WORLD’S RICHEST ONE PERCENT WEALTHIER THAN THE REST OF HUMANITY COMBINED

“The [world’s] richest 1 percent is now wealthier than the rest of humanity combined, according to Oxfam [the anti-poverty charity], which called on governments to intensify efforts to reduce such inequality.

“In a report published on the eve of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, [Oxfam] cited data from Credit Suisse Group AG in declaring the most affluent controlled most of the world’s wealth in 2015. That’s a year earlier than it had anticipated.

“Oxfam also calculated that 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.5 billion people, the bottom half of the global population, compared with 388 individuals five years earlier. The wealth of the most affluent rose 44 percent since 2010 to $1.76 trillion, while the wealth of the bottom half fell 41 percent or just over $1 trillion.

“The charity used the statistics to argue that growing inequality poses a threat to economic expansion and social cohesion. Those risks have already been noted in countries from the U.S. to Spain, where voters are increasingly backing populist political candidates, while it’s sown tensions on the streets of Latin America and the Middle East.

“ ‘It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world’s population owns no more than a few dozen super-rich people who could fit onto one bus,’” said Winnie Byanima, executive director of Oxfam International. ‘World leaders’ concern about the escalating inequality crisis has so far not translated into concrete action.”’

“Oxfam said governments should take steps to reduce the polarization, estimating tax havens estimating tax havens help the rich to hide $7.6 trillion. Politicians should agree on a global approach to ending the practice of using offshore accounts, it said.”

Simon Kennedy, “Richest,” Bloomberg Business, [Web Post] January 17, 2016.

Gateway to Sources and Information About Income Inequality in the United States

Millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, and yet almost all of the new income and wealth being created is going to the top one percent. While the top one percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. 
  Scholars, from the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman to the widely respected economist James Surowiecki, have been working to analyze these disparities. Americans are not generally aware of the extent of this income inequality. In most developed countries, there is a direct relationship between income inequality and the public's views about the need to address the issue – but not in America, where income inequality is worse but the concern is lower. The most commonly accepted measurement of income inequality, the Gini Index, ranks the United States sixth-worst among 173 nations. 
   Private-equity companies are far more obviously connected to an undue concentration of wealth at the expense of workers and communities than are collateralized-debt obligations, which were at the core of our 2008 Great Recession. Within the one percent, there is a top one percent that consists disproportionately of private-equity and hedge-fund principals.

   Anyone wanting to know about income inequality may scroll down the various dates of the archive file, or use Windows Command f to find specific names or topics throughout the archive.

CHINA SHOCK DEMOLISHED U.S. MANUFACTURING

“Trade with China, in particular, has inflicted serious damage on
American communities across the country, damage from which they
have yet to recover. As the economists David Autor, David Dorn, and
Gordon Hanson have documented, what they call the ‘China
shock’ - beginning in 1991 and lasting into this century - demolished
manufacturing in much of the U.S. Workers in the affected communities
had a hard time finding and keeping new jobs, and unemployment stayed high
and wages low for at least a decade afterward.”

James Surowiecki, “Economic Populism at the Primaries,” New Yorker, February 28, 2016, page 21.

WORKERS’ HOPES SUNK

               “American workers used to believe that a rising tide lifted all boats.
But in the past thirty years it has sunk a whole lot of them.”

James Surowiecki, “Economic Populism at the Primaries,” New Yorker, February 28, 2016, page 21.

POLICIES TO ACCELERATE GLOBALIZATION

[“ . . . both candidates [Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump]
are acknowledging something important: what has happened to U.S. labor
was not a natural disaster but, in part, the product of government policies
designed to accelerate globalization and expose American workers to foreign
competition. That admission is more than working-class Americans I
have got from most Presidential candidates.”

James Surowiecki, “Economic Populism at the Primaries,” New Yorker, February 28, 2016, page 21.

TRUMP WOULD ABOLISH ‘CARRIED INTEREST’ LOOPHOLE

“ . . . [Bernie] Sanders . . . campaign has focussed on income inequality and the undue influence of corporate elites. [Donald] Trump's economic populism, on the other hand, tends to be drowned out by his incendiary anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim positions. Nonetheless, it's what distinguishes him most strongly from other hard-line conservatives, like Ted Cruz. Trump has called for abolishing the carried-interest tax loophole for hedge- fund and private-equity managers. He's vowed to protect Social Security. He's called for restrictions on highly skilled immigrants. Most important, he's rejected free- trade ideology, suggesting that the US. may need to slap tariffs
on Chinese goods to protect American jobs. These views put Trump at odds not only with the leadership of the Republican Party but also with the main thrust of economic thinking since
the nineteen-eighties, which has been to embrace globalization.”

James Surowiecki, “Economic Populism at the Primaries,” New Yorker, February 28, 2016, page 21.