Where I sit tonight -- probably the same place as a lot of you right now -- is in the path of the largest winter storm in years. Tracy and I spent the afternoon getting ready. We already went to the supermarket yesterday, so what we were left with was making sure our backup battery power supply is charged and the generator is ready to go. That meant finding the little connection thing to charge the Jackery battery and looking for our collection of extension cords we can run from it, and from the generator outside, to the stuff we’ll want to be able to keep on if the power goes out – the fridge, the wifi router, the TV, and a couple of lamps.

I was toiling away in the room at the back of the house we use for cat boxes and cat feeding and keeping-stuff-we’re-waiting-to-put-away, and I was thinking of what to write at the end of this out of control week, the out of control month that’s about to come to an end, hell, the extraordinarily out of control year we have – so far – survived, when it came to me:

He’s losing.

He’s “losing it,” as the saying goes. He is more and more visibly disconnected from the reality the rest of us, and the rest of the world, live in. They can still shoot him up with something that is not vitamin B and wheel him out in front of the public and the press and turn him loose to babble the lies that make him so happy to repeat over and over – he won the 2020 election that he lost; the prices of things like electricity and food and drugs and health care that everyone else knows are going up, he thinks are going down 400 or a thousand percent or whatever number he’s got stuck in his mind; he’s the greatest president ever, greater even than Washington and Lincoln; and on and on. But it’s not working, and he knows it, and his people know it.

He’s losing his health. A new purple wound bloomed on his hand in Davos that they tried to explain away by saying he hit his hand “on a table.” What? There weren’t enough hands to shake in Davos, so they couldn’t explain it away using that lie, or maybe nobody would shake his hand. Who knows. Something is seriously wrong with him. It’s what his narcolepsy is all about. He couldn’t keep his eyes open if they paraded a bevy of topless teenagers in front of him, he’s on the nod so often and so deeply. The thing about dragging the leg comes and goes, but if I were to guess, I’d say one of the reasons they’re rushing to complete the gold-plated jet from Qatar they say will be ready “by summer” is that they’re installing some sort of elevator he can use to get into the thing.

He’s losing supporters. Three or four polls are out telling the tale of his crash in popularity with the 18 to 30-year-olds. Even those who flipped from Biden to him in 2024, think he stinks, with 65 percent in one poll and 69 percent in others disapproving of the way he’s doing his job. He’s so crazed over his tanking poll numbers that he wants to make it a crime to run polls that say his numbers are falling.

He’s losing Republicans in the House and Senate. How many have said they’re resigning now? I lost count at 40. They’re looking at the losses they’re going to face in the midterms and bailing at record levels.

He’s going to lose the midterms. Everybody knows it. James Carville thinks it’s going to be a blowout. Charlie Cook was just dragged kicking and screaming into admitting control of the Senate is likely to go to the Democrats. The White House announced this week that Trump will be traveling to support Republicans for the midterms once a week between now and next fall. That means rallies. Remember the last one, in the Poconos, when they couldn’t fill a casino convention room and had to wall off a smaller space with big curtains? Just wait: His rally tour is going to turn into the Big Search for the Smallest Event Space So It Will Look the Fullest.

He’s losing it with ICE. The violence and cruelty of his thousands of new barely-trained masked thugs is coming through in spades in Minneapolis. That city is showing what can be done to oppose these modern-day Brownshirts and turn the tide of public opinion against them. His polling on immigration is tanking. CNN ran a poll that found 52 percent find Trump “has gone too far” on immigration. New York Times/Sienna found 61 percent say he has “gone too far” on immigration and customs enforcement. That number included 70 percent of independents. Other polls have had similar results. That whooshing sound you hear isn’t the icy wind bringing the Big Winter Storm. It’s the sound of Trump’s immigration policies flushing down his golden toilet. And these polls were taken before the photo of the five-year-old boy in the knit hat with bunny ears and a Spiderman backpack hit the airwaves. The picture is already being described as “iconic” in the way it shows the inhumanity of Trump’s immigration policy. That’s the hand of an ICE agent holding the boy by his backpack.

He’s losing it internationally. The kidnapping of Maduro was a big fat bust. He’s leaving the same authoritarian regime in place in Venezuela. None of the Big Three oil companies want to touch Venezuela’s stinky, thick, hard-to-drill-for oil. No major countries want to join his toy U.N. “Board of Peace.” I mean, really – Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan? It’s like a club for wannabe dictators hoping if they please the utterly unpleasable Trump that some crumbs will fall to the table from the Big Mac he’s stuffing in his mouth. Embarrassing. Ridiculous. Absurd. A plaything for Trump’s ever-expanding ego. Europe is gone for him. Not even his pal Putin will listen to his pleadings about stopping the war in Ukraine so he can get another pretend peace prize.

He’s losing it with Wall Street and Banks. That’s what his incredibly rapid shift into reverse on Greenland was all about. The money-boys took a hit to their bottom lines and punched speed-dial for Trump and told him if he wanted to keep the crooked crypto pay-offs coming, he had to finesse a Greenland agreement and drop the threats of new European tariffs, and presto! After screaming for months that he “needs” Greenland for “national defense” and that you “can’t defend a piece of paper,” Trump’s big new deal on Greenland turns out to be a slight expansion of the 1951 treaty signed between the U.S. and Denmark as a – get this – “implementation of the North Atlantic Treaty.” That’s Trump’s bugaboo, NATO, of course. There is new language about “total access” and some filigrees and bows and it will probably be written on stationery in gold leaf lettering, but it’s “old wine in a new bottle,” according to a former NATO official quoted by Politico.

In the end, he is losing because taken together, what has resulted from all his big authoritarian moves is that he looks weak. Panic is setting in. There aren’t enough needles and “not vitamin B” in the world to keep this staggering act going.

That’s not to say he isn’t dangerous. He is. He’s still surrounded by wannabe Nazis like Stephen Miller, and he’s still listening – on the sly now, I suspect – to tech Nazis like Elon Musk. He’s still got a hand puppet running the Pentagon and his hand on a pen that can sign the bloody Insurrection Act any time he takes a mind to. He wants some form of what he thinks is martial law, and if I were to guess, he’s going to try it and end up being knocked back by the courts.

But he’s fading, and he’s fading fast. He is not invincible. Republicans will be heavily damaged in the midterms. If they lose the House and the Senate, Trump’s last two years will be empty theater. He won’t be able to pass a single law. He won’t be able to make a single appointment. He won’t get any new judges on Courts of Appeals. He won’t get any new U.S. Attorneys. Should a Supreme Court vacancy come up, it will stay vacant until 2029, and a Democrat will be in the White House.

He won’t just be a lame duck. His presidency will be a dead letter.

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This was triggered by a post over at our long-term friendly-rival blog, LGM. That post, in turn, was triggered by something stupid that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently.

What Kennedy said: he thinks his distinctive hoarse, raspy voice is “spasmodic dysphonia”, which he suspects may have been caused by taking flu vaccines for years.  Because dysphonia is a KNOWN side effect of these dangerous vaccines!  So he stopped getting flu shots back in 2005.

Blogger Shakezula quite correctly deconstructs this nonsense (only one flu shot lists dysphonia as a possible side effect, and that one wasn’t available until after 2005; if dysphonia is a side effect, it’s ridiculously rare, and nobody seems to have ever encountered it).  But then they make a wrong turn:  they suggest that maybe RFK’s weird voice is genetic, because his sister also has a kinda weird voice.

No.  No no no.  

There’s a thing called “heroin voice”.  And yes, it’s an actual thing — go ahead and google it.  There are papers.

TLDR: long-term heroin use can permanently damage your voice.  It doesn’t always happen, but it’s definitely a real and well-known risk.  Long-term junkies and ex-junkies often have a distinctive hoarse, raspy voice.  In rare, severe cases the user may need speech rehabilitation.  More often, they just have a weird voice.  And they may keep that weird voice for the rest of their life, because in most cases the damage seems to be irreversible.

Now on one hand this is a slightly niche topic.  If you’ve never spent much time around junkies, there’s no reason to know about heroin voice.  But on the other hand it’s not exactly a deep obscure secret.  “Raspy voice” is regularly listed as one of the warning signs of heroin abuse.  It’s right up there with pinprick pupils, pallor, reduced appetite, and a marked preference for long-sleeved shirts.

“RFK Jr. used to be a junkie” isn’t a secret either.  He’s admitted to several years of heroin addiction: basically, “It was the Eighties, man”.  I would bet a modest amount of money that he used heroin both more and longer than he’s now willing to admit, but whatever.  It’s relevant to his current position, not because he used to be an addict — there’s no shame in that — but because he grew into one of those ex-addicts who believe, that since they Triumphed Over Addiction through some combination of Clean Living and Personal Awesomeness, they’re now uniquely entitled to tell the rest of us how to behave.  If you’ve ever spent much time around twelve-step programs, you’ll know the type — mercifully rare, but instantly familiar.

Anyway!  RFK Jr. doesn’t have a weird voice because of vaccines.  And it’s not genetic either.  It’s heroin voice.   He has a weird voice because he used to be a junkie.

And that’s all.

ICE, I have written before, has become the personal paramilitary of an authoritarian despot, staffed up by men who are attracted to white supremacist propaganda and who probably couldn’t hack it in the military or traditional law enforcement. But ICE is also a profoundly macho and misogynist force, part of the kind of antifeminist crackdown that is prototypical of authoritarian regimes.

I spoke with Jessica Yellin of News Not Noise about ICE and misogyny, and I hope you’ll watch and listen to our discussion — I will send it around as soon as it is published (she really is so excellent, please also subscribe to her Substack and follow her on social media if you don’t already). And I thought I’d expand on our conversation here.

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ICE Recruits Fragile, Angry, and Insecure Men

The first thing to understand is that ICE recruitment is aimed at men who want to feel powerful, who want to bond with other men by committing social acts of violence, and who are drawn in by Nazi slogans. Also: Men with daddy issues. Here’s one ICE propaganda poster, promising heavily-armed father-son bonding (and, I guess, something for bored Fox-News-pilled old men to do):

And here’s another, encouraging men to fantasize about bonding with their “absolute boys” by grabbing people off the street and stuffing them into 1980s-style econovans, the kinds of vehicles associated with kidnappers, rapists, and child molesters:

The Department of Homeland Security, the president, and the vice president regularly post heavily edited videos of ICE raids, often set to high-energy music, that feature agents kitted out in tactical gear as if they’re going into combat, invading peoples’ homes and hauling brown and black people out in handcuffs. What the videos don’t tend to show: The lack of actual criminals being apprehended, or the US citizens being wrongfully arrested, or the human beings being brutalized, killed, or sent to foreign torture prisons with no due process. ICE agents have killed several people, with Renee Good only being the most prominent. Many people in ICE custody have died, with at least one of those deaths being ruled a homicide. Journalist Judd Legum recently found that ICE is not paying for detainees medical treatment — a policy that will almost certainly mean that detainees do not get medical treatment when they need it. That kind of medical neglect will no doubt kill people, and denying medical care so that detainees perish has been a signature move of some of the worst genocidal regimes in human history (Anne Frank died not in the gas chambers but of untreated typhus in Bergen-Belsen).

Men whose masculinity is fragile may be more prone to violence — they are more likely to interpret disagreement as disrespect, and to see disrespect as a challenge to their status. Men who feel that their masculinity is being compromised are more likely to act out with physical aggression — and “your masculinity has been compromised” was a major talking point during the Trump campaign. In its recruitment ads, ICE promises masculine restoration. In other words, ICE is a force of men who have felt small and have now been empowered by an administration that tells them they’re manliest of men, hands them guns and tactical gear, gives them precious little training, explicitly tells them they will be held to virtually no legal or moral standards, and sets them loose on a public it has warned is full of not just criminal illegal immigrants, but un-American subhumans, among the worst of whom are AWFULs: Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.

Of course these small, insecure, and incompetent men brutalize the people they’ve been told are domestic terrorists — including women.

Trads or Terrorists

The second thing to understand about this moment, and particularly about why the supposedly gender-traditionalist right has shrugged off men shooting women in the face, men dragging women around by their hair, and men otherwise brutalizing women and children, is that the Trumpian right very much divides women into two categories: “Good” women who obey, and bad ones who don’t. And they are very much obsessed with forcing all women into obedience.

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So, the late news out of Davos is that Trump threatened Greenland, then he backed down on using force, then he backed down again on the tariffs against eight European nations.

Don’t believe it for even one second.

The speech itself was a masterclass in what he calls the “weave,” and what I call “they shot him up with something that was not vitamin B.” Joe Biden should be suing him for a portion of everything he’s got, Biden’s name takes up so much of Trump’s speeches, his mind, his day, his Truth Social mania, his toilet musings, hell, every bloody moment the man hasn’t been drugged to sleep by whomever is in charge of his injection schedule. Between his press conference yesterday and his Davos speech today, the mentions of Biden were easily in the dozens. When Melania finally plants him next to his first wife in the wood line at his Bedminster golf course, his headstone should be inscribed, “Better than Biden.” That is clearly the way he measures himself. If I was Joe Biden on this first anniversary of Trump’s second term, I’d have a shit-eating grin on my face so huge, I’d have to take a muscle relaxant to get to sleep at night.

Lies, lies, more lies…you end up asking yourself, does he know he hasn’t been wheeled out in front of a high-school auditorium filled with JD Vance’s alleged tobaccy-chawin’ South Ohio relatives? Looking out at his audience in Davos, he was probably asking himself, where are all the red hats?

He bragged about how many bureaucrats he’d fired, then claimed, “They started off hating me when we fired them, and now they love me.” He was talking to an audience of corporate executives and politicians who know something about firing people, and he tried that line on them? Every suit in that room knew what it is to be hated, and hated with a passion by those they laid off to tack another few million on their salaries or cut taxes on their billionaire pals.

He prattled on about making fictional demand of Macron that he double or triple the price of some drug that France exports, “I said, Emmanuel, you’re going to have to lift the price of that pill to $20, maybe $30.” Then he starts mocking Macron’s accent, “No, no, no, Donald I won’t do that.” Embarrassing and pathetic doesn’t adequately capture that disgusting moment, and never will.

He told the crowd that a year ago when he took office, he promised to cancel 10 regulations for every new one imposed by his government, “But so far it’s averaging out to 129, if you can believe it.” He pulled “129” directly out of his ass, just like he pulled “no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime,” and everybody knew it. He was throwing the same old red meat to an audience with a taste for foie gras and truffles, and the lines landed as if he had just ordered a well-done burger at a three star Michelin restaurant.

He told them that “every major oil company is coming in with us” to Venezuela three days after headlines all over the world featured the CEO of Exxon-Mobil calling Venezuela “un-investible,” as if the Davos crowd can’t read.

Then he went after Europe’s energy policy, claiming that Germany is producing “22 percent less electricity than they did in 2017.” Two percent less electricity would be causing blackouts all over Germany. His Fox News addled speech writer probably saw some Aqua-net sprayed half-wit talking about a twenty-something reduction in fossil-fuel energy production in Germany.

You had to be listening to the speech live to get the full effect of his rant about windmills – killing “all the birds,” the usual nonsense. He claimed that every time the windmill “goes around, you’re losing $1,000. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money.” Then he came up with a new whopper, that China makes all the windmills, “and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that?”

Well, actually, no, you gibbering, fading fool.

He finally got around to Greenland, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop in the room. A thousand European machers had been losing sleep for a month wondering if World War III was around the corner, and he whines and tells lies about the history of Greenland, how “we” owned it after the war, and “we gave it back,” and still the room is utterly silent. Then he somehow starts in with his standard load of lies about the “rigged election” that “I won by a landslide.” How he sandwiched that into his Greenland rant you will have to imagine for yourselves, and how Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he had been president, because, you know, he and Putin are such close pals, and all he would have had to do is tell Vlad, “hands off.”

He throws in a couple of paeons to his almighty battleships: “I thought maybe we could take them out of mothballs. They said, no, sir. These ships are 100, think of that, 100 times more powerful than those big, big, magnificent pieces of art that you saw so many times ago that you still see on television.” Because everyone at Davos stays up at night in their bedrooms thumbing stupid shit on their phones and watching World War II movies on TV. Then he starts babbling about Ukraine again and talking about how many people are dying every month, and this word-salad comes out of his mouth. Remember “word salad,” from those relatively innocent days when we called his spew of invective and hate and lies and fascist crap a “word salad?” Well, listen to what he said today at Davos:

“I’m dealing with President Putin and he wants to make a deal. I believe I’m dealing with President Zelenskyy, and I think he wants to make a deal. I’m meeting him today. He might be in the audience right now, but they got to get that war stopped because too many people are dying needlessly. Dying. Too many souls are being lost. That’s the only reason I’m interested in doing it. But in doing it, I’m helping Europe, I’m helping NATO, and until the last few days, when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy right last time. Very smart man said he’s our daddy. He’s running it. I was like running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being. But now what I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection.”

Fu-u-u-u-u-ck.

I wish the cameras had panned the audience so we could see their faces like we saw the faces of the generals in Quantico when he was spewing lies and hate to that crowd. A half-dozen or more times, he confused Iceland with Greenland, and all those suits are sitting there, and you know what’s going through their minds. He’s fucking losing it, and he’s building up to give me what I want or I’m going to start bombing.

And then he did it. He said, “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay, now everyone saying, oh good. That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”

By that time, I was walking Ruby, listening to the speech on NPR on my phone, and with a 7-degree wind in my face, slipping on the ice and silently begging Ruby to get her business done so we could get back inside, I could hear the exhalation of relief in the room, the biggest sigh the world has heard for 75 years, as they realized some of the money guys in New York had gotten to him and told him that their net worth fell by 10 or 20 percent when the market crashed worrying about whether he would attack Greenland. And Donald Trump, like the good wealth-poodle that he is, caved.

He had an explanation for why he was caving. He couldn’t admit that the money guys got to him. He couldn’t admit that Europe getting together and forming their own Mini-Euro-NATO had gotten to him. He couldn’t back down in front of Putin and Xi. He couldn’t look, for God’s sake, weak.

So, what did he do? He reverted to who he is, who he always was, who he’ll always be: A real estate guy, who sees the world not in terms of war and peace and the almighty “deals” that he’s always talking about, because all they are is a piece of paper, and everybody knows that real estate guys don’t deal in pieces of paper, they deal in property. Listen to this, and then I’ll tell you where it comes from:

“All we’re asking for is to get Greenland, including right title and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Number one, legally, it’s not defensible that way. Totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease?”

There it is. Yesterday, he told the press he didn’t want us to be “a nation of renters.” In the world of Donald Trump, there is nothing lower than a renter. If you pay rent, like the poor people he used to collect from in Brooklyn and Queens for his father, you’re a sucker, you’re a loser.

That is really what he was talking about when he turned to his chief of staff John Kelly, who had retired as a four-star general in the Marines, and asked of the dead in Arlington Cemetery, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” He knew that the graves he was looking at held the bodies of young people who had died never having owned a home, a piece of land with their name on it. So what did they die for, really?

A piece of paper. An oath. An idea that the Constitution was worth defending with their lives.

Trump didn’t understand that any more than he understood why people were such suckers that they would pay rent. What do you get from paying rent? Nothing. It’s not an investment. Rent has no real value. It’s just money you give to someone smarter than you, someone who owns the crappy apartment you’re paying rent for.

Donald Trump doesn’t want to rent Greenland, any more than he would want to rent his apartment in Trump Tower or his home/resort/hotel/gilded hellhole, Mar a Lago. It bothers Trump so much that he doesn’t own the White House that he has set about remaking the place in his own image, doing more than putting his stamp on it with gold leaf and marble. He tore part of the place down. That’s something a real estate guy from New York understands, because that’s the first thing you do in New York when you buy land that you’re going to build on: You tear down the stuff built by little people, the shops and bars and little apartments little people live in, and then you build something spectacular…

Like a zillion square foot ballroom that is bigger than the White House that you can put your name on that will be there long after you have gone. That’s what his stupid arch on the mall is about. He’ll put his name on that, too, like he did on the Kennedy Center. If he can’t own it, he’s going to pretend to own it by slapping his name and…I can’t believe I’m going to write this…marble arm rests on the seats.

Can you imagine how small, how tiny, how infinitesimal is the mind that sees the world in terms exclusively of whether you own it or not? It’s a way of perpetual unhappiness. You walk down a street in New York City, and you can’t look a building and say to yourself, gee, that’s a beautiful plaza they’ve done for the entrance, that’s some outstanding architecture there. You can’t see the world around you and appreciate it, because you don’t own it. If you own it, and you’re Trump, it’s the biggest. It’s the best. It’s the tallest. It’s the most expensive. It’s got the most gold. It’s got the most expensive marble.

It’s got gold bathroom fixtures.

That’s what it comes down to for him. A better toilet than the other guy’s, a golf course that’s greener and better groomed, a lobby that’s got bloody gold escalators. That’s what a woman is for him. She’s not beautiful unless he can own her by grabbing her pussy or raping her in a dressing room in a department store, for crying out loud.

In New York when I first moved there in 1970, there was, and had been for decades, a thing called “key money.” This was money that a new tenant paid to the tenant occupying an apartment or loft you had just rented to compensate them for improvements they had done while they lived there. You were paying to get the apartment’s or loft’s keys. It was completely “under the counter,” not acknowledged by the landlord, who owned the building and the apartment. It was an informal way for someone who had lived in an apartment and had invested some money in it to get their investment back, without having owned it.

To Donald Trump, of course, key money was sucker money, because the ultimate beneficiary was the landlord, who would reap the benefit of the improvements made by tenants by raising the rent because the place was better than it had been when he rented it to the old tenant.

That’s part of the basis for Trump’s rant about not wanting to defend a “license agreement or a lease.” My god, that’s not real estate! That’s not land! That’s not property! It’s a piece of paper! It’s why contracts are quite literally not worth the paper they’re written on. For Trump, you don’t have to pay that contractor you contracted with a piece of paper for his work, because he doesn’t own the bathroom he just put a new sink in. You own it! All he’s got to show is his labor. God, can you imagine depending on your labor to make a living?

Late today, Axios reported that the deal that Trump came to with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte includes an agreement that anything new established by the United States in Greenland, like new “Gold Dome” bases and new deep ports, will be considered part of the United States. We won’t be renting. It will be U.S. territory.

It is obvious that Trump does not know that the United States already has U.S. territory in foreign lands around the world. The cemeteries where our war dead are buried, yes, including the ones he refused to visit in Europe, are little pieces of the United States.

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It takes a couple of years to finalize the income distribution data, and thus the Congressional Budget Office has just published “The Distribution of
Household Income, 2022″ (January 2026). The report is mainly graphs and data, rather than analysis or policy recommendations. Here are some patterns that caught my eye.

Start with focus on the income distribution produced by the market: that is, not taking account how government tax and spending policies affect the distribution. The pattern over time shows a well-known fact that income at the top has grown more rapidly. This figure shows that average income growth for the bottom quintile has been much the same as for the middle three quintiles, while the top quintile has gained faster.

Moreover, within the top quintile it is the top 1%, and indeed the top 0.1% and top 0.01%, that has seen the fastest income growth. This pattern emerged with force in the 1990s and early 2000s, and has remained in place since then

As a broad pattern, federal income taxes do take a higher share from those with higher incomes, and federal transfer payments and refundable tax provisions do provider greater benefit for those with lower incomes. Thus, these lines will tend to be closer together when looking at after-tax-and-transfers income.

The CBO uses a standard tool called the Gini coefficient as a way of measuring inequality. At an intuitive level, the Gini measures the gap from a completely equal income distribution: thus, a completely equal income distribution would have a Gini of zero, while a completely unequal income distribution (all income goes to one person) would have a Gini of 1. (For a more detailed description of the Gini, this earlier post offers a starting point.) For perspective, countries in highly unequal regions of the world like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa often have Gini coefficients in the range of 0.4-0.5, while countries in more equal regions like the advanced economies of Europe are closer to 0.3.

For the US, the top line shows the rise in the Gini coefficient based on market income. The category of “income before transfers and taxes” measures inequality after including income arising from benefits linked directly to earlier employment: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance. The next line shows income inequality after transfers and before taxes, while the bottom line shows income after transfers and taxes.

The specific Gini coefficient number for incoem after transfers and taxes in 2022 is 0.434. While this level of inequality is toward the higher end of the range, it’s quite comparabe to the level of after-taxes-and-transfers inequality in, say, 2018 (0.438), 2012 (0.444), 2007 (0.455), 2000 (0.440), or even 1986 (0.425). At least over the last quarter-century or so, government taxes and transfers have more-or-less offset any rise in market-income inequality.

The post Snapshots of the US Income Distribution first appeared on Conversable Economist.