Washington’s Blog | August 2, 2013
Associated Press reports that around 80 percent of all Americans deal with joblessness, near poverty, or reliance on welfare at some point in their lives.
AP notes that inequality is going through the roof:
An increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs [are the likely] reasons for the trend.
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The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality.
The U.S. compares very poorly to most other Western industrialized nations:
Washington may pay lip service to reducing inequality. But – as we will show below – bad government policy is largely responsible.
The Hard Facts of Inequality
A who’s-who’s of prominent economists in government and academia have all said that runaway inequality can cause financial crises.
Extreme inequality helped cause the Great Depression, the current financial crisis … and the fall of the Roman Empire.
But inequality in America today is actually twice as bad as in ancient Rome , worse than it was in in Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republics in Latin America, and worse than experienced by slaves in 1774 colonial America.
