High Inequality Results in More US Deaths than Tobacco, Car Crashes and Guns Combined
http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/19/high-inequality-results-in-more-us-deaths-than-tobacco-car-crashes-and-guns-combined/In 2009, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a study that revealed what seems to be a shocking truth: those who live in societies with a higher level of income inequality are at a greater risk for premature death.
Here in the United States, our high level of income inequality corresponds with 883, 914 unnecessary deaths each year. More specifically, the report concluded that if we had an income distribution more like that of the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland — or eleven other wealthy countries — every year, about one in three deaths in the US could be avoided.
Put that into perspective. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), tobacco, including second-hand smoke, causes approximately 480,000 deathsevery year, and in 2010, traffic accidents killed 33,687 people and 31,672 othersdied of gunshot wounds.
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too deep for some.
Thomas Piketty Undermines the Hallowed Tenets of the Capitalist Catechism
Not only does capitalist growth not reduce inequality; it increases it.
by Jeff Faux
"Underneath the rhetoric, the actual message from our governing class is: have patience. The economic tide—bringing with it good jobs at good wages—will soon rise again. It always has.
But as the US economy crawls into the sixth year of recession and the fourth decade of stagnant real wages, the signals ahead tell us that this time it probably won’t.
The Obama administration’s “optimistic” ten-year forecast (for obvious reasons, administration forecasts always lean toward optimism) is for enough growth to drop the unemployment rate to 5.4 percent by 2018 and have it remain there until 2024. Given that joblessness averaged 4.6 percent in the three years before the 2008 crash while wages stagnated, the president’s own economists are implicitly predicting that the gap between workers’ production and workers paychecks will widen further.
Others are even less sanguine. Progressive economists like Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz—and now even the less-than-progressive Larry Summers—think that the US and European economies are trapped by chronic weak consumer demand. Their remedy is more government spending on education and infrastructure to put more money in customers’ pockets. But the reactionary fiscal austerity that dominates Washington and Brussels—even among the left-center parties—makes such aggressive Keynesianism a political non-starter for the foreseeable future."
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/20-5