Poverty, inequality in America reaches record proportions

 By Cyrus Safdari 

 The domestic context: a nice war with Iran would do much to distract people from this reality: The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net Here's a fun fact: The top 10% of the population in the US owns 75% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% of the people own only about 1% percent of the nation's wealth. Yes, that's not a typo: Half of the US population, all together, own only ONE PERCENT of the nation's wealth. And this has been goingon for a while so its not a temporary Democrat vs. Republican thing: The study found that the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of households grew from 1989 to 2010. In every other segment of the remaining 90 percent of households -- i.e. the middle and lower class -- that share went down. It should be noted that while poverty levels are reaching 1962 levels, the income disparity in the US has exceeded the robber-baron days of the turn of the last century. In fact, today in America, the average CEO earns in a single day what an average worker earns in more than a year (the top CEOs earn more in a year than workers earn in 3,489 years) and this trend in disparity continues to grow. According to a Columbia University Nobel prize winner, the American Dream is dead: In the last 30 years the share of national income held by the top 1% of Americans has doubled; for to the top 0.1%, their share has tripled...Because the children of those at the top of society tend to do better than those at the bottom — thanks, in part, to better education, health care and nutrition — the income inequality that's slowly emerged over the past 30 years will only widen in the next 10 to 20 years. Internationally, Brand America already took a massive beating with the Iraq/Afghan wars, what with Bush's lies about WMDs and the legalization of torture etc. and now it turns out that America is having a hardtime feeding its own people: In 2010 48.8 million Americans lived in food insecure households, meaning they were hungry or faced food insecurity at some point during the year. That’s 12 million more people than faced hunger in 2007, before the recession, and represents 16.1 percent of the U.S. population...nearly half of the households seeking emergency food assistance reported having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food. Nearly 40 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food. More than a third reported having to choose between their medical bills and food. Apart from the specific case of Iran, the bigger question is how will this affect American "soft power" projection in the world...or do we not care about that anymore since the US military budget has continued to expand* despite efforts to reduce it? (*Note that in the past, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were largely funded through supplementary spending bills outside the Federal Budget, so they are not included in the military budget figures from past years.)