Tag Cloud See also My Widgets and My Animations
Tom Rush - What’s Wrong with America (by Tom Rush)
Says it all.
The charts, the rhetoric, the pundits, the books — all very well. But this says it all, and says it best, in a few lines of folk music. Brilliant.
It’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid.
The New York Times has made official what most of us have known for years: the children of the privileged do better in school than the children of the underprivileged. This matters because the rich-poor gap is growing wider, and so (therefore) is the educational outcomes gap, what everyone calls ‘the achievement gap.’
The CBO inequality report confirms what independent studies have been saying: the rise of the top 1 percent has absorbed a large fraction (almost half, by my reckoning), of economic growth, leaving a much smaller pie for everyone else.
This is one of the problems with the Republican argument that we should just be focussing on growth and ignore the ‘class warfare’ of income inequality.
From a March 7, 2011 post on michaelmoore.com:
In 2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion.
The best information now available shows that in 2009 the bottom 60% (yes, now it’s 60%, not 50%) of U.S. households owned only 2.3% of total U.S. wealth.
Total U.S. household net worth — rich, middle class and poor combined — at the time the Forbes list came out was $53.15 trillion. So the bottom 60% of households possessed just $1.22 trillion of that $53.15 trillion, less than the Forbes 400.
Thus the Forbes 400 unquestionably have more wealth than the bottom 50%.
By contrast, in 2007 the bottom 50% of U.S. households owned slightly more wealth than the Forbes 400; the economic meltdown has hurt the bottom more than the top. (And in fact, in 2010 the net worth of the Forbes 400 jumped to $1.37 trillion.)
This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators.
Some of the information may come as a surprise to many people. In fact, I know it will be a surprise and then some, because of a recent study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) showing that most Americans (high income or low income, female or male, young or old, Republican or Democrat) have no idea just how concentrated the wealth distribution actually is. More on that a bit later.
The article is a chart lover’s delight.
Eleven charts that explain everything that’s wrong with America.
