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QUOTE OF THE DAY
Americans Work ‘At Being Unequal’
We pay lip service to equality of opportunity, but it doesn’t exist. Is it time to kill the fantasy?
In one second, Jeff Bezos makes more than the median U.S. worker does in a week — $2,489 compared to $876.
That heartbreaker comes from Business Insider and supports what many Americans know instinctively: In the United States, the rich and the poor live in different galaxies.
Social scientists call the distance between them “the wealth gap.” But that’s a misnomer, suggesting that wealth exists among the rich and poor and we need only to close that gap between them. There’s no “wealth” among the poor: What the U.S. has is a poverty gap.
Social scientists date the beginnings of the divide to the rise of Reaganomics in the 1980s. Back then, Americans heard a lot about “trickle-down economics,” the idea that tax cuts and other privileges for the rich would lead to showers of financial gains for those at the bottom.
Four decades later, the poor have yet to feel the raindrops. In the U.S., the top 1% have more money or other assets than the bottom 92%. And the 50 richest Americans, Bezos among them, have more wealth than the entire bottom half, about 165 million people.
