AND NOW . . . ITS PITCHFORK TIME!
By Servando Gonzalez
August 1, 2015
My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.
—Barack Obama talking to Wall Street bankers, April 3, 2009.
According to “conservative” millionaire disinformer Rush Limbaugh,[1] the growing chasm between the mega rich and the hyper poor is nothing but a figment of the imagination of Marxists, communist and the Left encouraged by Obama — Limbaugh blames Obama for everything that is wrong in this country. Nevertheless, he has never explained how it is possible that an impostor with a third rate intellect who spends most of his time playing golf and have never written anything worth reading, can conceive things like Obamacare and Obamatrade to screw Americans.
Unfortunately, despite claims on the contrary, there is a widening economic gap between the 1 percent of Americans who are doing extremely well and the 99 percent who are barely surviving paycheck to paycheck and have lost their hope on the American dream.[2]
In a previous article,[3] I mentioned French economist David Picketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, whose main thesis is that the gap between the poor and the rich has reached dangerous levels. Picketty warns that the U.S. may be on the same trajectory as France before the Revolution, where the very rich ended with their heads chopped-off.
Picketty is not the only economist concerned about the inordinate growing inequality in America and the world. For more than a century, economists have documented the existence of this alarmingly growing gap using a scale, known as the Gini coefficient or Gini ratio, devised by Italian statistician Conrado Gini in 19122. The Gini index is used to represent the income distribution of a nation’s citizens, and is commonly used to measure income inequality
According to the Gini index, if all the income in a country would were earned by one person and the rest earned nothing, they would have a Gini index of one. On the other hand, if everyone in that country earned exactly the same income, they would have a Gini index of zero. So a Gini index of 0 represents total equality, while an index of 1 implies total inequality.[4]
Since 1947, the U.S. Census Bureau began using the Gini index to calculate income inequality. According to its statistics, between 1947 and 1968 the Gini index in the U.S. dropped to .386, which indicated a reasonable, relative equality of income in America. But then it began rising and currently income inequality in the U.S. is greater than in any other of the Western developed countries. While countries like the UK, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland ranged between .200 and .300 in the Gini scale, between 1975 and 1985 the U.S. Gini index jumped from .397 to .419.
But there is more than meets the eye in those statistics. According to statistics provided by the Center for American Progress, while the U.S. shows pre-tax inequality similar or lower than Canada, U.K. Taiwan, Germany or Norway, it stands out as the leader in after-tax income inequality[5]— a clear indication that the U.S. tax system is slanted to benefit the rich.[6] Currently in America, the average pay for a CEO of a corporation is 185 times bigger than the average pay of a worker — probably closer to difference in earnings between a slave and its master in the pre-war South.
This inequality gap is also evident in the political elite. While median worth for American families is $120,000, median net worth for members of Congress is $912,000. There are at least 10 members of Congress whose net worth is more than $100 million. Not surprisingly, seven of them, Darrell Issa, Jane Harman, John Kerry, Jared Polis, Mark Warner, Herb Kohl, Jay Rockefeller and Diannne Feinstein are Democrats — the party that allegedly cares for the poor.
So, have your pitchfork at hand and ready for the coming battle. If you don’t have a pitchfork, an AR-15 or AK-47 will do the job nicely.
Notes:
1. I remember that some years ago Rush had a problem, must likely a set up, related to overuse of prescription drugs. Some time later he signed an eight-year contract for 400 million dollars. Obviously he carrot worked better than the stick. See, Damian Sofsian, “Conservative Radio Host’s Prescription Drug Addiction Story,” EzineArticles.com
2. See, “‘Record gap’ between rich and poor,” Yahoo.com, May/21/2015, See also, Paul Harris, “Is the US Heading for ‘Developing Nations’ Inequality Levels?,” The Observer UK, July 30, 2007.
3. “The Current Tragedy of the Commons,” NewsWithViews.com, June 27, 2014.
4. Though there are no statistics for Cuba, I would guess that the Gini index for pre-Castro Cuba may have been around .400, with relative income equality due to a large middle class, while it jumped in the 1970s to close to .900, with Castro and his family members and close associates taking the lion’s share of the country’s income.
5. See, John Cassidy, “American Inequality in Six Charts,” The New Yorker, November 18, 2013.
6. Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot “It’s the Inequality, Stupid: Eleven charts that explain what’s wrong with America.,” Mother Jones, March/April, 2011.