Les termes descriptifs en phénoménologie artistique

« We are the 99 percent », it’s the rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. They say that a tiny minority controls America’s wealth. So, how rich have the richest got and how poor are the rest of us? Is it really 99% versus 1%? The richest 1 percent of the US population own a third of the US net worth. So, how did we get here? When times were good, everyone gained. In Bill Clinton’s boom of 1993 to 2000, average incomes went up just as they did during George W. Bush’s boom at the beginning of his presidency. But if you were rich, you gained even more. That’s nearly half of all the growth in the Clinton boom years. Under George W. Bush it was even more; and there are some really rich people in the US today. In fact, there are now over 4 million millionaires but these are not the richest of all. The US has over 530 billionaires, just behind China. But who’s at the top of that pile? Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos have a combined net worth of 240 billion dollars. That’s just over the combined budget shortfall of every state in the US for 2016, more than the cost of the global war on terror in 2010. But haven’t the rich lost out as well as the poor in the economic crash? When the economy tanked, everyone suffered. The 24 million least wealthy households in the US saw their average income go down by 10 percent. If you were super-rich, it went down too. The 530 wealthiest American households lost around 4 percent. So the richest lost 4%, the poorest lost 10%. Part of the reason average Americans have been hit so hard is where their wealth comes from. Before the crash, middle-class Americans had 65% of their wealth tied up in their house but the 1% of the population kept most of their wealth in stocks and shares and business. So when house prices went south, many Americans found their wealth disappearing too. Now, one in every seven Americans lives below the poverty line, that’s a record: nearly 50 million people. One in 6 Americans has no health insurance, that’s also 50 million people. Of every 17 Americans, at least one will be earning below the minimum wage. Nearly 15% of American households are defined as food insecure that means for every seven households, one will have trouble putting enough food on the table. Nonetheless, some things are doing very well. Sales of luxury cars are up, big luxury brands have reported their best sales figures in years like Louis Vuitton, Givenchy or Porsche. According to a Washington Post investigation, since the 1970s median pay for executives at the nations’ largest companies has more than quintupled. Over the same period, pay for a typical non-supervisory worker has dropped more than 10%. But, don’t the super-rich pay taxes? They do, just not quite so much as the rest of us.

So is it 99 percent versus one percent? As we said, the richest 1% of the US population own a third of the US net worth but an even smaller group, the 0.01% are at a record high. Therefore, we should talk of 99.99% vs 0.01%.

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