Posts tagged obscene wealth

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-36232280

“’I think what a lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard bearer that bears our standards.’ House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday,”

Perhaps “Republican Standards” are the standards of the rich and elite.  American wealth is moving toward the few (.8% now) at an unprecedented  rate of flow (up).  American wage earners have experienced their standard of living dropping whilst Congress spends such a lot of time bickering and fighting each other.  Perhaps the other 99.2% are just fed up.

For example:  “For most workers, real wages have barely budged for decades”

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ and yet; there are now more than twice as many millionaire households than there were in 1996. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/09/more-millionaires-than-ever-are-living-in-the-us.html

48.00% of Americans earn less than $25k a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

“In 2011, the majority of low-income working families (61 percent) spent more than one-third of their income on housing, exceeding an accepted guideline for what constitutes affordable housing.”  http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2013/us-working-poor-families.aspx

A low-income family is: “those earning less than twice the federal poverty line. In 2011, the low-income threshold for a family of four with two children was $45,622.”  That means the poverty level is $22,811.  So nearly ½ of American families (2 adults and 2 children) are living in or very near poverty.  “In 2011, the top 20 percent of working families received 10.1 times the total income received by the bottom 20 percent of working families, up from 9.5 in 2007.”  I’m sure that in 2016 at least 50% of American families are earning below the poverty line.

For quite a while I’ve heard the over-ripe saying that “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”  I always thought it was just an over exaggeration.  Not anymore.

As I posted on Facebook Friday, “Fanaticism is bred by hopelessness and despair”

I think it is safe to say that almost half the American population despair of ever rising above the poverty line.  Then along comes Trump!  But Trump is a millionaire.

Does this really make any sense?