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What's This?
We're All the 1 Percent
The U.S. middle class is still incredibly wealthy by international standards.
BY CHARLES KENNY | MARCH/APRIL 2012
After 30 years of greed being good and rising tides lifting all boats, inequality -- or "class warfare," if you prefer -- is back on the political agenda.
The Occupiers who camped out in central squares from Melbourne to Oakland, denouncing the "1 percent" for its supposedly ill-gotten gains, have a point: Inequality is out of control. But these mainly middle-class complainers are an incredibly coddled bunch by any international reckoning. This is good news, because we're going to need to tax them more if we're ever going to solve the world's real inequality problem: the estimated 900 million people who live on less than $1.25 a day.
First things first: America's rich are really, really rich. U.S. Census data suggest every man, woman, and child in the top 1 percent of U.S. households gets about $1,500 to live on each day, every day. By contrast, the average U.S. household is scraping by on around $55 per person per day. But the global average is about a fifth of that.
So by global standards, America's middle class is also really, really rich. To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. The average family in the United States has more than three times the income of those living in poverty in America, and nearly 50 times that of the world's poorest. Many of America's 99 percenters, and the West's, are really 1 percenters on a global level./.../
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