In the US, All Men Are Created Unequal

The gap between rich and poor in America has never been wider, and the latest figures show it is getting much worse.  New figures from the Internal Revenue Service show that income disparities grew substantially from 2002 to 2003. After adjusting for inflation, the after-tax income of the one percent of households with the highest incomes shot up in 2003 by an average of nearly $49,000 per household while the after-tax incomes of the bottom 75 percent of households fell on average.

And the corporations and the bosses have done even better. 

During this recovery period, wages and salaries as a whole have grown less than half as fast as the average growth during other post-World War II recoveries. Meanwhile, corporate profits have grown more than half as fast as in other recoveries.  Separate surveys of pay trends by Business Week and Forbes magazines both found huge increases in the compensation of chief executive officers (CEOs) in 2004. The Business Week article observed that from 2003 to 2004 “CEO raises and total pay once again dwarfed those of theaverage worker.” The Forbes report found that the CEOs of the nation’s 500 largest companies received an “aggregate 54 percent pay raise last year…. That easily outpaced 2003’s eightpercent raise.”

Capitalism is by definition designed to create inequality, and modern consumerist-capitalism merely exacerbates that built in tendency.  But rarely do we see a government encouraging this income spread as Bush as his allies do.  The Bush family slogan should be: From the many to the few.