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Old 12-08-2011, 05:20 PM
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Riot Riot is offline
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Default 6 Walton heirs have the same amount of money as the bottom 30% of Americans

Does anybody begruge them their inherited wealth? Heck no.

But the income inequality is pretty damn noticable. Those in the top 1% have seen their incomes skyrocket, while the bottom 99% have had their real incomes stagnant and get smaller over the past 40 years.

The problem isn't capitalism, or being wealthy. The problem is that the system has been changed and set up and gamed, so that the wealthy get incredible breaks and get to keep and grow their money, while the poor earns 0.25% taxable on a savings account, and hopes for a mortgage deduction, while their wages go down while their production went up.

That's right: Americans are working more, producing more, but their relative incomes, their wages paid for their hard work, have gone down.

Put it this way: The US runs on the takeout. The wealthiest 1% live lives with little to no take out, but the bottom 99% has 15-30%. And they want to increase the take out on the bottom, to create more wealth at the top.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/08/the_...unding_family/
Quote:
[T]hen compared those numbers to the net worth of the six members of the Walton clan as reported on the Forbes 400 list in 2007. They are all children or children-in-law of the founders of Walmart. Their total net worth that year: $69.7 billion.

That’s equal to the wealth of the poorest 30 percent of all Americans, according to Allegretto’s calculations.

Six people. As much wealth as 30 percent of all Americans. In 2007, the population of the United States was 302.2 million people. Six people had as much wealth as 90.7 million of those people. Or, to put it in another way, we're not talking about the top 1 percent. We're talking about the top .00000002 percent.
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