US Inequality–Latin American Model?
December 3, 2010 Leave a comment
Highly unequal countries tend to become unstable and dangerous places. How unequal do you want the United States to become?
via Fixing The US Budget – Straightforward Or The Hardest Problem On Earth? « The Baseline Scenario.
Our country is gradually imitating the Latin American model of development with the latter’s great inequality (perhaps the worst region in the world), a huge gap between the few at the top of the income and asset pyramid and the mass at the bottom, accompanied by a fairly small middle. In the US the middle and bottom have access only to increasingly poor education, restricting opportunities to lower paying jobs and not ability to accumulate capital (worse after the housing crisis) during their lifetime.
In the US the chance of progressing, related to education and opportunity, is rapidly narrowing for the middle class in the current unemployment crisis. There seems to be little political desire to change the system.
The pure capitalist system works now for a few and, unless there is active government intervention to protect the low and middle income people, there is little prospect of changing these trends. Things will get worse if the US extends income tax reductions permanently to the high income groups.
About Stephen E. McGaughey
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