Some Financial Facts Concerning Startups, Income Equality, Immigration Wage Effect, and a Declining Banking Sector

I. Startups, Income Equality, Union Membership, and Raising Kids
About a quarter of American startups are not founded on brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who can't get a decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures, having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneurs, and often wasting away. [1]

Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark and Finland as among the most income-equal countries in the world. Only 11% of U.S. workers belongs to a union, compared to Norway's 52%, Denmark's 67% and Sweden's 70%. [2]

In Norway, both mother and father in turn take paid parental leave during the child's first year or longer. The international organization, Save the Children, puts Norway as the best country in which to raise children; the United States is ranked in 33rd place.

II. Women Earn Less at Every Age Range
According to an analysis by Time magazine, women earn less than men at every age range: 15% less at ages 22 to 25, and a staggering 38% less at ages 51 to 64. [3]

Before retiring, a woman typically loses $435,049 over the course of a career, because of the current wage gap, according to a 2015 analysis from the National Woman's Law Center, a Washington D.C. advocacy group. Most startling: there was not a single occupation in which women ages 30 and older took home significantly higher average salaries than their male colleagues, even if they started out earning more.

III. Immigration's Effect on Wages
Immigration raises wages overall 0.35% and boosts growth, even though it may cut wages 2.2% for those without a high school diploma. A 20% increase in the minimum wage would benefit other wages too. [4]

Since the Great Recession, working-class wages are down 8%. If they had kept their share, they'd be 27% more in wages today. The drop in the share of national income for the bottom 60%: 28% in 1979; and 22% in 2007. [5]

IV. Banking's New Normal
"Returns on equity have fallen. Bonuses and salaries have been slashed; in the first quarter, Goldman Sachs cut the amount it set aside for compensation by forty per cent. Payroll is down too: banks have eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in the past couple of years and are now embarking on a new round of severe job cuts." [6]

James Surwiecki, who writes a financial column for The New Yorker magazine, points out that before the financial crisis, "financial companies (not including the Federal Reserve banks) accounted for nearly thirty per cent of the U.S. corporate profits. By 2015, the number had fallen to just seventeen per cent." Although Surwiecki paints a picture of a declining banking sector, the really big banks seem to be doing so well that Bernie Sanders made the breaking up of them a cornerstone of his campaign for the presidency.

ADDENDUMS:
*Senator Tom Cotton (R-ARK) has slammed efforts to reduce mandatory minimum sentences, saying the U.S. is actually suffering from an "under-incarceration problem."

*A 106-page grand jury report finds that Oklahoma's lethal injection process has been saddled with "inexcusable failure"and it cites a "litany of failure and avoidable errors committed by state employees."

Footnotes
1. Ann Jones, "America Felt Backward," The Nation, February 15, 2016.

2. Ibid.

3. Amelia Showalter and Chris Wilson, "How the pay gap hurts women's financial security," Time, March 14, 2016.

4. Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal, "Trump vs. Immigrants," The Nation, April 11/18, 2016.

5.) Ibid.

6. James Surwiecki, "Banking's New Normal," The New Yorker, May 16, 2016.