Wealth Inequality (Morgana's Observatory)

Wealth Inequality Threatens Economy and Democracy

Although the mainstream news media diligently track economic news, a fundamental point is missing from those reports: Wealth inequality in the US has almost doubled over the past 30 years. In fact, the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances supplement on high-income families shows that in 1998, the richest 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of the nation’s wealth. The top 5 percent owned almost 60 percent of the wealth. “We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country,” New York University economics professor Edward Wolff told Third World Traveler.
But that’s just part of the problem. “Most Americans believe we take from people at the top to benefit those below,” Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter David Cay Johnston said in an interview. “But our tax system is actually set up such that people who make $30,000 to $500,000 give relief to those who make millions, or tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
The US is not alone. Today, 940 million people, almost one-sixth of the world’s population “already live in squalid, unhealthy areas, mostly without water, sanitation, public services of legal security,” wrote John Vidal in The Guardian. A recent United Nations report predicted that, absent drastic change to reverse “a form of colonialism that is probably more stringent than the original,” one in every three people worldwide will live in slums within 30 years. That’s a bigger threat to democracy and global security than al-Quaeda and international terrorism.
Sources: “The wealth divide” (an interview with Edward Wolff), Multinational Monitor, May 2003; “A BuzzFlash interview” (with David Cay Johnston), www.buzzflash.com, March 26 and 29, 2004; “Every third person will be a slum dweller within 30 years, UN agency warns,” John Vidal, The Guardian, Oct. 4, 2003); “Grotesque inequality,” Robert Weissman, Multinational Monitor, July-August 2003.

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