Your taking out one of the leading if not the most important barometers of a societies well being

Economic inequality can not be ignored 

What does the influence of lobbyists (which can have nothing to do with the 1% : see NRA) have to do with Human Development Index? 

I'm sorry, as long as the government has the power it does there will always be an establishment who takes advantages of the economic special interests it has to offer. Look at congress, most members of congress don't go in as millionaires, yet they come out as millionaires. Why? Because they set up for themselves government contracts, and deals which reward them for favors. This would be true regardless of the income inequality of a society, unless of course we're talking about utopian communism where money is abolished and everybody is allocated equal resources. How must we fix it? Remove the power of economic special interests from the governments plethora of powers. Otherwise, regardless of the income distribution you will find this same corruption. 

Deceiving title... 

I thought this was about inequity in America, not the USA.

Do the top NOT deserve this wealth ?!

The way I see it is that the top 1% are the ones providing the jobs around here while also the ones who mostly made their own businesses. They should be the ones deciding who gets whatever wage they'll assign.

Being poor is usually a result of making bad decisions initially.

I love these new catch phrases being pushed by the media in this country. Gender inequality, wealth inequality, etc.

What exactly does wealth inequality mean, anyway? That some folks out there have more money than others? Right, like THAT'S never happened before in human history. There was never a time where a wealthy minority coexisted with a frugal majority. This all started with the rise of Corporate America over the last 30 years or so.

But nevermind the huge advancements in standards of living, quality of life and technology made in just the last 30 years... a couple people made billions along the way, and we can't have that!

Are you seriously making the technology argument?  "We have better technology! Being poor is BETTER than it used to be!  Whatever are you complaining about?"  That's absurd.  It's ridiculous.  And you completely miss the point.  Completely.  Technological advancement is a constant, it raises quality of life for everyone, but does nothing to ease the economic burdens of the impoverished.

Nobody's complaining about billionaires, they complain about the shifting of wealth into few and fewer hands.  Of COURSE some people are poor and others are rich.  Money is moving away from the lower and middle classes and into the hands of a few -'the 1%' as they're sometimes referred to.  That is the inequality, and rising inequality, that is a problem not just for the poor, but for the overall economic situation of the country.  It will ruin the rich along with everyone else when the inequality becomes too great a strain on the economy, on the government, and everything collapses.  (I hope you didn't think the "Great Recession" was bad)

This sentence is literally everything wrong with Capitalism. 

Money should never, under any circumstances, equal power.

Did you expect South America? Those coffee farmers in Colombia..... they have it rough :P

Look to science to answer that one 

In most of Human existence (100,000 years) we have had little wealth inequality (hunter gather culture) people would share most resources mostly evenly, it's only roughly in the past 5000 years where moderate to high levels of wealth inequality has become common

Lets not kid ourselves we have evolved with sharing most resources most of the time, that's' how we survived to later become the dominated species of Earth, it's part of who we are, we naturally don't like it when others get far more than us, we accept it once we are conditioned, but we naturally feel most comfortable when people are mostly equal to each other.

Since agriculture we have changed this basic principle into one where some have a lot more resources than others, and the ones with the most resources often use it to control the ones with less, creating social problems because people feel less looked after and feel less valued unlike in our hunter gather ancestors who felt valued because they mostly shared in the spoils of the hunting and gathering

I don't blame people for thinking we have always have to live with inequality, it because it's all we have know and are conditioned to it, but the reality for vast periods of Human culture is that is was very different and equatable, our Human DNA has evolved to work best and happiest in as close to an equatable society as possible 

I was expecting the whole continent, not just a portion of it.