The Sadoff Investment Research firm of Wisconsin has released the results of a recent report and according to the investment group’s findings, the top one percent of wage-earning households in the US were reaping in around $1,264,065 in 2012 — or around 41-times as much as the average income for all wage-earners, who pulled in a comparable meager mean income of $30,997 that year.
The greatest demonstration of inequality is most evident in the income generated by not the top one percent, though, but by the sliver of the US population that makes more than 99.9 percent of the country. According to the firm’s research, the top 0.1 percent of Americans earned around $6,373,782 during that same 12-month span — or around 206 times what the average family in the US earned.
“The ‘top one percent’ might be the primary target of the masses' ire and envy, but it's actually the top 0.1 percent who are grabbing a bigger slice of wealth,” Matt Krantz wrote for USA Today this week.
Of course, even that small chunk of the population has an even more exclusive group to be jealous of: according to the group’s report, the top 0.01 percent of the nation’s top-earning households brought in more than $30 million apiece in 2012 — or around one thousand times what the average American earned.
With regards to the .1 percent, the researchers found that nearly a quarter of those wealthy Americans earned their money through work in the nation’s financial industry. Around 40 percent are either executive, managers and supervisors.
Think Progress writer Bruce Covert wrote this week that gap between rich and poor has been growing steadily since the 1970s, but is now at a level that hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression:
“Since the 1980s, the top 0.1 percent of the wealth distribution, or those who have more than $20 million in assets, has seen big increases, and the top 0.01 percent, or those with more than $100 million, has seen even bigger ones. But there hasn’t been a big jump in wealth inequality for people below the 0.1 percent,” Covert wrote.
Although they say they're concerned about inequality, economic policymakers continue to pummel low-income families and the jobless. Economic policy for the most part is still biased against the poor — in some ways, it is becoming increasingly anti-poor. A Time magazine article says there is ample evidence that Marx’s theorizing that the capitalist system was inherently unjust and would inevitably concentrate wealth in the hands of a few while impoverishing everyone else is becoming reality.
According to a recent report from the International Monetary Fund, income inequality has risen in nearly all advanced economies over the past two decades. In the U.S., the share of income captured by the richest 10% of the population jumped dramatically from around 30% in 1980 to 48% by 2012, while the portion grasped by the population’s richest 1% more than doubled, from 8% to 19%. Other data shows that since 2009, the 1% captured 95% of all income gains; the bottom 90% of people got poorer.
In the USA, Washington sliced $8.7 billion from the food-stamp program in February, even though nearly 47 million people, or about 1 out of every 7 Americans, currently rely on it. A new bill to extend emergency unemployment benefits is almost definitely dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 60% of families with children who receive food stamps have a member who works. The problem is that too many people with jobs don’t earn enough to buy sufficient food and other necessities — they’re the “working poor.” U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan recently lambasted America’s school-lunch program, which provides meals to poor kids, as offering “a full stomach — and an empty soul.” Yet is it fair to expect a student with an empty stomach to perform as well on exams as those with full bellies? Ryan isn’t encouraging hard work. He wants to tilt the playing field in favor of the wealthy.
In Europe, politicians and bankers are breathing sighs of relief that the region’s debt crisis has been quelled. But the reality is that, for tens of millions of Europeans, it hasn’t. Unemployment in the euro zone in February was a gut-wrenching 11.9% — almost unchanged from 12% a year earlier. In Greece, the latest rate is a staggering 27.5%. No wonder angry Spaniards protested in the streets of Madrid in March, more than five years after the economic crisis began. Yet the European Union remains wedded to a policy of austerity.
In Japan, new policies by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aimed at restarting a stalled economy are instead squeezing the Japanese people. In an attempt to shake Japan from damaging deflation, Abe is using the central bank to flood the economy with cash to raise prices. Meanwhile, to contend with giant budget deficits and rising government debt, he is also increasing the consumption tax. Yet even though corporate profits have soared — thanks to a weakened yen, also engineered by central-bank policy — those profits haven’t trickled down to the average worker. A combination of higher prices and taxes, and flat wages, means that Japanese families are getting poorer.
In China, policymakers talk about closing the country’s gaping rich-poor gap, but many of the necessary reforms have yet to materialize. Interest rates in the banking sector are still controlled in a fashion that punishes savers to subsidize industry, so the return on bank deposits is so meager it barely keeps up with inflation. That hurts China’s low-income families the most. Policy also continues to discriminate against the country’s 262 million migrant workers, who are deprived of proper social services.
The Gini coefficients of the US and China are almost the same. The wealthiest 50 delegates on China's congress control US$ 15.3 billion. While the 50 richest members of US congress only controls US$ 1.6 billion in total. In the U.S., the people making the decisions may not be the wealthiest, but they may be making the decisions on behalf of the wealthiest because the wealthiest are paying them. Getting elected in the U.S. is extremely expensive. In the last election both candidates spent US$ 1billion. Now they didn't have that billion dollars. They had to raise it, and when you raise it from people, most weren't doing it as an act of charity, but as an investment. And when they make an investment they expect a return.
The fact is that there is a class war going on and the poor are getting their butts kicked.
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