America’s Income Inequality is worse than Russia’s
Income Inequality in the United States is now worse than in Russia. The gap between rich and poor is now greater in America than in the Russian Federation.
The richest 10% of Russians receive 46% of that nation’s income; the wealthiest 10% of Americans receive 47% of the USA’s wealth, The World Inequality Report for 2018 claims. Some other frightening details of the report compiled by noted economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez include:
- “In Russia and the United States, the rise in wealth inequality has been extreme.”
- “Wealth inequality has not yet returned to its extremely high early-twentieth-century level in rich countries.”
- “Evidence points towards a rise in global wealth inequality over the past decades. At the global level—represented by China, Europe, and the United States—the top 1% share of wealth increased from 28% in 1980 to 33% today, while the bottom 75% share hovered around 10%.”
- “If established trends in wealth inequality were to continue, the top 0.1% alone will own more wealth than the global middle class by 2050.”
- Piketty and Saez estimated that 50% of Americans saw their income shrink between 1980 and 2016, CBS News reported.
- Income Inequality is growing fastest in Russia, India, and the United States.
- Income Inequality and wealth are not growing in the Middle East, Brazil, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Wealth growth in those regions is so stagnant; Piketty and Saez labeled those areas an “inequality frontier.”
- The growing level of violence, war, and unrest in the Middle East proves; that lack of Income Inequality might be worse than inequality itself.
- The violence in the Middle East might be repeated in other regions; such as Brazil, if economic growth does not occur.
It looks as if both America and Russia lost the Cold War. Only the 1% have won, which will make the world a far more unstable place in the near future. The next war will be between the haves and the have-nots and it will not be pretty.
