Wealth vs income

[essentialsaltes]

From FARK to Racialicious to the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, I followed the trail to Insight's study on wealth, focusing primarily on women of color. The Racialicious post pulls out a couple of the more interesting graphs.

Although comparing the median incomes of evil white males to women of color produces a disparity of no more than a factor of two (not that this is something to crow about), comparing wealth shows a much greater disparity. Wealth is the result of totting up what you own and subtracting what you owe. The median wealth of single Hispanic or black women is essentially zero -- $100-120 if you discount the value of the person's car. Nearly half have negative wealth. Whereas the median SWF has something like $42K of net wealth. And the SWM, $44K.

The tables also suggest that the median non-Hispanic white male has a much nicer car than I do.

Comments

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

One more reason to support my long-time position of "lower income taxes, higher inheritance taxes." Really, I'd prefer to see a tax on wealth replace a tax on income, but that's a lot less feasible. It helps reduce class and racial inequality AND it's better economics. Win-win!