This quotation from the article below jumped out at me to the degree that I wanted to bold it out here:
You could have banked $1 million a day every day for the last two years and still have far to go to make the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.
You just gotta pause and let that sink in for a second. Wow. What does this mean, as Martin Luther might say?
So if you're NOT banking well over a million a day, even with that wonderful math of compounding interest that is waved around in front of all of us to get us to start saving early for retirement so we can retire millionaires, that means, you could never even approach the shores of this new class-based American upper crust, this new Gilded Age.
Retirement savings started at age 25 could make you a cool million to retire on, but even if you made it there, the super-rich would be so far out in front of you, that million to retire on would be the equivalent of what, $20,000 in the 1950s? (remember, that's how much you get in the Game of Life, per kid in your little car, when you reach the Day of Reckoning)
OK, so there's no chance in hell any of the folks reading this will ever hit that Forbes mark, just because of the RATE with which the millions must accumulate. I'll set the morality of even striving for such ultra-wealth as others suffer aside, still trying to wrap my dyslexic mind around this math. There are issues of scale that the article below raises as well.
We've become accustomed to the articles that describe how many millions fall into Bill Gates's lap every time he sneezes. That's what I mean by RATE. But what this article does is also try to compare the rate people's incomes are falling as well, as if these two kinds of numbers can be offset against each other. But I'm starting to think these numbers are so desparate, they can't be compared at all. But they must! What to do?
76 more people have joined the U.S. "billionaire club," while FIVE MILLION MORE PEOPLE have newly fallen into the U.S. "poverty club."
To make the billionare club, you must amass money at a rate of millions a day. To make the poverty club, you must only lose about $20K or so from the lower middle class annual income, you know, one little pink or blue stick person from your Game of Life car at the Day of Reckoning.
Five million people times $20K is $100,000,000,000, one hundred billion, right? (my math is extremely questionable, so somebody count my zeroes).
76 more people each amassed one billion (76 billion), while five million all together must have lost about one hundred billion, roughly speaking.
So hypothetically we could take those 76 people and another 24 already in the billionaires club and lift five million out of poverty, eh? Imagine you are a god floating up on a cloud somewhere. In the palm of your godly right hand are the teeming masses of five million people (that's just in the U.S., dunno if other countries get to have gods that weigh things in right and left hands), while in your godly left hand are 100 billionaires.
I don't need to ask what's wrong with this picture. For many people in the U.S. everything is the way it should be in this picture. The needs of one hundred billionaires of course should be worth so much more than the needs of those five million. They're contemplating giving those billionaires even more tax cuts.
SCALE tho, I keep coming back to scale. Yes, I know the scale is unbalanced. That's obvious. It is the level of the unbalance that my visualizing non-math brain keeps coming back to, thinking there's some further insight to be gleaned from a ratio of five million to one hundred. Like a broken filling on a cavity, my tongue just keeps circling around and around this one. I don't know what I expect to find, but I gotta keep worrying at this broken filling.
Five million to one hundred. 50,000 to one. I'm no utilitarian, but this just seems like the strangest logic I've encountered.
Link: Growing Gulf Between Rich and Rest of US .
Growing Gulf Between Rich and Rest of US
By Holly Sklar
10/03/05 -- -- Guess which country the CIA World Factbook describes when it says, "Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households."
If you guessed the United States, you're right.
The United States has rising levels of poverty and inequality not found in other rich democracies. It also has less mobility out of poverty.
Since 2000, America's billionaire club has gained 76 more members while the typical household has lost income and the poverty count has grown by more than 5 million people.
Poverty and inequality take a daily toll seldom seen on television. "The infant mortality rate in the United States compares with that in Malaysia -- a country with a quarter the income." says the 2005 Human Development Report. "Infant death rates are higher for [black] children in Washington, D.C., than for children in Kerala, India."
Income and wealth in America are increasingly concentrated at the very top -- the realm of the Forbes 400.
You could have banked $1 million a day every day for the last two years and still have far to go to make the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.
It took a minimum of $900 million to get on the Forbes 400 this year. That's up $150 million from 2004.
"Surging real estate and oil prices drove up several fortunes and helped pave the way for 33 new members," Forbes notes.Middle-class households, meanwhile, are a medical crisis or outsourced job away from bankruptcy.
With 374 billionaires, the Forbes 400 will soon be billionaires only.
Bill Gates remains No. 1 on the Forbes 400 with $51 billion. Low-paid Wal-Mart workers can find Walton family heirs in five of the top 10 spots; another Wal-Mart heir ranks No. 116.
Former Bechtel president Stephen Bechtel Jr. and his son, CEO Riley Bechtel, tie for No. 109 on the Forbes 400 with $2.4 billion apiece. The politically powerful Bechtel has gotten a no-bid contract for hurricane reconstruction despite a pattern of cost overruns and shoddy work from Iraq to Boston's leaky "Big Dig" tunnel/highway project.
The Forbes 400 is a group so small they could have watched this year's Sugar Bowl from the private boxes of the Superdome.
[...]
The number of Americans in poverty is a group so large it would take the combined populations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, plus Arkansas to match it. That's according to the Census Bureau's latest count of 37 million people below the poverty line.
[...]
America is becoming a downwardly mobile society instead of an upwardly mobile society. Median household income fell for the fifth year in a row to $44,389 in 2004 -- down from $46,129 in 1999, adjusting for inflation. vThe Bush administration is using hurricane "recovery" to camouflage policies that will deepen inequality and poverty. They are bringing windfall profits to companies like Bechtel while suspending regulations that shore up wages for workers.
[...]
Holly Sklar is co-author of "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us" (www.raisethefloor.org ). She can be reached at hsklar@aol.com
Comments