who keep low balances. a new york times investigation found this week that more than 1 million low-income americans are blacklisted from opening a bank account, because of minor past mistakes, like bouncing a check. so this feels to me i was like, okay, you ve got no food stamps, no safety net, and you can t even get a checking account. i think it just shows that it is incredibly expensive to be poor in this country and to be working poor. no matter please say that again. please say that. it is incredibly expensive to be poor in this country and to be a working poor. and that is something at paul ryan s hearing, or a lot of the rhetoric around these issues, doesn t acknowledge. is that working people are working extremely hard. they are trying to find full-time hours when they can get them. they are working two jobs, as apparent the mcdonald s budget calculator suggest that they do to make ends meet. and they are not getting ahead. and every single policy that pushes them f
his, quote, better bargain for the middle class. in his first interview with the new york times in three year, the president said if washington is not talking about upward mobility, then it s missing the boat. there was a sense of not upward mobility in the abstract, it was part and parcel of who we were as americans. and that s what been eroding over the last 20, 30 years. here we are, having dealt with this massive crisis, but those trends, those trends have continued. and that s what people sense. that s why people are anxious. that s why people are frustrated. of course, the problem is neither party has a great legislative solution to this issue of the widening income gap. while americans are concerned about how to climb the income ladder and what a secure middle income job will even look like in ten years, washington is
expanded so much is because we went into a power recession. so this is nothing new. when you talk about that, the reality is that food stamp enrollment has increased 70% since 2008. the average income growth from 1976 to 2011, the income of the bottom 90% grew $59. the income of the top 10% grew $116,000. the reason we need more assistance is because middle class and working class wages have effectively stagnated and the recession wiped out whatever wealth american families might have held on to at least if you were in the bottom 90%. there has been no recovery for people at the bottom of the income ladder. people who were subsisting on fast food job wages where they may not have health insurance. when you have people working
housing subsidy for the mortgage interest deduction. the more you make, the bigger your subsidy. but what s not in the tax expenditure budget is just as important. if you are wealthy enough that your annual increase in wealth exceeds your consumption, you just borrow against your assets and live tax tree. $17,000 a year if you can afford it. i m older. i can save an extra $6,000. but if you re an executive, a large business owner, a movie star, you can save unlimited amounts of money under a little-known section of the tax code, and there are people with multiple billion-dollar untaxed fortunes and some are done in the way they can borrow against them. that s something seriously wrong with the system. that s why we need to talk act fundamental tax reform and lowering rates would make all these things worse and put the burden on the people down the income ladder. fundamental tax reform, comprehensive tax reform.
bottom rungs of the income ladder will stay there. which i think is the most damning case. i mean, we talk about inequality a lot, but the more damning thing about american society right now from the perspective of the sort of from conservative perspective is the decline in mobility, and the best we can know mobility has been declining over time, and it s also very low in the oecb countries. the class bound rigid hierarchies of europe 18th or 19th. this is something that i think there s an emerging conversation about in universal pre-k seepz like a way of doing that. it s necessary, but not sufficient, but i m glad to see the step. i m now wondering whether i went to pre-k, and i think i m getting quietly angry at my parents because i don t think i did. i ll have to research that. my parents my mom, to her credit i was. as a 3-year-old. my mom this is a perfect example. my mom and my parents, to their great credit, organized a coop pre-k in the neighborhood in the b