Broken

It's the Inequality, Stupid

This is something that's been on my mind a lot over the past six months. The charts on this page do an excellent job of highlighting the disturbing and growing income inequality in the U.S. This is something that we've studied from every angle in my grad program in social work, and there is no way around the fact that the gap between the super-rich and the rich and, well, the rest of us, is ever widening. Something is so incredibly wrong with this picture.

If the site above doesn't hit the point home for you, here's another way to look at it. Someone in my department emailed this out; it's from The Economist (via Andrew Sullivan's blog):

Giants Of Finance by Zoe Pollock

The Economist reconfigures an old way of picturing inequality:

Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that
someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that
the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single
hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are
invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the
working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are
still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the
mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear.
But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to
go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right
at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

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This is so frustrating to me. We're operating within a broken system that has and continues to blatantly create and perpetuate inequality. So much is happening to protect the ultra-rich while everyone else struggles more. How did we get here? This is what makes what's happening in Wisconsin and other states so critical. The poor have been pushed so far down, so up next the already squeezed center of the hourglass, the middle class, is about to disappear.

I wonder when the bottom 90% of us are going to fully grasp this and get to the point of doing something about it?

A few minutes later...

It's funny. Just as I hit Publish on this post, Rage Against the Machine's "Take the Power Back" came up on last.fm. I've never even heard this song before, but it's pretty perfect for this post. You've gotta love the universe sometimes.