Skip to main content

What the Gini Coefficient Means

How and why is there such a he gap between the Haves and Have Nots, which exacerbates inequality of lifestyle and wages and promotes a death spiral of the Have Nots by a very uneven playing field in education and healthcare? Without good paying jobs, poor educational opportunities and no healthcare, the poor find themselves in a very dark hole with no ladder to climb out. Faced with this, people go to the servile mode to survive and will do whatever to survive. It is the survival of the fittest, which is one step away from war. The money people who could change this just keep hording more money and depressing the proletariats more by trying to stop unions and taking away their voting rights with voter identification gimmicks. This attack on the workers here in the U.S. is the same thing going on all over the world. If the capitalist system is going to survive the 1 percent must make some changes and invest in using their cash to create manufacturing jobs and not just shifting paper from place to place. All this does is make the 1 percent richer, but does nothing else for anyone else except allows the 1 percent to hoard even more money while stifling the economy and driving the inequality of the world. Just look at the most used measures of income inequality it is called the Gini Coefficient. The “Gini index measures the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditure among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots the cumulative percentages of total income received against the cumulative number of recipients, starting with the poorest individual or household. The Gini index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a hypothetical line of absolute equality, expressed as a percentage of the maximum area under the line. Thus a Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality,” according to the World Bank. The CIA’s world fact book gives Gini Coefficient for 141 countries and it shows the Scandinavian countries do well as they have low inequality. The U.S. ranks 41st, meaning 41st from the bottom–yea America! We have fractionally more equality than Peru and Uruguay, but less than the Philippines, Cameroon, Guyana, Iran and many other countries. This needs to change and if it doesn’t the capitalist system as we know it today will change to a type of hybrid system or just go away. Then what good will all that money hording by the rich do for them? It might be very good for the Have Nots if nothing changes. We may soon find out.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Now is the Time to Prepare

I hope that I am wrong, but what I see at this time is our unions are going to be in the fight of their existence. This is the most perilous time of our life. The life we had is threatened like never before. Unions are the largest organized group of people who can save our country if things keep going the way they are heading at this time. We need to all stand together for power, but we each must prepare and plan to take care of ourselves and our families. We can fight the big fight and not be distracted by worry about things that can and should already be taken care of. For instance, stashing at least one month’s pay and at least a month or even a year’s worth of food, whether the food is staples (pasta, rice, canned goods) and meat or chicken in the freezer. Keep your vehicles' tanks full and if possible a gas can full. It’s in your best interest to also save money for house or rent payments plus extra. This is not new thinking for us old trade workers who had to prepare when...

They'll Be Coming For All Of Us

Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...

We Are the Power

Looks like there is hope for the union workers and our country for the union people who believed Trump’s lies, who now know that he was just full of bullshitting all of you. He said the he would bring more work to this country, but took away money from job projects, and the ones that were too late to stop, Trump put his name on it and is taking credit for the work done. Trump is not a union supporter and the people who work for him do not support unions either because they all get their money from big corporations, who are notoriously anti-union. The entire GOP is bought and paid for by large corporations, such as Home Depot, Walmart, Chamber of Commerce and many other nonunion selfish companies. We all have a chance to change things and take it all back if we dare by voting blue in the mid-term elections. If we vote for things that are what we really need like healthcare, good pensions, living wages, voting rights, more affordable housing, and rent control. In other words, let’s get a...