Translated material
USA: worse even than in Uganda
A power that proudly positioned itself as a country of limitless opportunities, judging by the latest data, in fact turned out to be a state of super-unequal opportunities for its citizens. The rich there become even richer, and the poor become even poorer than before. And the gap between their incomes is growing so rapidly that the world superpower has surpassed even African Uganda, which has barely set foot in civilization, in terms of this shameful indicator.
On official paper, the United States has left the mid-2009 recession far behind it and is now confidently pursuing economic growth. However, in reality, the vast majority of citizens, with the exception of the richest one percent of Americans, practically did not notice these beneficial changes.
The German newspaper Handelsblatt talks, for example, about 52-year-old Anita Reyes, a casino employee in Minneapolis, whose salary has been frozen since 2009. Anita allows herself only a can of soup for dinner for one dollar and 67 cents and makes great efforts to save her tiny house, which she almost lost for debt on loans a couple of months ago. “Two or three years ago I would never have dreamed in my wildest dreams that I could be left without a roof over my head,” laments the American woman.
Things are going completely differently for Stephen Hamsley. His salary is also frozen, which, however, cannot be said about his income as the head of a medical concern. He has earned $1.3 million a year since 2007, and since the American economy recovered, he has exercised more than $170 million in stock options, plus another $51 million in sales.
These two examples clearly demonstrate that there are two completely different types of economic recovery in the United States. The richest 1.2 million households, who make up the top one percent of the nation's wealth distribution, increased their income by 5.5 percent last year, the U.S. Census Bureau reports. At the same time, for the 96 million households occupying the bottom 80 percent of this scale, incomes, on the contrary, decreased by 1.7 percent.
In other words: the lion's share of 93 percent of all income growth due to the so-called economic recovery ended up in the pockets of the clearly not ordinary one percent of Americans. The United States has not seen such a gap between the incomes of the poor and the rich for more than forty years. The idea that each new generation of American people would be better off than the last—a key aspect of the American dream—suddenly came into question. Over the past decade, for the first time since World War II, Americans' average income has fallen.
As the economy began to recover, it suddenly became clear that in America it is more profitable to own shares than to own a house. From the official end of the recession in June 2009 to the present, the value of outstanding shares has jumped from $6 trillion to $14 trillion. Over the same period, the value of owned real estate fell by $41 billion. Since 2006, the value of American homes has fallen by a total of $5.8 trillion. Meanwhile, for middle-class families, real estate is their main asset.
The most far-sighted Americans are sounding the alarm. Former American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall states bluntly: “This gross income imbalance will destroy our democracy! It feels like all responsibility has been lost. When the owner of an enterprise makes a profit, his employees should receive checks with their share along with him. However, this is increasingly not happening.”