The Left is Lying About Poverty in America… WHY?
28 June 2019 [link youtube]
It is so commonly said that "the poor are getting poorer" that, apparently, nobody does a quick google search to put political claims about economic inequality in check. In the debates within and surrounding the American Democratic Party primaries, this has become a meme… BUT WHY? If you're going to advance a plausible case for a new economic and social policy, why build it on an obvious lie?
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Youtube Automatic Transcription
okay let's let's start with the facts
let's throw up this chart on screen here real quick okay what do you see here from 1960 to 2015 has poverty gotten worse no inequality got worse but inequality got worse only because the rich got richer not because the poor upward these issues are emotive and people tend to look at these charts and only see what they want to see now Bernie Sanders is no fool he avoids using the rhetoric of saying that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer because I think he is aware that it is not true factually that the poor are getting poorer but most people look at a chart like this one and they just see what they want to see if you look at the bottom of the chart see the number zero zero percent there for the poor to be getting poorer their lines would have to be below zero because this is a chart showing average real household income growth the growth the percentage growth they're all growing they're all growing above zero percent ten percent twenty percent and so on okay this chart is showing you that the poor are getting less poor in the United States of America right but the rich are getting richer much much more rapidly look at this chart very easy to be emotive about this very easy to be irrational but what does this actually show yes this shows that the top 1% have become spectacularly wealthy they've become much much more wealthy in this span of time and note that this chart ends in the year 2007 or 2008 for whatever reason this is not as as current not as up-to-date a chart okay but what does this show about the poor the poor are not getting poorer between 1960 and the present inequality has gotten worse in America but not poverty inequality and poverty are two very different things right now in the Democratic primaries in the debates for who will be the next president in States the debates for who will be the figurehead leader of America's left-wing mainstream party lies are being told about this constantly and the problem is not just that those lies they're factually wrong the problem is that they're misleading they really lead to a false perception of what America's problems are and very false assumptions about what the solutions are what the outcomes will be the red line on this chart is the really important line it says consumption poverty now what does that mean the word consumption has many meanings in English consumption poverty so I my university degree my first Universe degree is political science I learned this in the classroom from the textbook it was covered very briefly into the university kitchen and then I learned it in the real world when I went to Cambodia and did social science research there in the nonprofit humanitarian sector okay the most important way to measure poverty is by people's consumption so in the United States of America you might ask questions like do you own shoes how many years have you been wearing the same pair of shoes do you eat in restaurants how many times this month have you eaten in a restaurant how much money in total have you spent eating a restaurant and then you have to calibrate the statistics you've got to reflect what is the standard of poverty in that society in the United States of America poor people can't eat in restaurants or can't eat there regularly poor people have to pack a sandwich and take it with them to save money so they don't eat lunch in a restaurant now this is almost universal in different societies you're going to be measuring different levels of poverty in the United States it's accepted without questioning it that a person can own a car and still be considered poor they can have a person who owns a car and owns many pairs of shoes and eats in a restaurant and that they're still poor so how you calibrate it where you set the offline for someone being in poverty versus not in poverty is significant but the way to measure that is by measuring consumption not not by measuring income not through relative measures of poverty if use relative poverty the bottom twenty percent of people are then always going to be poor you get a self-fulfilling prophecies - this way when we were in Cambodia I remember debating this with my boss the measures of poverty he really favored were things like the roof of your house what is the roof what material is the roof of your house made of which is interesting picture of poverty you know do you own a cellular phone or not things like this because his experience we came about in societies with the first things people would spend money on as soon as they had some security as soon as that a little bit of income - a little bit of income - waste they would improve the tiling on their roof that access do with the torrential rain that it's so loud it's so noisy the rain beating down on the other of your house so when you look at the red line on this chart what you see is a dramatic dramatic decline in poverty since the Year 1960 okay and the black line there is some decline but that's been wavering along it's relatively relatively stagnant okay that sharp sharp decline on the red line you cannot cannot say honestly that the poor are getting poorer in the United States of America that is false okay the poor have become there the poor have become dramatically fewer in number or you can say the poor are less and less poor however we are in a period of time in which the rich get richer now there was a quotation I copied out here someone claimed at the latest Democrat Party primary debates that we have had 40 years of no economic growth for 90% of the people [Laughter] that's not that's not what this chart shows not the first person try to debunk these myths here is a quotation from The Washington Post by meg Kelly the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the bottom four quintiles so the poor four-fifths of society saw an average income growth of 32% between 1979 and 2015 before transfers and taxes if you include the difference made by taxes and transfers then the middle three quintiles saw a 46 percent increase in income but the poorest of the poor the lowest quintile the lowest quintile saw a 79 percent increase in income during that span of time 1979 to 2015 so the rhetoric within the Democrat Party within the mainstream left and of course it's even worse on the far left amongst the extremists the rhetoric has fundamentally become detached from reality now the other canard the other excuse that's given to direct us away from these facts and to keep using this meme this false mean this misleading meme that the problem with United States America is that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer it's not so is to say oh well even if you think the poor doing okay you know with Donald Trump's America the current economy even if you think that it's not true because they're working such long hours they're working multiple jobs look at this chart what do you what do you see about that what do you see there yeah it's not true it is not true believe it or not the rich people the rich people are really the purple line those are this extremely wealthy we get several different levels of rich people rich people are working longer hours okay I don't find that surprising in the past rich people relied another human beings health amount they had servants and secretaries increase now if you meet people who are millionaires not multi billionaires because people of over a million dollars they do everything themselves they don't have a secretary they don't have a travel agent they use their computers and they book everything themselves they do all the work themselves I think it's really true you know high-income people whether they be medical doctors or architects or owners of small businesses they network very very long hours and that's what this that's what this chart shows the people who are working shorter hours are the red line so the red line here this isn't the poorest of the poor you can see if you look at this is the relative poor and this is the the majority of society they are not working long term for how hers you can see very clearly the trend and especially interestingly the the trend in in recent years so um what's the problem with this approach I'm saying this partly because I want to set up a discussion of issues in the future video probably the next video I make um the problem is that the quality of life people have in America is absolutely awful and that problem cannot be sold by raising the wages of employees at Amazon from $14 and 25 cents per hour to $15 an hour it's not going to make that kind of difference it's not gonna make that dramatically difference for the people at Amazon it's not gonna make that dramatic a difference for the people at Disneyland either I followed those arguments very closely when Bernie Sanders presented them and even the particular case studies he presented were really misleading and dishonest I do completely sympathize with the the movement to raise minimum which I completely sympathize with it but you know have you been to Los Angeles have have you been to San Francisco why are there huge numbers of homeless people on the streets it's not because of the difference between $14 an hour and $15 an hour for people who already have a steady job at Amazon or Disney World it's not okay obviously anyone talked to anyone who has real-world experience working with the homeless in the 21st century obviously the single most outstanding issue is drug addiction including addiction to painkillers as well as you know recreational drugs illicit drugs illegal drugs okay drug addiction is an enormous vector for homelessness vagrancy and extreme poverty in the United States of America there's no denying it what is it that makes life so unpleasant for the working poor so you know now not talk about vagrants they're almost people for the working poor in the United States America one of the single greatest issues is public transportation Los Angeles is hell everyone needs to own a car and working poor people they may be spending 50 percent of their income on their car and car related expenses you know making the down payments on their car and insurance and yet a some extent fuel gasoline is relatively cheap these days you know the cost imposed on the buying a car and the misery of having to drive more than an hour every day back and forth to work this is a huge cost imposed on the whole society due to having terrible infrastructure and this is true in Los Angeles it's true in Detroit it's true in many parts the Unites States life is not like that in the South of France if you ask why is the quality of life higher in the South of France it's not something simple like oh well it's the minimum wage it's not something simple like oh it's Andrew Yang's crazy idea of having universal basic income in the South of France they have a beach the train goes right up to the beach you can get out of the Train you can pay $5 to take the train you know it's not free but it's cheap obviously built at taxpayers expense etc and poor people and rich people alike can take their kid and get on the train and get out get out and go swimming on the beach the poor and the millionaire's alike all enjoy this you know this natural splendor thanks to the government building infrastructure that enables it okay why is life better in the south of France than it is in Los Angeles because of the cost of education because of the cost of health care and I'll just I'll just throw this this chart up on screen everyone knows this right this is the misery of modern life in America and this absolutely will not be broached it will not be solved it will not be improved by raising minimum wage nor through Andrew Yang's you know universal basic income proposal okay and this is not even talking about rent one of the most fundamental miseries in the 21st century is the cost of rent and no government wants it wants to deal with it neither left-wing no right when nobody neither Democrat nor Republican nobody wants to talk about how can really help the poor by having you know housing that works with them housing that doesn't require them to drive two hours back and forth their place of employment housing that doesn't cost them 50 percent of their income etc etc this is a huge crushing problem in the United States of America and this it is in some other countries around the world high ranch crisis is not universal and there are government policies to deal with it okay the most fundamentally dangerous element of the left-wing blaming the problem on the rich are getting richer the poor getting poorer this false this factually false meme their statement of the problem is misleadingly simplistic and this is training public opinion to endorse and commit to solutions that are even more misleadingly simplistic indeed in my opinion dangerously so you
let's throw up this chart on screen here real quick okay what do you see here from 1960 to 2015 has poverty gotten worse no inequality got worse but inequality got worse only because the rich got richer not because the poor upward these issues are emotive and people tend to look at these charts and only see what they want to see now Bernie Sanders is no fool he avoids using the rhetoric of saying that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer because I think he is aware that it is not true factually that the poor are getting poorer but most people look at a chart like this one and they just see what they want to see if you look at the bottom of the chart see the number zero zero percent there for the poor to be getting poorer their lines would have to be below zero because this is a chart showing average real household income growth the growth the percentage growth they're all growing they're all growing above zero percent ten percent twenty percent and so on okay this chart is showing you that the poor are getting less poor in the United States of America right but the rich are getting richer much much more rapidly look at this chart very easy to be emotive about this very easy to be irrational but what does this actually show yes this shows that the top 1% have become spectacularly wealthy they've become much much more wealthy in this span of time and note that this chart ends in the year 2007 or 2008 for whatever reason this is not as as current not as up-to-date a chart okay but what does this show about the poor the poor are not getting poorer between 1960 and the present inequality has gotten worse in America but not poverty inequality and poverty are two very different things right now in the Democratic primaries in the debates for who will be the next president in States the debates for who will be the figurehead leader of America's left-wing mainstream party lies are being told about this constantly and the problem is not just that those lies they're factually wrong the problem is that they're misleading they really lead to a false perception of what America's problems are and very false assumptions about what the solutions are what the outcomes will be the red line on this chart is the really important line it says consumption poverty now what does that mean the word consumption has many meanings in English consumption poverty so I my university degree my first Universe degree is political science I learned this in the classroom from the textbook it was covered very briefly into the university kitchen and then I learned it in the real world when I went to Cambodia and did social science research there in the nonprofit humanitarian sector okay the most important way to measure poverty is by people's consumption so in the United States of America you might ask questions like do you own shoes how many years have you been wearing the same pair of shoes do you eat in restaurants how many times this month have you eaten in a restaurant how much money in total have you spent eating a restaurant and then you have to calibrate the statistics you've got to reflect what is the standard of poverty in that society in the United States of America poor people can't eat in restaurants or can't eat there regularly poor people have to pack a sandwich and take it with them to save money so they don't eat lunch in a restaurant now this is almost universal in different societies you're going to be measuring different levels of poverty in the United States it's accepted without questioning it that a person can own a car and still be considered poor they can have a person who owns a car and owns many pairs of shoes and eats in a restaurant and that they're still poor so how you calibrate it where you set the offline for someone being in poverty versus not in poverty is significant but the way to measure that is by measuring consumption not not by measuring income not through relative measures of poverty if use relative poverty the bottom twenty percent of people are then always going to be poor you get a self-fulfilling prophecies - this way when we were in Cambodia I remember debating this with my boss the measures of poverty he really favored were things like the roof of your house what is the roof what material is the roof of your house made of which is interesting picture of poverty you know do you own a cellular phone or not things like this because his experience we came about in societies with the first things people would spend money on as soon as they had some security as soon as that a little bit of income - a little bit of income - waste they would improve the tiling on their roof that access do with the torrential rain that it's so loud it's so noisy the rain beating down on the other of your house so when you look at the red line on this chart what you see is a dramatic dramatic decline in poverty since the Year 1960 okay and the black line there is some decline but that's been wavering along it's relatively relatively stagnant okay that sharp sharp decline on the red line you cannot cannot say honestly that the poor are getting poorer in the United States of America that is false okay the poor have become there the poor have become dramatically fewer in number or you can say the poor are less and less poor however we are in a period of time in which the rich get richer now there was a quotation I copied out here someone claimed at the latest Democrat Party primary debates that we have had 40 years of no economic growth for 90% of the people [Laughter] that's not that's not what this chart shows not the first person try to debunk these myths here is a quotation from The Washington Post by meg Kelly the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the bottom four quintiles so the poor four-fifths of society saw an average income growth of 32% between 1979 and 2015 before transfers and taxes if you include the difference made by taxes and transfers then the middle three quintiles saw a 46 percent increase in income but the poorest of the poor the lowest quintile the lowest quintile saw a 79 percent increase in income during that span of time 1979 to 2015 so the rhetoric within the Democrat Party within the mainstream left and of course it's even worse on the far left amongst the extremists the rhetoric has fundamentally become detached from reality now the other canard the other excuse that's given to direct us away from these facts and to keep using this meme this false mean this misleading meme that the problem with United States America is that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer it's not so is to say oh well even if you think the poor doing okay you know with Donald Trump's America the current economy even if you think that it's not true because they're working such long hours they're working multiple jobs look at this chart what do you what do you see about that what do you see there yeah it's not true it is not true believe it or not the rich people the rich people are really the purple line those are this extremely wealthy we get several different levels of rich people rich people are working longer hours okay I don't find that surprising in the past rich people relied another human beings health amount they had servants and secretaries increase now if you meet people who are millionaires not multi billionaires because people of over a million dollars they do everything themselves they don't have a secretary they don't have a travel agent they use their computers and they book everything themselves they do all the work themselves I think it's really true you know high-income people whether they be medical doctors or architects or owners of small businesses they network very very long hours and that's what this that's what this chart shows the people who are working shorter hours are the red line so the red line here this isn't the poorest of the poor you can see if you look at this is the relative poor and this is the the majority of society they are not working long term for how hers you can see very clearly the trend and especially interestingly the the trend in in recent years so um what's the problem with this approach I'm saying this partly because I want to set up a discussion of issues in the future video probably the next video I make um the problem is that the quality of life people have in America is absolutely awful and that problem cannot be sold by raising the wages of employees at Amazon from $14 and 25 cents per hour to $15 an hour it's not going to make that kind of difference it's not gonna make that dramatically difference for the people at Amazon it's not gonna make that dramatic a difference for the people at Disneyland either I followed those arguments very closely when Bernie Sanders presented them and even the particular case studies he presented were really misleading and dishonest I do completely sympathize with the the movement to raise minimum which I completely sympathize with it but you know have you been to Los Angeles have have you been to San Francisco why are there huge numbers of homeless people on the streets it's not because of the difference between $14 an hour and $15 an hour for people who already have a steady job at Amazon or Disney World it's not okay obviously anyone talked to anyone who has real-world experience working with the homeless in the 21st century obviously the single most outstanding issue is drug addiction including addiction to painkillers as well as you know recreational drugs illicit drugs illegal drugs okay drug addiction is an enormous vector for homelessness vagrancy and extreme poverty in the United States of America there's no denying it what is it that makes life so unpleasant for the working poor so you know now not talk about vagrants they're almost people for the working poor in the United States America one of the single greatest issues is public transportation Los Angeles is hell everyone needs to own a car and working poor people they may be spending 50 percent of their income on their car and car related expenses you know making the down payments on their car and insurance and yet a some extent fuel gasoline is relatively cheap these days you know the cost imposed on the buying a car and the misery of having to drive more than an hour every day back and forth to work this is a huge cost imposed on the whole society due to having terrible infrastructure and this is true in Los Angeles it's true in Detroit it's true in many parts the Unites States life is not like that in the South of France if you ask why is the quality of life higher in the South of France it's not something simple like oh well it's the minimum wage it's not something simple like oh it's Andrew Yang's crazy idea of having universal basic income in the South of France they have a beach the train goes right up to the beach you can get out of the Train you can pay $5 to take the train you know it's not free but it's cheap obviously built at taxpayers expense etc and poor people and rich people alike can take their kid and get on the train and get out get out and go swimming on the beach the poor and the millionaire's alike all enjoy this you know this natural splendor thanks to the government building infrastructure that enables it okay why is life better in the south of France than it is in Los Angeles because of the cost of education because of the cost of health care and I'll just I'll just throw this this chart up on screen everyone knows this right this is the misery of modern life in America and this absolutely will not be broached it will not be solved it will not be improved by raising minimum wage nor through Andrew Yang's you know universal basic income proposal okay and this is not even talking about rent one of the most fundamental miseries in the 21st century is the cost of rent and no government wants it wants to deal with it neither left-wing no right when nobody neither Democrat nor Republican nobody wants to talk about how can really help the poor by having you know housing that works with them housing that doesn't require them to drive two hours back and forth their place of employment housing that doesn't cost them 50 percent of their income etc etc this is a huge crushing problem in the United States of America and this it is in some other countries around the world high ranch crisis is not universal and there are government policies to deal with it okay the most fundamentally dangerous element of the left-wing blaming the problem on the rich are getting richer the poor getting poorer this false this factually false meme their statement of the problem is misleadingly simplistic and this is training public opinion to endorse and commit to solutions that are even more misleadingly simplistic indeed in my opinion dangerously so you