Goldman Sachs humor...

"The market was so bad today that Goldman Sachs had to lay off three congressmen."
---Jay Leno

Inégalités aux US

El Blogo cite cette déclaration de Warren Buffett à chaque occasion:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Warren Buffett, 26 novembre 2006

Traduction du blogo:
"Il y a une lutte des classes aux Etats-Unis, bien sûr, mais c'est ma classe, la classe des riches qui mène la lutte. Et nous gagnons."
(voir New York Times, November 26, 2006 et CNN Interview, May 25 2005)

Daily Kos a un post résumant la réalité statistique:

Open Thread for Night Owls: The Class Divide

by Meteor Blades

Fri May 07, 2010 at 09:04:51 PM PDT

At In These Times, Roger Bybee writes:

As Les Leopold notes in The Looting of America, the richest 1% of earners collected 8% of national income in 1973. "By 2006, the top 1% got nearly 23% of the pie, the highest proportion since 1929, " he writes. Moreover, the richest 1% now earns more than the bottom 50% of Americans. During almost exactly the same period, the pay gap between the top 100 CEOs and workers rose from 45 to 1 in 1970 to Himalayan proportions in 2006, reaching 1,723 to 1, Leopold says, citing data from Forbes.

But one of the most significant and least-discussed elements in the stunning polarization of America is the extent to which rising productivity has become unhitched from the way that its rewards are distributed.

Leopold lays out the astonishing data on this disparity:

By 2007, real wages in today's dollars had slid from their peak of $746 per week in 1973 to $612 per week--an 18% drop. Had wages increased along with productivity, the current average wage for nonsupervisory workers would be $1,171 per week--$60,892 instead of today's average of $31,824.

Our real average compensation is now about $25 per hour, including all benefits, representing a small increase from the early 1970s [in part created simply because of the sharp rise in health costs.] If it had risen along with productivity, it would be more like $41 an hour. The productivity bonus--about $16 an hour--is still AWOL.

Over roughly the same period, the ratio of household debt to income went from 55% to 127%, as Americans tried to make up for the loss of real wages with increased use of their credit cards.

American families have found themselves with vastly reduced time off the job, losing vacation days, sick time, and other leave. Until the recession hit, we were working the longest hours in the world.

While the numbers for income are highly skewed, those for wealth are even worse, as shown by these graphs.

^{Click for clearer image}