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US WINS the race for most distorted income distribution (PRIZE: a right wing government) [1]

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Date: 2025-01-30



The United States is the clear winner in income and wealth inequality. It has run away from the field in its distortion for the benefit of the rich and super-rich. The US is an extreme outlier among developed nations, almost off the screen to the right. This fact is oddly little know by its citizens, but that does not keep the grotesque deformation from bringing with it a host of social and personal maladies. The US again leads in almost all categories, from high rates of alcoholism and drug abuse, to obesity, violence, mental health breakdown, educational under-performance, teenage pregnancy, imprisonment, and on and on.

The cataloging of the correlations between income inequality and sick society has been the work of British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, first in the book Spirit Level (2008) and continuing today with the Equality Trust. The ultra rich and sick societies go together, perhaps no surprise, but with mathematical confirmation.

To the dozens of dysfunctions that correlate with high income disparity, we can add another: right wing government. The more unequal your country, the more autocratic its government. “Briefing: The Link Between Inequality and the Far Right” Gross inequality in income and wealth translates directly to gross inequality in political influence, and directly to the breakdown of trust.

“This inequality rapidly causes a breakdown in trust: of politicians, of the media covering politics, and of the mechanisms of democracy itself. High income disparities also collapse trust across other areas of society by fostering an ‘othering’ mentality,”

One of the most flamboyant members of the plutocracy has surfed into the White House on a wave of distrust and outrage. Trump was backed largely by lower income, lower information suburban and rural white people, who perceive his peacock-like displays as strength or even competence. The oligarchs have coalesced behind him, obscenely wealthy plastic saints to this plastic Jesus. To minimize the event is to ignore reality.

Of course, the takeover of American government by the plutocrats has been the project of decades, as has the steady rise of income disparity. Examples are numerous. The right wing captured the Supreme Court early in this century (with its ruling that corporations are people with rights, as ridiculous as any of Trump’s wild claims). The Fed, the chief regulator of banking, has long since been captured by the commercial banks it is supposed to oversee. A dozen Senate seats in the low population Midwest States have been bought by Big Oil and Big Money, including John Thune of South Dakota, the new Senate majority leader. Dark money swirls in and out. The Koch machine produces cut-and-paste legislation it sends around to states with its financial backing. Every GOP presidential candidate must have a billionaire sponsor to be taken seriously.

So the takeover was well advanced before the coup de grace of electing a neofascist to rule your father’s democracy. I think that’s Elon Musk waving his agreement.

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The standard measure of income inequality is the Gini coefficient. It can be calculated in different ways, apparently. The scatter plot below comes from two sources. The higher and further to the right, the more income disparity. Please note: the maladies in a sick, unequal society are not reserved for the poorer classes. All income groups get to be more drug-addicted, more obese, have more severe mental illness, be more violent, spend more time in jail, etc., in the country with the more distorted distribution of income and wealth.

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