Thanks goodness we have Obama doing his best to put us all in the 99%.

tenpoundsofcheese: GAT_00: Thus excusing the fact that this county has the 5th highest Gini coefficient in the world,.

and you can thank Clinton for giving us that wealth disparity

Glass-Steagall, Fannie and Freddie certainly made it worse.

everyone since Nixon set foot in China has farked over the American worker.
The people of this country have allowed it's govt to send it's jobs overseas while the politicians took money from these multinationals.
they've allowed them to bankrupt us with their wars of choice and their tax cuts for the rich.
and both sides are complicit. they may give lip service to two different ideological groups of people but make no mistake. they're both the same.
and they're not working for me and you.

Considering the US has a population of 310 million people, or about 4.5% of the world's population, it's impossible for us all to be in the 1%.

if you want to feel better about what you earn go here, you put in your salary and it compares you to the rest of the world:

Link (new window)

After you've finished working out with that empty punching bag called "wealth distribution inequality" I got a nice shadow spar partner called "the USA is not a free country" to really get those muscles burning

Headso: Debeo Summa Credo: I was just pointing out that Americans who whine about income or wealth disparity in the US are hypocrites if they aren't giving a portion of their own income or wealth to those in other countries who are far worse off.

How much should they tithe before they can get your not a hypocrite seal of approval?

That's a good question. I'd suggest that they should pay what they would if we were to take the proportional wealth transferrence desired in the US and do that globally. So if you think the top 1% should earn no more than 10% of national income, and the to 5% should make no more than 30%, then apply those percentages globally and just transfer the excess to poor nations.

GAT_00: Debeo Summa Credo: GAT_00: Thus excusing the fact that this county has the 5th highest Gini coefficient in the world, following a country known for being the world's bank, a defunct economy, and a country that has a significant portion of their people who don't use money. We're officially worse than 3rd world dictatorships at equal wealth distribution, something that a few decades ago wouldn't have been thought possible.

Why does Gini coefficient make a difference in countries vs. globally? If you really want equal wealth distribution, you should be writing personal checks to folks in central america, haiti, sub-saharan africa, and much of Asia, etc.

Ah yes, the 'it's all YOUR fault' Republican counterpoint to decades of their economic policies.

Huh? It has nothing to do with placing fault for faulty economic policies, rather I was just pointing out that Americans who whine about income or wealth disparity in the US are hypocrites if they aren't giving a portion of their own income or wealth to those in other countries who are far worse off.

It's like your standing on a ladder two rungs from the top, whining about how unfair it is that their is someone else at the top of the ladder, while disregarding the dozens of people on the ground looking up at you.

tenpoundsofcheese: GAT_00: Thus excusing the fact that this county has the 5th highest Gini coefficient in the world, following a country known for being the world's bank, a defunct economy, and a country that has a significant portion of their people who don't use money. We're officially worse than 3rd world dictatorships at equal wealth distribution, something that a few decades ago wouldn't have been thought possible.

Clinton gave us that Gini coefficient, but you also have to ask, why does it matter if wealth is not as uniformly distributed as in other nations? Are you saying it is better to be living in a 3rd world dictatorship in which everyone is poor because that is more fair or something?

ftfa

"In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world"

yeah, that is horrible, huh?

1: Why does it matter which President or former President "gave us that Gini coefficient"? And if we're really assigning blame, I'd look to Reagan as the first one to really implement neoliberal economic policies that have been the main source of growing inequality. Not that Reagan, or Bush, or Clinton, or Bush, or Obama really deserves the blame... they're basically figureheads for a corrupt, ideologically-driven policy machine that favors narrow interests over wider well-being.

2: Why conflate less inequality with "uniform distribution of wealth"? It's easy to score points that way, I guess, by raising the spectre of authoritarian communism and implying that the state, the party, or some other bogeyman is out to redistribute your wealth and take away your right as an American to work hard and prosper. It's intellectually dishonest though, for a couple reasons. First being that outrage over the radical inequality in American today and demands for change has nothing to do with an imagined scheme to forcibly redistribute wealth so that no matter how hard anyone works everyone gets the same; second being that the meritocracy that is so deeply ingrained in the American national psyche is little more than a myth at this point. Sure, hard work pays off to some degree, but what really pays off is using your wealth and privilege to rig the system in your favor, and that is well beyond the means of the vast majority of Americans.

3: Is "living in a 3rd world dictatorship in which everyone is poor" the only real alternative to living in a developed industrial economy in which inequality is increasing and poverty is worsening? Most Americans are lucky that they're continuing to benefit from the huge leap taken after the Great Depression, but those legacy benefits of economic growth, widespread prosperity, and international political/military strength will not continue to carry us forever. The same policies of deregulation and globalization that have made the super-rich super-richer have had and will continue to have negative effects for the rest of us. For the moment, many Americans are still satisfied with their quality of life; the harder it is for them to get by, the less satisfied they'll be... eventually, they might even realize that they're effectively living in a kind of dictatorship, much like those "3rd world dictatorships in which everyone is poor," where the elite control and accumulate ridiculous wealth at the expense of the rest of us (and, by the way, some of those 3rd world dictatorships have been run by leaders and cronies who are easily among the 1%, living lifestyles that very few Americans could even dream of...).

4: What does it really mean in terms of overall well-being that "even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financial than two thirds of the entire world"? If we're looking purely at income, and even factoring in cost-of-living, maybe that's true. What if we also think in terms of food security, opportunities, and future prospects? Is someone who works three part-time jobs to pay their rent/mortgage and other payments and keeps a couple credit cards going to pay for food and other expenses really better off than someone who has lower cash income but grows their own food or owns their own piece of land outright? We need a far more sophisticated measure of wealth, poverty, and well-being than just a $/yr or $/day figure compared across diverse countries with little consideration of diverse contexts.

Just for fun, someone should work up statistics that show the distribution of wealth and power between the global elite (by which I mean the global economic and political class that includes the Wall Street 1%), the global middle class, and the rest of the world... Just because a considerable proportion of Americans fit into this fictitious category of the "global 1%" doesn't mean that a majority do, or that being on the bottom 99% of that top 1% gives us any more real wealth and power versus the 1% of the global 1%...

Report from yesterday's "8-year-olds-sing-about-the-99%" thread:

Enough about the "one percent". In reality, 15 percent of the world makes the jobs for the other 85 percent.

US population: 309 million
Europe population: 739 million
World population: 6892 million

1048/6892 = 15.2%

It's not even arguable. The Western demand for cheap goods and services keeps over 5/6ths of the world from starving. So quit crying about the guy with the yachts and the private jets and be thankful that YOU are feeding lots of families just by hauling your fat butt to Walmart and spending hours on the phone getting tech support from some punk in Karachi. Stuff your face with more Cheesy-poofs and shut up.

mitEj:

Currently I have 2 people that are living with me because they were foreclosed on after the wife lost her job. They are both working now and have been for a while but they can not find jobs that pay enough for them to live on their own. If it was not for me they would be part of that homeless statistic. Between the 2 of them they make 27k a year. They have no insurance they wouldn't be able to live on their own and according to the government they do not qualify as poor.

Our country is farked up.

Are there worse places. Yes. But in no way does the existence of hellholes elsewhere validate the fact that our country is farked up. To claim that it does is to use a false equivalency argument.

to claim that since the country is "farked up" because someone is poor in the country is a stupid argument. Made worse with a sob story about a couple who makes 27k a year and has free rent.

tenpoundsofcheese: GAT_00: Thus excusing the fact that this county has the 5th highest Gini coefficient in the world,.

and you can thank Clinton for giving us that wealth disparity

Glass-Steagall, Fannie and Freddie certainly made it worse.

The 401(k) scam that replaced conventional pensions is what gave the investment banks the first leg up. (Look back 30 or more years for answers.)

satanorsanta: It doesn't matter what your salary is it matters what your cost of living is.

this is such a lame copout, commodities cost what they cost, yeah your rent might be higher here or there but if you think some guy earning 500 bucks a year is living it up just because he lives in a part of the world with a lower cost of living you're high on crack.

I'm starting an Occupy America Movement.

Thus excusing the fact that this county has the 5th highest Gini coefficient in the world, following a country known for being the world's bank, a defunct economy, and a country that has a significant portion of their people who don't use money. We're officially worse than 3rd world dictatorships at equal wealth distribution, something that a few decades ago wouldn't have been thought possible.