Income Inequality
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011This morning I was up early reading articles from the NY Times newspaper on-line edition, there is article from The Opinion Page of The Sunday Review by Nicholas D. Kristof that has some pretty good facts stated in the article.
One of the first facts is that by the C.I.A’s own accord and ranking of countries by income inequality The United States of America is more unequal than a country of like Egypt or Iran Israel. There are almost 100 countries with better equality in income distribution than The United States of America.
Really that is pretty darn interesting that a branch of our own government says our income inequality is worst that other countries.
Here are some of the facts that Kristof outlined in his opinion;
Three factoids underscore that inequality:
The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.
The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.
Another NY Times reporter Catherine Rampell wrote in an Economix article writing about Bankers’ Salaries vs. Everyone Else’s
The securities salary is an average of $361,330, 5.5 times the average of the private sector, by comparison 30 years ago it was only as twice as much.
A lot of what Occupy Wall Street and the 99% feel is what corporations such as Bank of America have been doing and not just in the last few weeks as common practice.
As of last week Bank of America released/disclosed that they were paying out to two executives who were forced out do to management reshuffling a sum totaling $11 million dollars.
Yet on 18 October 2011 Bank of America reported a 6% jump in third quarter earnings and a 6.2 billion in profit.
How than is it that a company such as Bank of America which post 6.2 billion in third quarter profits, pays 2 executives 11 million dollars starts laying off 30,000 employees?
When is that good business practice?
But this seems to be a more common practice in todays business world.