Distribution of Wealth in America

[TotallyOz]

[Guest thaiworthy]

A great animated graphic that easily explains how it really is. Nothing new, except to note a pattern here. What happens as this rift keeps widening is what I want to know. It's a cliche, but true and getting more true, the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer. While I do think capitalism is a great ideal in this world, it is far from an equitable reality.

 

After talking to Thai people, they sometimes convince me just the opposite of the following popular conception (the key word is can, and the whole thing pretty elementary.) As if to say in the Thai culture, what's the use in trying?

 

 

Yeah, OK. But trite. I don't wonder how the bottom 20% feels. I already have a good idea.

 

Most of the time I believe what a good friend of mine once told me, "half the wealth in this world is inherited, the other half comes from dumb luck."

[Guest fountainhall]

There are so many things about that vdo clip that should be discussed. The first is the criminality of the Republican position that the rich should not be taxed a bit higher. Are Americans mentally so numb (note: I did not say ‘dumb’) that they happily accept the top 10% are “so much better off that the top 2% to 5% are off the chart – and the top one percent is 10 times higher than the chart can show?”

Why is there not a huge grass roots movement screaming that “1% of America owns 40% of the nations’ wealth”? Or that “the bottom eighty %*** has just 7%?” And as if this was not bad enough, this disparity “has got worse in the last 20 – 30 years”?

How can any country, any group of shareholders – heck, any group of company employees, accept the situation where “a CEO earns 380 times as much as the average worker in his company?” Not the lowest paid, note: “the average”?

I find this not merely disgustingly immoral. It is a foul condemnation of what capitalism has become. America used to be the land of opportunity for many. And by sheer hard work many did rise above their lowly beginnings. But the balance has become horribly skewed.

I remember some decades ago there was a theatre company in the UK titled the “7:84 Company”. The name came from a statistic published in the Economist that 7% of the UK population owned 84% of its wealth. The company ran for several decades before the establishment, in the form of the UK Arts Council, conveniently decided to withdraw its grant. It then collapsed.

Let’s not forget that whilst America may be at the top of the heap, it is not alone. Between 1986 and 2011, the UK’s Office of National Statistics reported that the income gap also widened – with the top 10% of earners jumping 117% in real terms, whereas the bottom 10% rose 47%.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/nov/07/wage-inequality-rises-ons

But – and it’s an important ‘but’ – in April 2011, the top 10% of the UK’s highest earners were averaging £135,666 a year. The lowest 10% £15,565. That's a gap of less than ninefold. I can’t find a similar comparison for the USA but I’ll put a lot of money on its being vastly greater.

The only info I can easily glean from the web is on wikipedia, but that article is far too long to gain any meaningful statistics without in depth study. However, there are a few noteworthy points.
 

 

The Gini coefficient summarizes income inequality in a single number and is one of the most commonly used measures of income inequality. It uses a scale from 0 to 1 -- the higher the number the more inequality. 0 represents perfect equality (everyone having exactly the same income), and 1 represents perfect inequality (one person having all income). (Index scores are commonly multiplied by 100 to make them easier to understand.

The UN, CIA World Factbook, and OECD have used the gini index to compare inequality between countries, and as of 2006, the United States had one of the highest levels of income inequality among similar developed or high income countries, as measured by the index. While inequality has increased since 1981 in two-thirds of OECD countries[most developed countries are in the lower, more equal, end of the spectrum, with a Gini coefficient in the high twenties to mid thirties.

The gini rating (after taxes and government income transfers of the United States is sufficiently high, however, to put it among less developed countries. The US ranks above (more unequal than) South American countries such Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, according to the CIA.

Pretty damning! Even the now less respected former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, has stated in reference to the growing inequality gap:
 

 

"This is not the type of thing which a democratic society — a capitalist democratic society — can really accept without addressing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States

The only immediate conclusion I reach is that unless the US does something that radically alters its income gap, perhaps those who profess to want to retain the sort of firearms Senator Feinstein and her colleagues wish to ban may have some right on their side. But not because the nation is going to turn on its citizens. Could it be that a fear that a grass roots revolution may not be so far away?
 
*** please Scooby and moderators - why is that when we type eighty percent using numbers we always get this icon -  80%!!! Can this not be changed??