive -- with ample clinical experience. Teachers in these countries are esteemed, and are expected to make teaching their profession, and they're virtually 100 percent unionized.

Contrast this with the United States, where teacher preparation too often is insufficient for the complexity and importance of this work. Teachers frequently are assigned a classroom and left to sink or swim. High rates of turnover are expected and even built into the system. Indeed, half of all teachers leave within their first five years. This constant churning costs American school systems $7 billion each year. The cost to American students is incalculable.

The top-performing countries provide a more equitable education for all students and offset the effects of poverty through wraparound services that support students and their families. South Korea provides increased pay, smaller class sizes and more time for collaboration for teachers working in hard-to-staff schools.

Shanghai, which outranked all its competitors, emphasizes support for struggling teachers and schools. As the New York Times reported, "When a school is in trouble in Shanghai, authorities pair it with a high-performing school. The teachers and leaders of the strong school help those in the weak school until it improves. The authorities send whatever support is needed to help those who are struggling." The United States, in contrast, too often substitutes last-resort measures such as school closings and mass teacher firings for this thoughtful approach proven effective by the world's education leader.

High-achieving countries treat teachers as professionals, and responsibility for student outcomes is shared. School systems work with teachers and their unions, and parents and students are engaged and responsible, as well. Compare this with what happens in the United States, where teachers are routinely asked to accept policies made without their input, and then blamed when the policies fail. And often teachers are held solely accountable for student achievement, rather than the mutual responsibility approach that has proven so successful in many other countries.

Educating all our students at high levels is not easy, but our international neighbors show that it can be done. We must study and replicate the best practices, both here and abroad, for the benefit of our kids, and our competitiveness.

Paradox of American's Unborn

January 2, 2011 LINK

The Unborn Paradox

By ROSS DOUTHAT

The American entertainment industry has never been comfortable with the act of abortion. Film or television characters might consider the procedure, but even on the most libertine programs (a “Mad Men,” a “Sex and the City”), they’re more likely to have a change of heart than actually go through with it. Reality TV thrives on shocking scenes and subjects — extreme pregnancies and surgeries, suburban polygamists and the gay housewives of New York — but abortion remains a little too controversial, and a little bit too real.

This omission is often cited as a victory for the pro-life movement, and in some cases that’s plainly true. (Recent unplanned-pregnancy movies like “Juno” and “Knocked Up” made abortion seem not only unnecessary but repellent.) But it can also be a form of cultural denial: a way of reassuring the public that abortion in America is — in Bill Clinton’s famous phrase — safe and legal, but also rare.

Rare it isn’t: not when one in five pregnancies ends at the abortion clinic. So it was a victory for realism, at least, when MTV decided to supplement its hit reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” with last week’s special, “No Easy Decision,” which followed Markai Durham, a teen mother who got pregnant a second time and chose abortion.

MTV being MTV, the special’s attitude was resolutely pro-choice. But it was a heartbreaking spectacle, whatever your perspective. Durham and her boyfriend are the kind of young people our culture sets adrift — working-class and undereducated, with weak support networks, few authority figures, and no script for sexual maturity beyond the easily neglected admonition to always use a condom. Their televised agony was a case study in how abortion can simultaneously seem like a moral wrong and the only possible solution — because it promised to keep them out of poverty, and to let them give their first daughter opportunities they never had.

The show was particularly wrenching, though, when juxtaposed with two recent dispatches from the world of midlife, upper-middle-class infertility. Last month there was Vanessa Grigoriadis’s provocative New York Magazine story “Waking Up From the Pill,” which suggested that a lifetime on chemical birth control has encouraged women “to forget about the biological realities of being female ... inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.” Then on Sunday, The Times Magazine provided a more intimate look at the same issue, in which a midlife parent, the journalist Melanie Thernstrom, chronicled what it took to bring her children into the world: six failed in vitro cycles, an egg donor and two surrogate mothers, and an untold fortune in expenses.

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.

And lives are what they are. On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just “pregnancy tissue.” After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: “If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.” Instead, “think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.”

It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she begins to cry when he calls the embryo a “thing.” Gesturing to their infant daughter, she says, “A ‘thing’ can turn out like that. That’s what I remember ... ‘Nothing but a bunch of cells’ can be her.”

When we want to know this, we know this. Last week’s New Yorker carried a poem by Kevin Young about expectant parents, early in pregnancy, probing the mother’s womb for a heartbeat:

The doctor trying again to find you, fragile,

fern, snowflake. Nothing.

After, my wife will say, in fear,

impatient, she went beyond her body,

this tiny room, into the ether—

... And there

it is: faint, an echo, faster and further

away than mother’s, all beat box

and fuzzy feedback. ...

This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

Tracking the Shrinking Middle Class

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/features/view/1

Income Inequality Hurting Social Security

WEDNESDAY, FEB 16, 2011 18:17 ET LINKBY ROBERT REICHEnough with the budget baloney!

AP/Julio Cortez

Chris Christie

This originally appeared at Robert Reich's blog

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican presidential hopeful, says in order to "save" Social Security the retirement age should be raised. The media are congratulating him for his putative “courage.” Deficit hawks are proclaiming Social Security one of the big entitlements that has to be cut in order to reduce the budget deficit.

This is all baloney.

In a former life I was a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. So let me set the record straight.

Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

But why should there even be a problem 26 years from now? Back in 1983, Alan Greenspan’s Social Security commission was supposed to have fixed the system for good – by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age. (Early boomers like me can start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 will have to wait until they’re 67.)

Greenspan’s commission must have failed to predict something. But what? It fairly accurately predicted how quickly the boomers would age. It had a pretty good idea of how fast the US economy would grow. While it underestimated how many immigrants would be coming into the United States, that’s no problem. To the contrary, most new immigrants are young and their payroll-tax contributions will far exceed what they draw from Social Security for decades.

So what did Greenspan’s commission fail to see coming?

Inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain ceiling. (That ceiling is now $106,800.) The ceiling rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Commission assumed that, as the ceiling rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 84 percent of total income.

It went from 90 percent to 84 percent because a larger and larger portion of total income has gone to the top. In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security’s long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

So there’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical response to the increasing concentration of income at the top is simply to raise the ceiling.

Not incidentally, several months ago the White House considered proposing that the ceiling be lifted to $180,000. Somehow, though, that proposal didn’t make it into the President’s budget.

• Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of"Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." More:Robert Reich