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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy Don’t the Unemployed Get Off Their Couches?
By Peter Van Buren, who blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He writes at his blog, We Meant Well and has a new book Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent has just been published.
Last year eight Americans the four Waltons of Walmart fame, the two Koch brothers, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett made more money than 3.6 million American minimum-wage workers combined. The median pay for CEOs at Americas large corporations rose to $10 million per year, while a typical chief executive now makes about 257 times the average workers salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009. Overall, 1% of Americans own more than a third of the countrys wealth.
As the United States slips from its status as the globes number one economic power, small numbers of Americans continue to amass staggering amounts of wealth, while simultaneously inequality trends toward historic levels. At what appears to be a critical juncture in our history and the history of inequality in this country, here are nine questions we need to ask about who we are and what will become of us. Lets start with a French economist who has emerged as an important voice on whats happening in America today.
1) What does Thomas Piketty have to do with the 99%?
French economist Thomas Pikettys surprise bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is an unlikely beach read, though its selling like one. A careful parsing of massive amounts of data distilled into only 700 pages, it outlines the economic basis for the 1%-99% divide in the United States. (Conservative critics, of course, disagree.)
Just in case you arent yet rock-bottom certain about the reality of that divide, here are some stats: the top 1% of Americans hold 35% of the nations net worth; the bottom 80%, only 11% percent. The United States has such an unequal distribution of wealth that, in global rankings, it falls among the planets kleptocracies, not the developed nations that were once its peers. The mathematical measure of wealth-inequality is called Gini, and the higher it is, the more extreme a nations wealth-inequality. The Gini for the U.S. is 85; for Germany, 77; Canada, 72; and Bangladesh, 64. Nations more unequal than the U.S. include Kazakhstan at 86 and the Ukraine at 90. The African continent tips in at just under 85. Odd company for the self-proclaimed indispensable nation.
More at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/06/dont-unemployed-get-couches.html .
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)apples in the same country. In a poor country with less inequality the poor are really really poor, but in a wealthy country the poor are not so poor in comparison, although wealth may be more unequally distributed.
stopbush
(24,396 posts)Why don't people in sales get off their asses and force people to buy more goods?
Why don't restaurants make people forego the dinner table and spend $ eating at restaurants?
Why don't the unemployed just get a job?