The Widening Gap Between Rich And Poor

What is happening to us? We live in a society which is so wealthy there has been nothing like it before. If one took the Gross National Product of the United States and divided it by the population, the amount each one of us would have is over $500,000 per year and this is on the conservative side. If my math is wrong please drop me a line, but this is not really about math, but the fact there is enough wealth in the United States to eliminate poverty. It was said the gross national product for this country was 16,800 Billion Dollars in 2014. The population that year was said to be 317,000,000 people. So what is the problem? It is the way the wealth is concentrated. I think we all know it by now. Let’s not just look at wealth in the United States, let’s look at it on a global scale. The ultra-rich had good news last year. The world’s wealth passed $250 trillion dollars for the first time. Here is the sad part of things. To be counted in the richest half of the world’s population you only need to be making $3,650 a year. Seventy percent of the world is making less than $10,000 per year. Looking at the world from the other end of the spectrum, the top one percent of the richest people in the world own almost half of the world’s riches and the top ten percent own 87% of all the wealth in the world.

What do you think this is telling us? I think it is saying there is something wrong with the systems in the world for taking care of its citizens. I don’t know of anyone who thinks making money is wrong, but I know quite a few who think no one should be starving in this country or anywhere else for that matter. Isn’t there something wrong with a person who is ultra-rich but who wants to keep accumulating money at the expense of his or her workers who are struggling on a meager wage which is so low everyone in the family has to work just to live? While it may not be against the law of the land, it certainly seems immoral and unethical. So what should we do to correct this huge inequity? In the past people have tried socialism, communism and other utopian remedies, but this was short sighted. A society where everyone has exactly the same does not work. If one looks at socialism and communism they see systems which are not equal, they are only pretending to be. In the old communist system the state officials had much better lives than the ordinary people. The same is true in socialist states. The utopian experiments never worked on a scale larger than a few hundred people. I think human nature is such we have to try and better ourselves which means inequity.
There has to be some inequity. A brain surgeon should not be making the same as a ditch digger, but the ditch digger should make enough money to afford a roof over his head, food for his family and be able to take care of the family’s everyday needs. This is especially true in a rich country like the United States.

Unfortunately the rich companies have taken over the government along with the rich and powerful individuals and they control the lobbying which controls the legislators. They are determined to either hold wages down or reduce them even further to feather their investments even more. This is where the inequity really builds. One has to ask the question, how much money is enough and for these people the answer is no amount is enough.

One of the richest men in the world is Warren Buffett. The reason I picked him out of the pack is he is worth about 70 Billion Dollars, but this is not the only reason. I picked him because all he seems to do is collect money. He lives in a modest home, drives a modest car and can be seen walking in the street or riding a public conveyance. Β While many say he is a man of the people, I think what he is doing is one of the worst things. His money doesn’t get back into the economy except for his charitable contributions. He has made collecting money a game. In 2013 45.3 million people or 14.5% of the population were in poverty. There will always be those who will say things like it’s their own fault, or their lazy, but the truth is some of these people had great jobs before the economy declined and they lost them. The easiest thing to do is blame the poor for their condition. Yes there are some slackers to be sure, but they don’t account for anything near the 14 odd percent of poor. If I were Buffett this would bother me as I move my tens of billions of dollars around trying to increase their value. This certainly is not only true for Buffett, but also for the ultra-rich everywhere. If there was a law which said you had to retire if you value was one billion dollars or more, unless you gave 75% of your income to social and retraining programs for the poor, would that really hurt anyone? I don’t think so and it sure would be a great help solving the problem of the poor. On the other hand we need regulations stating the poor would have to find jobs no matter how low paying and they would receive supplements to bring them up to a living wage. If a poor person was too ill to work that would be a different matter, but they would have to be examined by a government doctor. We wouldn’t want any cheating would we?

There are problems with my idea and they are the ultra-rich would move out of the country so the law would have to be world-wide and we all know there are certain countries which wouldn’t agree to anything like this including this one. Would North Korea go along with this or the Sudan? Probably not and in some places the central governments are so nebulous they have no power to enforce anything. The ultra-rich would probably buy islands and declare them a separate country. It does seem impossible to enforce this idea, but it is something to talk about.

Something has to be done, the world just can’t keep going this way with the widening gap between the rich and poor. If it does, ultimately the rich will form their own areas and probably go to war against each other as they get in each other’s way in deal making and such. By then the world as we know it will have vanished and individuals will either be under corporate rule or under the rule of incredibly rich individuals.