We’ve talked a lot about the growing disparity between the extremely wealthy and the average person in this country. We’ve remarked over and over about how the 1% are entrenching their wealth and failing to maintain their end of the bargain in the “trickle-down” economy. Americans are missing the whole picture though. Income inequality is a lot worse than they even know.
A study recently published by the Harvard Business School helps illuminate the depths of the problem of inequality that are plaguing the United States, and in some ways the globe.
According to the study, CEOs are now taking home as much as 272 to 354 times as much as the average employee. That’s a really stark statistic to consider when you compare it to the same number just a generation ago. In the 1960s it the multiplier of CEO to employee income was only 20. That’s 10 to 15 times growth in just around 50 years.
It gets worse though.
New information puts it front and center who GDP gains are going to. Can you guess who? If you guessed “not us,” you’re right.
According to research from Pavlina Tcherneva, what had been the trend for over 60 years has stopped. Since 1949, the majority of gains from economic growth went to the bottom 90% of wage earners. According to Vox, “Since 1980, that hasn’t been the case. And for the first several years of the current expansion, the bottom 90 percent saw inflation-adjusted incomes continue to fall.” The data available to Vox and the researcher did not go past 2012, so it isn’t confirmed if the trend has continued.
Smart money says that its time to pack it up, this show is over. There was a battle between the poor and the super wealthy in this country. The poor lost.
