Ever notice how car trips clear your head? I took a brief one this weekend, and, at one point on the road, I found myself marveling at all the cars around me and contemplating the regularly spaced street lights that line the interstate. Aware of the energy all that motion and electricity require, I remembered just how rich I am — just how rich we all are. It made me wonder why, in all the tumult and commotion of the Occupy Wall Street protests, I haven’t once heard a protester clamor to redistribute his own wealth to the world’s poorest.
They want to talk about the haves and the have-nots? Let’s talk about them. Earlier this year, World Bank economist Branko Milanovic released a book called “The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.” In it appears this provocative chart:
The chart can be a bit confusing to interpret at first (for an in-depth explanation of how to read it, click here), but the gist of it is pretty clear. Firstly, the relative flatness of the United States’ income inequality line reveals that income inequality in the U.S. is not nearly so great as it is in a country like Brazil, for example, where the nation’s poorest are among the world’s poorest and the nation’s richest are among the world’s richest. Secondly, the placement of the U.S.’ income inequality line along the Y-axis reveals that the U.S.’ poorest are still among the richest people on earth.
As The New York Times’ Catherine Rampell explains, the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants. As a group, America’s poorest are about as rich as India’s richest. Just by virtue of the fact that they were born in the United States (if, in fact, they were), very few of the Occupy Wall Street protesters can claim to be anything other than the “very rich” — the very class of people the protesters are protesting.
In other words, just as we suspected, the vast majority of America’s “Occupiers” are simply spoiled brats.
And, even if their own parents didn’t spoil them, their schools taught them to feel entitled.
While our Constitution promises equal opportunities our spoiled rotten brats insist on equal outcomes.
(I’d love to see them dropped off in one of those other countries where they would be seen as the rich.)
@Nan G: Right on Nan!! A bunch of spoiled brats who where raised by a bunch of spoiled brats who expect something for nothing. I saw it when I went to college in the late sixties, I saw it raising my daughters here in Souther California, and I see it now. I am part of the 99% but not part of these idiots who demonstrate with no answers. It looks to me like a lot of those my age just didn’t grow up and want to demonstrate because that’s all they know how to do.