Please don't run off. I'll keep this simple, and it's important that you understand:
Recently I read an article about the 2017 "Gini Coefficient" study by the German bank Allianz which ranked developed nations based on their level of income inequality.
Some brief background: It was a little over a century ago that an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, devised the method for measuring income inequality which we now call the Gini Coefficient. It is a scale from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning everyone has the same wealth, and 1 means one person has everything and everyone else has nothing. Obviously in the real world the Gini score will be somewhere in between.
In the current Allianz Bank Gini Coefficient study of 53 developed countries, the United States was the most unequal with a Gini of .81. (Example: Just 3 Americans, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, have more wealth than the poorest 50% of all other Americans combined.) Others with high Gini scores are Germany with .73 and Russia with .69. Among the most equal are South Korea with a Gini of .54, China with .53, and Slovenia with .48.
Going back thousands of years, archaeologists have determined the relative concentration of wealth in various societies by looking at the size of their homes, the amount of valuables they had (such as pottery), and the size of their stables (the more affluent had the most large, domesticated animals, making them the most productive farmers). Until modern times the most unequal they could identify was the Kahun society in ancient Egypt with a Gini of .68.
Here is their warning for us: Throughout history, when things became as unequal as what we're seeing today, violence eventually erupted and societies collapsed.
When I've written on this topic before my conservative friends have just rolled their eyes and said, "Oh, here we go....rob from the rich, and give it to the poor." "Income redistribution" they moaned. "Socialism at it's worst."
My point was that unless things somehow evened out, the ultra-wealthy will some day find themselves owning everything, but be under siege and fighting for their lives.
IMO the wealthy would be smart to back new tax laws that allowed the middle class to keep more of what they earned, and be content with having for themselves a slightly smaller slice of a very big pie. But instead what are they doing? They, through their lobbyists, are about to get their wish of yet another tax windfall.
A day of reckoning is coming. How soon, I have no idea, but it's coming. Wise up, America.
S
*According to the fable, a cottager and his wife had a goose that laid a golden egg every day. They supposed the goose must contain a great lump of gold in its inside, and in order to get the gold they killed her. Having done so, they found to their surprise that the goose differed in no respect from their other geese. The foolish pair, thus hoping to become rich all at once, deprived themselves of the gain which they were assured day after day.
