Just in case you cannot read the graph which is data on wealth distribution in the USA from 2003.
The top 1% have 25% of the wealth in the USA
The top 5% have 50.7%
The top 10% have 62.9%.
That leaves 90% of us fighting over 37.1% of the pie.
The only country with a worse mal-distribution of wealth is Mexico.
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“Wealth is a person’s net worth, expressed as:
wealth = assets – liabilities
The word “wealth” is often confused with “income”. These two terms describe different but related things.”
“A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth… Moreover, another study found that the richest 2% own more than half of global household assets.”
Source for above – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth
As Shakespeare so nicely put it, “There is something rotten in Denmark.”
Since you landed on this page this is an issue that probably concerns you. Question is now what are you going to do about it?
hmm. Wouldn’t taxing the top 5 % a wee bit higher help pay for the Healthcare reform.
Is that terribly socialist?
Of course, we could just bring our troops back from Iraq and Afghanistan and save a ton of money too.
It would be fund to see which one of the above people will vote for if there was a poll with those options ( + a third choice : do BOTH)
I may be wrong, but the to 5% probably own the government or at least the politicians.
“That economic stratification may lead to collapse on its own… Under this scenario, elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour. Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour.”
From a BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse
Read a column that related how an academic was flown into a Caribbean island for a presentation for some ‘wealthy’ folk. His area of study was extreme wealth and instability, etc. He was led to a room that he thought was the ante-room to where he would be giving a presentation. Several individuals eventually showed up; he realized they were his audience. They were asking questions about how to preserve wealth. One of the queries was how effective would ‘shock collars’ be for ‘workers’ should things degenerate that far.
The recent Oxfam report showed that 26 individuals hold as much wealth as 3.8 BILLION.
Now seriously folks, what makes us think that is sustainable?