We Can't Fix It by Tweaking Capitalism
Income Inequality is form of Child Abuse
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/05/income-inequality-policy-capitalism
Portside Date:
December 6, 2015
Date of Source:
Saturday, December 5, 2015
The Guardian
The economic hoarding by those at the top has been termed “income inequality”, but that’s neither a strong nor accurate enough phrasing. I have never heard poor people complain about “income inequality”; poor people complain about being screwed out of housing [1] , or about working more hours for less pay [2] or about having to choose between medicine and food [3].
“Inequality” sounds like something that happens by accident and can be remedied by fiddling around the edges. It is not as if the rich are a little more equal and the poor a little less equal, and if we shift a bit we’ll all come out in the middle. What we’ve been calling “income inequality” might be better understood as a war waged by US political and economic policy on the poor.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies [4] issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans [5] and found that “the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States”. That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks [6] walking around the country (and the million or so [7] locked up) combined.
“Inequality” sounds like something that happens by accident and can be remedied by fiddling around the edges. It is not as if the rich are a little more equal and the poor a little less equal, and if we shift a bit we’ll all come out in the middle. What we’ve been calling “income inequality” might be better understood as a war waged by US political and economic policy on the poor.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies [4] issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans [5] and found that “the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States”. That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks [6] walking around the country (and the million or so [7] locked up) combined.
