Enough!

The rich are getting richer. There is no doubt about that. Whatever statistic or measurement one uses, the rich have gotten much richer in relation to the rest of us over the past 30 years. About half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and all of them are beholden to the very wealthy for donations to their constant campaigning.

Between 1960 and 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans received about 10 percent of the total national income. But since 1980 the share of national income going to the richest Americans has shot upwards: by 2007, the top 1 percent received 23 percent of all income. The richest 0.1 percent of families received 12 percent, and the richest 0.01 percent, 1 out of every 10,000 families, received 6 percent of all income in the US.

The salaries of top executives have gone through the roof, while the pay of average workers has stagnated. In 1965, the average CEO of a large corporation earned about 24 times the salary of an average worker. Now they make over 300 times the pay of average workers. The median pay for CEOs at 200 big companies in 2010 was $10.8 million, a 23 percent increase over 2009. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that compensation of workers in private industry rose 2 percent.

Directors at the 200 biggest publicly traded companies received a median $228,000 in 2009, for perhaps 225 hours of work, which is less than six weeks (that’s an estimate of Peter Gleason, CFO of the National Association of Corporate Directors, who is not likely to underestimate that workload).

For the whole 20th century up to 1980, the richest 10 percent of Americans took about 30 percent of the total growth in income. But since 1980, they have taken 98 percent of the growth, with only 2 percent going to the rest of us. Since 1997, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has declined; all the growth went to the top 10 percent, and the top 1 percent saw their average incomes grow from about $900,000 to $1.3 million per year.

Poverty is often cited as contributing to poor health. Poverty results in poor access to health screening, poor access to quality care for those who actually have heart disease, greater vulnerability to stresses associated with heart disease and a greater likelihood of engaging in unhealthy behavior. Researchers have calculated how many people poverty kills and presented their findings.

For 2000, the study attributed approximately 245000 deaths in the United States in 2000 were attributable to low education, 176000 to racial segregation, 162000 to low social support, 133000 to individual-level poverty, 119000 to income inequality, and 39000 to area-level poverty. For example, looking at direct causes of death, 119,000 people in the United States die from accidents each year, and 156,000 from lung cancer.

If they had not smoked, 400,000 people each year would not have died. Similarly, if they had graduated from high school, the 245,000 people whose cause of death he attributes to low education would still be alive.

How much richer do the rich need to be before we say “Enough!” ?
How much longer will we suffer the consequences of poverty before we say "Enough!"

Figures taken from here and here