Economic Inequality
Great Depression levels of economic inequality have divided us and continue to wreak havoc on our national stability. A country where three people have more money than half the population, and the vast majority are just treading water with little to no financial safety net, has serious consequences.
This level of inequality is not sustainable without severe consequences
This threatens the stability of our nation and demands immediate action.
10 months into the pandemic and inequality is only intensifying. The Billionaires in this country increased their wealth by 40% while food lines are stretching for miles.
How Trump fueled economic inequality in America
The Hill Article by Jeffrey Kucik
Excerpt - The numbers are revealing. The distance separating America’s highest and lowest income brackets grew by almost 9 percent annually under Trump. That growth is faster than in previous periods. From 1990 to 2015 growth was about 7 percent — a period that included three recessions.
That 2 percent difference might sound small. But it matters once we recognize that many households cannot meet their basic needs.
By 2019, housing was unaffordable for workers in 70 percent of the country. The average family is now far less able to afford homeownership than it was just a few years ago. Almost 30 million people lacked health insurance in 2019. One-quarter of Americans have no retirement savings. And one widely cited report from the Federal Reserve found that 40 percent of the country could not afford an emergency expense of $400.
The list does not end there. A full 20 percent of American children now live in poverty, a number that increased under the Trump administration. At the same time, education, which is supposed to help overcome these problems, is becoming increasingly unaffordable as tuition outpaces income growth.
Perhaps most strikingly, all of this happened before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the U.S. economy. Things have gotten worse since then.
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The Vanishing Middle Class
Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about.
Economist Peter Temin, the author of "The Vanishing Middle Class," explains how the US is moving towards two economies, one for the lower 80% and one for the upper 20%
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Correlation between Violence and Inequality
The Great Leveler, by Walter Scheidel
Book, Blinkist, Scribd
“It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time,” said Scheidel, summarizing the thesis of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, his newly published book
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Warning from Stephen Hawking
Learn about the warning Stephen Hawking left us with
Last Reddit post from Stephen Hawking warns that great technological advances can leave most people "miserably poor." That technological automation might benefit humanity — or, if we're not careful, could instead send inequality skyrocketing and make life harder for the vast majority of the world's population.
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New research shows how economic inequality can provoke polarization — and ensnare an entire population
Article by Eric W. Dolan based on a research article, Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline, in Science Advances (link in article)
“We show that under a broad range of conditions, the trade-off between risk reduction and benefit maximization decreases out-group interactions, that is, increases polarization, when a population is faced with economic decline. We show that such group polarization can be contagious, and a subpopulation facing economic hardship in an otherwise strong economy can tip the whole population into a state of polarization,” the researchers explained in their study.
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The Inequality Virus, Oxfam Report
Virus Bringing together a world torn apart by coronavirus through a fair, just and sustainable economy
Billionaire
fortunes returned to their pre-pandemic highs in just nine months, while
recovery for the world’s poorest people could take over a decade. The crisis
has exposed our collective frailty and the inability of our deeply unequal
economy to work for all. Yet it has also shown us the vital importance of
government action to protect our health and livelihoods. Transformative
policies that seemed unthinkable before the crisis have suddenly been
shown to be possible. There can be no return to where we were before.
Instead, citizens and governments must act on the urgency to create a more
equal and sustainable world.
See Report
Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers
Blogging our Great Divide by by Chuck Collins at Inequality.org
The collective wealth of all U.S. billionaires has increased over $1.1 trillion since mid-March 2020, a nearly 40% leap during the past 10 months of national emergency.
This wealth windfall could pay for all the relief for working families contained in the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package proposed by President Biden, while leaving the nation’s richest households no worse off than they were before COVID-19 hit.
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Can we get back to "normal"? That would require addressing structural wealth inequality
Going back to pre-COVID reality won't save our economy. We need to restructure our grotesquely rigged system - article by Bob Hennelly
Here in the New York and New Jersey region, a year into the pandemic, both Cuomo and Murphy have said repeatedly that the pandemic has been most devastating for low-income communities of color where the lack of access to health care means that chronic untreated diseases had established a foothold, decades before COVID came calling.
Across the country, public health experts have flagged the same connection between race, poverty and the prevalence of the highly contagious and deadly virus. As it turns out, this is the same demographic cohort that is the backbone of the essential workforce that has borne the brunt of the pandemic. Yet even now some members of Congress would deny them an increase from the current $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage.
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