The maddening data on wealth inequality in America have now gotten so ridiculously out of hand that the headline for this post really does sum up what ought to be the single, defining issue in today’s election. For confirmation, check out the following amazing graphic from the good people at Inequality.org.
The good folks at Inequality.org continue to do a great job of documenting America’s obscene and metastasizing wealth and income gaps. This week, in their online newsletter Too Much, they highlight as fascinating comparison between French and U.S. households when it comes to wealth. As you can see, Americans top the French when it comes to average wealth because the rich here are so much richer and all of their holdings gets factored in. When one looks at median wealth however (i.e. the wealth of the most typical adult) the French leave us in la poussière. This graphic from the Too Much website tells the grim story.
The good people at Inequality.org have stashed several nuggets of powerful information in today’s edition of Too Much: An online weekly on excess and inequality that will make you want to pound the table, but the story on the newest edition of Forbes magazine’s richest 400 gazillionaires is perhaps the most amazing — especially this little vignette on one of the richest of the plutocrats, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison:
Take Larry Ellison, the third-ranking deep pocket on this year’s Forbes list. Ellison just stepped down as the CEO of the Oracle business software colossus. His net worth: $50 billion.
What does Ellison do with all those billions? He collects homes and estates, for starters, with 15 or so scattered all around the world. Ellison likes yachts, too. He currently has two extremely big ones, each over half as long as a football field.
Ellison also likes to play basketball, even on his yachts. If a ball bounces over the railing, no problem. Ellison has a powerboat following his yacht, the Wall Street Journal noted this past spring, “to retrieve balls that go overboard.”
And if Ellison’s ridiculous wealth doesn’t get you a little fired up, check out this graph from the same story showing just how rapidly he and his peers are leaving the rest of us in their wake:
These come from a recent University of California Alumni Association profile of economist Emmanuel Saez and his work that was linked to by the excellent online newsletter Too Much:
The top 1 percenters in the United States, for example, have seen their share of national income rise from under 8 percent in 1970 to just under 20 percent in 2010. A similar pattern is seen in Canada, which also adopted the same esprit de laissez-faire that made Reaganomics the hallmark of United States fiscal policy in the 1980s.
In contrast, over the same period, the top 1 percenters in Japan saw their share of national income inch up from 8 to 9.5 percent. French and Swedish plutocrats were similarly deprived. (Emphasis supplied).
Meanwhile, check out the following amazing graph of Census data that also comes from the folks at Too Much: Read More
The good people at Inequality.org and the online publication Too Much do a great job each week of documenting America’s one-sided class warfare and the fast-mushrooming gap between the haves and have nots. If you’re not already a subscriber to their updates, click here to get signed up.
The graphic at left was featured in the most recent edition of Too Much and paints a remarkable picture of where the market fundamentalists appear bent on taking the country in the years to come.
Note: You might want to make sure that anyone you share it with this evening has a cold beverage close by to ease the pain.
