One of the most disturbing trends in this country is the rise of extreme wealth and income inequality.
As the following charts show, America is rapidly becoming a country of a few million overlords and 300 million serfs.
Unfortunately, this issue has been politicized, which means that people don't think about the implications of it — they just start yelling.
But extreme inequality is bad for everyone, even the overlords.
Why?
Because when inequality gets bad enough, serfs can't afford to buy products from overlords. This hurts the overlords' ability to get even richer.
And that's what's wrong with the American economy right now. The serfs are tapped out. The overlords are responding by cutting costs (firing serfs), to increase profits. Unfortunately, one person's "costs" are another person's "wages,"so this is making the problem worse.
The best way to start reversing our inequality trend is not to increase taxes on overlords and give the additional money to the serfs. That just inflames class warfare and gets people yelling about "socialism."
The best way to fix inequality is to persuade our overlords that it is in their best interests to share more of their wealth by paying their employees more for their work — work that, not incidentally, is what makes the overlords rich.
In other words, the best way is to persuade companies that it's better to focus on creating value rather than just profit.
Given America's current obsession with short-term profit, however, this will likely take a while.
So let's just start by helping everyone understand just how extreme the inequality in this country has become.
It's way worse than most people think it should be. And it's way worse than most people think it is.
The following screenshots are from a video created by a pseudonymous videographer called "Politizane." You can watch the video here or at the end of this presentation. There's one criticism of it that I'll address at the end, but the basic message is correct:
A couple of years ago, professors Dan Ariely and Michael Norton asked 5,000 Americans about wealth and inequality.
They wanted to see what wealth distribution Americans thought would be IDEAL ... and then compare this to the ACTUAL distribution of wealth in America.
To illustrate the findings, a videographer named "Politizane" reduced America's population to "quintiles" based on their wealth. ("Bottom 20%, Top 20%, etc.)
See the rest of the story at Business Insider