Link: www.thenation.com/…
This isn’t getting better on its own. Twenty Americans now have more wealth combined than 50% of Americans. That’s over 150,000,000 people.
The top 400 have more wealth than 61% of Americans, or over 180,000,000 people.
There’s this, too:
And there’s a stark racial divide at the top. The 100 richest households own more assets than the entire African-American community (there are just two black people on the Forbes 400 list, one of whom is Oprah Winfrey). And just 182 individuals on the Forbes list have more assets than America’s entire Hispanic population.
And it’s ACTUALLY far worse than that, believe it or not:
But Chuck Collins, director of IPS’s Program on Inequality and the CommonGood and a co-author of the report, tells The Nation that their study likely underestimates the scope of the problem. “Our wealth data is a tip of the iceberg,” he says. “So much wealth among the über-rich is hidden, either in offshore tax havens or in these loophole trusts where money is shuffled around into private corporate accounts or between different family members, and it disappears from taxation or any sort of oversight or accountability. So there’s a huge amount of escaped wealth that isn’t even factored into these statistics.”
And this inequality has far-reaching affects to all of us:
It’s only when you look past the numbers that the scope of the problem comes fully into focus. A 2009 study published in the British Medical Journal compared income inequality (which is less extreme than wealth inequality) in the United States and 14 other wealthy countries, and found that our skewed income levels corresponded with 893,914 avoidable deaths per year compared with those other economies. That’s more unnecessary deaths than are associated with tobacco use, car accidents, and gun deaths combined.
There is only one candidate for President that is specifically focused on this issue, and ways to cure it: Bernie Sanders. This problem isn’t getting any better, and, like climate change, won’t get better by ignoring it, and it’s more serious than just a few uber-wealthy people. It’s affecting our health.
VOTE BERNIE SANDERS.