This is America Too

The Income Gap

It's more than low income. It's despair, It's hopelessness. It's the powerless and voiceless.

It's more than throwing money at a situations. It's about facilitating long term solutions with the help of those affected.

The World Bank says access to good schools, health care, electricity, safe water, and other critical services remains elusive for many people, often determined by socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, and geography. Moreover, for those who have been able to move out of poverty, progress is often temporary: Economic shocks, food insecurity and climate change threaten to rob them of their hard-won gains and force them back into poverty.

The World Bank's goal is ending extreme poverty within a generation and promoting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner across the globe. This at a time when the elite continue gather and hold more than the rest of the world. The gap is widening.

According to inequality.org, the world’s 10 richest billionaires own $745 billion in combined wealth, a sum greater than the total goods and services most nations produce on an annual basis.

Mind Our Gap

The gap is widening here. According to a recent report on CNBC, The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

The top 1 percent of families took home an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent in 2015, according to a new paper released by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. This has increased since 2013, showing that income inequality has risen in nearly every state.

Tax breaks for the rich are always touted as job creators as they invest in the economy. All boats will rise?

Maybe not. There are more jobs. Unemployment is low, but wages remain relatively low. The gap widens.

Worldwide?

According to Oxfam

Inequality gap widens as 42 people hold same wealth as 3.7bn poorest. The goal of shared prosperity seems further out of reach.