Quote:
|
Originally Posted by stevo
Its closer to 1/3. that is the top 1% holds close to 33% of the wealth.
|
The following data is the stuff that violent revolutions are eventually made from:
Quote:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/f.../200613pap.pdf
<b>From page 10:</b>
Concentration ratios. Because the Gini coefficient attempts to summarize many complex changes in terms of a single number, it may miss important variation for particular parts of a distribution or for particular subpopulations. A more detailed means of summarizing the relative distribution of wealth is the use of concentration ratios, the proportion of total wealth held by specific groups. In 2004, slightly more than one-third of total net worth was held by the wealthiest one percent of families (table 5). Although the estimated level of this share has changed over the surveys since 1989, the differences are not statistically significant. In 2004, the next-wealthiest nine percent of families held 36.1 percent of total wealth, again, a figure not significantly changed over the course of the surveys. <b>This leaves less than a third of the total for the remaining ninety percent of the population.</b> A subset of that group, families in the bottom half of wealth distribution, held only 2.5 percent of total wealth in 2004, and this figure is significantly different from the higher estimates for 1995, 1998, and 2001; of course, those differences reflect movements elsewhere in the distribution, but the statistical power of the tests is not sufficient to identify where among the groups shown the offsetting changes occurred. <b>A possible explanation of the decline for the lowest wealth group might be changes in their use of debt, but a separate examination of gross assets yields a pattern similar to that seen for net worth......</b>
|
Couple the data above with the decline of better paying union organized and collectively bargained jobs, the failure of government to perform it's chartered duty of guarding the borders, which has resulted in a "parallel" labor force of at least eleven million, low skilled illegals who are willing to work for a lower wage, and I have to ask those who speak against a higher minimum wage, what is the role of this federal government, now....
now....that it has allowed the distribution of wealth to become even more lopsided, because, among other things, the executive has appointed all 5 members of the NLRB from non-labor sympathetic factions, i.e....only those who side with the agenda of management....
now....that an illegal parallel labor force has been allowed to form as it passed unchecked, across the border guarded by an underfunded border patrol....
now...that representative government has been replaced with government by lobbyists paid and controlled by the top 2 percent...the class that already controls 67 percent of the wealth....
so....friends....what now??? Can you not recognize that failure of government to enforce the law, to represent the "people", to uphold the integrity of instruments to "level" the playing field...(as in the stacking of the NLRB with management "hacks"), is the cause of wage stagnation of the lowest paid workers?
In 2004, Floridians forced the issue with a populist driven effort to add a minimum wage referendum to the state ballot. The people bypassed their own
"special interest" corrupted legislature. They voted overwhelmingly to raise their minimum wage by one dollar per hour, raising the pay of at least 250,000 workers.
Why is government only "interfering" when it actually represents the people, and not when it is bought out by the wealthiest, or when it benignly neglects to guard the borders, while the employers, across the board, enjoy the benefits of reduction of upward wage pressure that a "parallel" illegal labor force, predictably brings to the status quo?