A widening gap and a justified award
Two mostly unrelated things struck me today.
First, of course, was the news of Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Any man who can push right wing zealots and their libertarian enablers to extremes of rage merely by winning an award is OK in my book. The fact that he's doing so by promoting science over greed and fact over dogma makes his award all the more sweet.
Second, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening:
According to recent data from the Internal Revenue Service, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all U.S. income earned in 2005.
One fifth of all the income in this country is controlled by one percent of the population. To be a member of that club, an individual would have to make in excess of $364,000 per year.
Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of wage earners only hold 13 percent of the nation's income.
Got that? The top one percent of wage earners in this allegedly egalitarian society earn almost 1.5 times as much as the lowest half of the population combined.