We’ve all heard about the 1% ad nauseum. Why do some people really get down on this 1% problem? In fact, what is the problem?
Well, the problem is that the table has tilted so far in the direction of the wealthiest people on the planet that the wealth gap has both the poor and the middle class struggling just to eat.
To use the USA as an example (let’s face it, that country leads the capitalist parade) we can look at this staggering graph, where it shows that the top 1% in terms of wealth have gone from 9% of the total wealth in the USA to a breathtaking 24% of the total wealth as of about 2009. And it is of course worse than that today …
See that wide stack on the right? That’s about 10 times too high for the graph. See the bottom 7% of the population? They do not even register. In fact, the bottom 50% of the population only have about one half of one percent of the total wealth. That’s called “just scraping by” and that’s what happens when you allow a tiny segment of the population to run everything.
What do I mean by that? Well, have you ever noticed the number of programs that do not seem to make a lot of sense except perhaps as a way of keeping a lot of money flowing towards specific special interest groups? Why does the USA have by far the most prisoners in the world? Do they have by far the most evil people? Hardly. I will leave it to you to extrapolate that to the military industrial complex and so on and so forth …
The point being that the 1% now have a slice of the pie that is crippling the western world. That money is not flowing back into the economy as goes the myth (Republicans love to spread that fable) … the money is more often than not resting quietly in off shore banks, doing nothing useful and forcing the government to borrow to maintain services that were once paid for by a healthy middle class. I remember those times … in fact, I watched them fade away …
Have a look at this if you can stand it.
