Income Inequality Is At An All-Time High
University of California at Berkeley
Many Americans cheer the egregious discrepancy revealed by the above graph: one one hundredth of one percent of Americans take home 6% of the nation's treasure. (This is no typo: "one one hundredth of one percent" or 31,000 people.)
Distracted by social issues, red button Americans believe that unlimited concentration of wealth "at the top" creates more jobs and trickle-down prosperity. These Americans have no appreciation of "threshhold phenomena" and how catastrophe always manifests above -- and below -- certain limits. For example, try living in an environment where the temperature is above 200 F or more than 200 F below zero. Among contemporary "conservatives," such patent impossibility is demonstrably absurd but universally subscribed.
Naive belief in the beneficial effects of ever higher wealth concentration "at the top" does not take into account 1.) that unprecedented tax cuts during the Bush administration did NOT result in cumulative job creation nor distributed prosperity, 2.) that current levels of income discrepancy prevent the middle class from propelling economic growth because it lacks purchasing power to do so - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/opinion/03reich.html?_r=1 - and 3.) that Wall Street financiers (when not making money by the destructive "churning of markets") steer American treasure overseas where profit margins are greater than in the United States. Almost all of the jobs that have been lost are not coming back. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/churning.asp#axzz1rqBvVbf7 /// http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
No comments:
Post a Comment