https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
"Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the
COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health
infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance
system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely
contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences
of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is
extreme income inequality.
How big is this elephant? A staggering /$50 trillion/. That is how much the
upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several
decades.
This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a
groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the
RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three
decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the
aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would
have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal
to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to
pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional
$1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year."
Via Kevin O'Brien.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
