Yesterday, I wrote (again) about democratic egalitarianism, and discussed the way that current policies operate against that ideal by consolidating the misallocation of resources (and other desirable attributes) in the hands of the elite.
Today, let's look at some of the evidence for that--a study by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (hat tap--Mark Thoma), presented in 20 Facts About U.S. Inequality. The study catalogues time shifts in various data, including the following (click on link to see graph and summary information):
Wage Inequality (the top 10% have taken off since the 1980s, while the bottom half languishes)
Wealth Inequality (the top 10% hold an even more disproportionate share of wealth than before, while the bottom 60% hold even less)
Child Poverty (we have more children in poverty than any other rich country, except for Mexico)
Job Losses (unstopping)
CEO Compensation (the CEO makes way more than the average worker --and that disparity is increasing over time, from 24 times the average workers' salary in 1965 to almost 200 times in 2009 after the financial recession's impact)
So, again, I ask--what kind of a society are we creating with the current laws for spending subsidies, tax expenditure subsidies, and outright protection of the incomes of near-monopoly Big Businesses and the denigration of vast majorities of the people's rights to form unions to bargain for a fairer share of company profits in the form of higher wages and benefits?
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