The Unspeakable Seperation of Wealth

There are 44 New Billionaires in the US, bringing the total to 374 Americans with a Billion Dollars or more. There are 37 Million Americans living "below the poverty level".

The official Poverty rate in the US has increased for the last for Consecutive Years as has the number of Billionaires. Almost 400 Billionaires, while there are still 750,000 homeless in the US, 250,000 of them Veterans... why won’t the politicians address this glaring atrocity?

Forbes on the rising inequality:

Given the editorialists’ recurring objections to George Bush’s tax cuts, their implication here was clear: The Bush Administration has been especially awful in creating inequality. That implication is wrong. The reality is that measured inequality has been rising steadily for close to 30 years and hit successive new highs in the Carter, Reagan, elder Bush and Clinton administrations before doing the exact same thing under the younger Bush.

I agree, it’s not just Dubya, it’s been going on for a long time. There was a huge wealth gap 30 yrs ago, and now it’s wider than ever. The NAFTA/WTO Free Trade (tax-free "out-sourcing") screwed millions of Americans just to make the billionaires richer. Millions are suffering while a few are living high on the hog.

The driving force behind income inequality has been meritocracy, i.e., workers get what they’re worth.

Anybody else have a problem with that? Did Bill Gates really work so hard as to accumulate the wealth of 50,000 millionaires? What if a married couple works full-time for 50 years, but still have to sell their house to pay the doctor bills (old age hits everyone)... are they really worth nothing?

How about a working class family whose principal wage-earner is laid off thanks to out-sourcing. The Bank forecloses on their house and the family is left sleeping in a shelter... did they "get what they earned"?

The average CEO now takes home a paycheck 431 times that of their average worker. Does he really work that hard?

Does inequality matter? One problem is that concentrations of wealth and power pose a danger to our democratic system. The corruption of politics by big money might explain why for the last five years the President and Congress have been more interested in repealing the federal estate tax, paid only by multi-millionaires, than on reinforcing levees along the Gulf Coast.

The obvious truth is that someone with wealth can use that as leverage to accumulate ever more wealth. A billionaire can invest that money in an auto company which has 30,000 workers making an avg of $25/hr. The workers slave away for 40 hrs/wk while the billionaire plays golf, taking a profit from every car sold. He profits from their labor.

What about a wealthy landowner... say some guy like Larry Silverstein owns thousands of high rise apartments in several major cities. The little people work full-time to give the billionaire 50% of their paycheck.

It is written in our Constitution that, "All men are created equal". Yet according to the current US Gov’t, "Some pigs are more equal than others."