Income Inequality

Fifty years ago, average Americans lived in a society that had been growing — and had become — much more equal. In 1963, of every $100 in personal income, less than $10 went to the nation’s richest 1 percent. Americans today live in a land much more unequal. The nation’s top 1 percent are taking just under 20 percent of America’s income, double the 1963 level.

While the man who coined the "Two Americas" term left politics in disgrace, that message has never been more important or apparent than in the debate over raising the minimum wage. After adjusting for inflation, minimum wage workers earn 25-percent less than they did 45 years ago—despite upper-echelon employers raking in a bigger slice of the pie than ever before.

Too many Americans are unaware of the extreme disparities that have been caused by the unregulated profit incentive of capitalism. Our winner-take-all system is flailing away at once-healthy parts of society, leaving them like withered limbs on a trembling body.

Ronald Reagan's big fat lie: 93 percent of non-home wealth is now owned by the richest quintile of Americans, while everyone else has experienced a 35-year decline in income.

The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans.

As we try to grasp the reasoning behind cuts to life-saving programs while billion-dollar incomes and trillion-dollar profits are being made, we must understand that extreme wealth deadens parts of the brain.

On the fourth day a food pantry gave me FOUR dollars worth of food. That's about what food stamp recipients get each day through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To pay for rent and utilities, a family of three gets $400 per month from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which comes to about FOUR dollars a day per person.

The dilemma isn’t just economic. It’s also political. As money concentrates at the top, so does power. That concentrated power generates even more entrenched wealth at the top, and less for the middle class and the poor.

Even though Wall Street financial "gurus" and media reporters have finally had to acknowledge that income inequity is a real problem, they still don't get why it's happened, and are clueless about how to deal with it.

More than 75 percent of the additional income generated in New Jersey went to the top 20 percent of households, with the richest 1 percent receiving the bulk of the increase. The bottom 40 percent lost income and everyone else experienced stagnate income or minimal growth that failed to keep pace with inflationary costs.
According to the report this growing divide has hurt the vulnerable the most, including single mothers, ethnic minorities and those with less education.