https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
"Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went
into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying
public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an
employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the
moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death
toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and
its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income
inequality.
How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much
the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the
past several decades.
This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a
groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards
of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of
the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held
steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th
percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone.
That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than
double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the
bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every
single year."
Via Whuffo, who wrote "People like Trump like that - he can use their
hate to further his agenda. But ultimately the hate grows too big and
turns on its master. Getting rid of the sociopathic President is a first
step - but you need to follow it up with equalizing the distribution of
income and wealth. Having ultra-wealthy people in a country that has
more empty homes than homeless people is a sign of deep dysfunction."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
