In an interesting article entitled The Rich and the Rest of Us, published in the June, 2008 edition of the Nation magazine, authors John Cavanagh & Chuck Collins point out that "[t]he richest 1 percent of Americans currently hold wealth worth $16.8 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than the bottom 90 percent. A worker making $10 an hour would have to labor for more than 10,000 years to earn what one of the 400 richest Americans pocketed in 2005."
They claim that Richistan did not suddenly appear in the United States, but instead evolved as a result of a three-decade "war against common sense" that "has preached that tax cuts for the rich help the poor, that labor unions keep workers from prospering, that regulations protecting consumers attack freedom. Duly inspired, our elected officials have rewritten rules that run our economy -- on taxes and trade, on wage policies and public spending -- to benefit wealthy asset owners and global corporations."
