| Arminillo said: I would say the bar to comfortable living is a lot lower than the top percentage of income in America. America does a lot for their poor population, it just is also one of the biggest captialist countries in the world, so that 'inequal' pay gap is to be expected. |
Fair point, but as well as income ineqaulity (which is getting worse over time even when the US economy isnt getting better) the US has inequality in many other areas that also affect income
Some examples
- CEOs in 1965 made 24 times more than the average production worker, whereas in 2009 they made 185 times more
- In the United States, 21 percent of all children are in poverty, a poverty rate higher than what prevails in virtually all other rich nations.
- There are 750,000 Americans who are homeless on any given night
- High-school dropout rates are least among whites and highest among Hispanics, while college enrollment rates are least among blacks and highest among whites.
- Only college graduates have experienced growth in median weekly earnings since 1979 (in real terms). High school dropouts have, by contrast, seen their real median weekly earnings decline by about 22 percent.
- Resumes with “white-sounding” names, whether male or female, were much more likely to result in call backs for interviews than were those with “black-sounding” names (even though the resumes were otherwise identical)
- The incarceration rate in the United States has grown so dramatically since the 1970s that the U.S. now has one of the highest rates in the world. The rise in incarceration has been especially prominent among young Black males and high school dropouts.
- In 2007, 8.1 million children under 18 years old were without health insurance. Children in poverty and Hispanic children were more likely to be uninsured.
Note, it's not just income, income inequality is a just a convient way to measure inequality within one easy value, but inequality is far more widespead in many areas of society, the US is one of the worst countries for this issue and it's growing fast
