In rich America, Third World inequality: Bernd Debusmann
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The minimum wage in the world's richest country has just been raised by almost 12 percent. That followed a 13.6 percent hike last year and looks like major progress for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. At first sight, at least.
Examined more closely, the figures highlight poverty and economic inequality of Third World proportions.
The latest increase took effect last week and brought the minimum wage to $6.55 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, this is less than it was in 1964, the year President Lyndon Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty in America."
Poverty won, as free-market champion Ronald Reagan put it a quarter of a century later.
Then, 13 percent of the U.S. population lived below the official poverty line. In 2006, the most recent year for which the U.S. Census Bureau has statistics, it stood at 12.3 percent, or 36.5 million people. On the other end of the scale, the U.S. economy produced billionaires at a steady pace.
There are 469 of them, by the latest count of Forbes magazine. In 1982, when the magazine started its annual list of the richest Americans, there were just 13 billionaires. Today, the United States has the largest gap between rich and poor of any Western industrialized country. In terms of equitable distribution of income and wealth, the U.S. is closer to Iran, Argentina or Mexico than to Canada or Germany.
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