Actually, America's Inequality Is Far Worse Than Egypt's and Tunisia's

# February 1, 2011 • 6:00 am PST
http://www.good.is/post/actually-america-s-inequality-is-far-worse-than-egypt-s-and-tunisia-s/




What's behind the protests in Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt—and the growing unrest in several other Arab states? A whole host of things, actually, but one of the most glaring seems to be the shocking, ever-increasing disparity between the wealthy and the needy of those nations.

"They all want the same," Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the Middle East says of the demonstrators. "They're all protesting about growing inequalities, they're all protesting against growing nepotism. The top of the pyramid was getting richer and richer." It makes perfect sense: The rich can only exploit the poor to get richer for so long before the underclass revolts. It may take centuries, but it's bound to give eventually.

That inevitability, it turns out, should be a cause for concern for Americans. Because despite our unprecedented prosperity, the inequality in the United States is not only drastically worse than Egypt's, it's also worse than Tunisia's and Yemen's as well.

The "Gini Coefficient" is a measure of distribution inequality; the lower the number, the more equal the data being measured.


snip...please read the rest of the article, the sources and some comments before that knee jerk bumps hand to keyboard:P

n/t

the source material is NOT some crackpot site..but of course some will always jerk the knee & attack the messenger as well as the message.

:cry:

compare infant and child mortality rates, malnutrition rates, disease rates and on and on. Compare numbers of people without adequate water and sewage.

They've got plenty of poverty and homeless there, too. Not sure why you think we're somehow worse.

I thought it was interesting...thatisall :hi:

I did now. Thanks :)

the poverty there is absolutely mind-numbing, and there is no social safety net at all.

Yes, it's bad here, but at least there is a safety net--welfare, housing (not big enough) & pubic & private organizations (shelters, food pantries) to assist the indigent. Egypt has none of those.

dg

...a high poverty rate is the match.

Rwanda, Egypt and Pakistan are ranked better than both Canada and the Netherlands.

Oh and the income gap is supposedly worse in Chile and Hong Kong than it is in Nigeria. Fucking hilarious.

What a rubbish statistic.

So coming together around this issue of poverty, the income divide, the growing gap of income between rich and the working class & poor and lack of jobs hasn't been possible yet.

K&R

To them I say: Read Cervantes.


"Conspiracy Theory" by Michael Samuels.

To SoCalDem I say: Thank you.

When I post something it's just because I read something that I thought was interesting.. of course some here will not, but some will.

Ricky Nelson had it right:)

Inequality in all three if FAR worse than the US.

To be blunt, the article is horse shit!