Countries with the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor: We beat France!!!!!!

[Karmadillo]

Go USA!!!

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/107980/countries-with-the-biggest-gaps-between-rich-and-poor

The U.N. Development Program recently came out with a report looking, among other things, at income inequality worldwide.

The UNDP ranked countries and regions based on a number of factors, including their Gini coefficient, named for Italian statistician Corrado Gini.

We have listed the world's most advanced economies based on their Gini score, with zero marking absolute equality and 100 absolute inequality. Scandinavian countries, Japan, and the Czech Republic have the least amount of inequality. The U.S. is among the most unequal, but it's not No. 1. To see which economy is, read on.

Top 11 Countries With the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor

No. 1 Hong Kong

Gini score: 43.4
GDP 2007 (US$ billions): 207.2
Share of income or expenditure (%)
Poorest 10%: 2.0
Richest 10%: 34.9
Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%: 17.8

Renowned for its high concentration of Rolls-Royces, expensive real estate, and posh shops, the Chinese special administrative region has plenty of rich who enjoy showing off their wealth. However, Hong Kong also has one of the largest public housing sectors in the world, with about half the population living in government-supported or -subsidized housing estates. The city has no minimum wage—except for domestic helpers from the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries.

No. 2 Singapore

Gini score: 42.5
GDP 2007 (US$ billions): 161.3
Share of income or expenditure (%)
Poorest 10%: 1.9
Richest 10%: 32.8
Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%: 17.7

Singapore is one of the world's most open economies, and it suffered badly following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers last year. Recently, though, the city-state's economy has rebounded, with GDP growing an annualized 14.9% rate in the third quarter compared with the previous quarter.

No. 3 U.S.

Gini score: 40.8
GDP 2007 (US$ billions): 13,751.4
Share of income or expenditure (%)
Poorest 10%: 1.9
Richest 10%: 29.9
Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%: 15.9

The share of income for the top percentile of Americans was 23.5% in 2007, the highest since 1928, according to Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley economist who won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal in April. Income for the top 0.01% hit a record-high 6.04%. And the recession may be exacerbating income inequality.

No. 4 Israel

Gini score: 39.2
GDP 2007 (US$ billions): 164.0
Share of income or expenditure (%)
Poorest 10%: 2.1
Richest 10%: 28.8
Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%: 13.4

Gone are the days when Israel was one of the world's most egalitarian societies. Early Labor Zionist pioneers built kibbutzim for Jewish immigrants, but those collectives have fallen on hard times. The growing number of haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, with large families and men who study the Torah rather than work has worsened the inequality problem.

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[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

1. Where's my giant styrofoam #3 finger?

We're #3! We're #3!. But moving swiftly up the charts with a bullet. Just wait til next month!

[marmar]

2. Scandinavia "gets it"......

I remember thinking the whole time I was in Denmark: "Geez people seem happy and well-adjusted here."

[Karmadillo]

4. True. More proof: "Scared of Sweden?"

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=70675

Socialism.

There exists no other word in the English language that provokes as much irrational fear in the hearts and minds of Americans as fast as this one does.

And yet whenever I attempt to press someone on why, exactly, they are so scared, so absolutely petrified, of socialism, the only response I get is either a blank stare or incredulous anger, always coupled with the inevitable vague reference to the Soviet Union.

After all, don’t I understand what socialism means?!

I’m aware that the geography skills of most Americans are utterly nonexistent, but apparently no one has ever heard of Scandinavia, where socialism – or something very similar to it – has been operating vibrantly and arguably more successfully than capitalism in some of the world’s most affluent countries for decades.

Take Sweden, for example.

Sweden has what many people would call at least a substantially socialist economy. The government covers 97 percent of all health care costs, provides 88 percent of the funds for the cost of all education expenses (which makes education completely free until graduate school, at which point it becomes only mostly paid for by the government), pays 89 percent of the cost of daycare and guarantees more than a year of paternity leave at 80 percent pay, among other clearly communist notions.

According to the American conception of socialism, Sweden should be a desolate wasteland filled with mindless communist zombies, right? After all, they give poor people things after transferring money from people who can afford it (gasp!).

Wrong.

Sweden tops almost every list of state progress, including being ranked as the least corrupt and the most democratic nation on Earth, not to mention ranking in the top 15 percent for quality of life, GDP per capita, the Human Development Index (a measure of citizen happiness and personal development) and life expectancy – exactly the sorts of things that Americans might offer as examples of what are supposedly dismally lacking in any given socialist economy.

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[damntexdem]

3. Not a Gini-al Coefficient for us!

[KamaAina]

5. Watch your backs, Hong Kong and Singapore!

We're coming to get you!

Note that the only two countries "ahead" of us are basically city-states. (HK isn't even a country, but a Special Administrative Region of China.) Naturally income inequality is going to be higher in cities. A quck trip across East 96th St. in Manhattan will illustrate the point nicely.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

6. Yes, but we all can be CEO one day of course

On Thom Hartmann this morning, he interviewed a lady from the Kato Institute, the libertarian thinktank. I don't remember her name (she had a British accent). She was arguing against his point that our trade policies have resulted in the fact that we don't manufacture very much here anymore. She defended the policies and argued that it was great that everything is made abroad and factory jobs have disappeared. She said that in a Service economy, we have become service MANAGERS and EXECUTIVES instead of factory workers. I guess we're lucky in that we're all CEOs, Managers, and big bosses now in a service economy. Is McDonald's now calling its cash register workers CEOs, Executives, and Managers?

[Karmadillo]

7. Service manager? Me! Dare I hope!?!? Only in America, only in America.

nt

[Tashca]

8. Three easy steps.

I think we can easily make a move to number one in three easy steps.

1) Cut corporate taxes and of course capital gains taxes.

2) Cut taxes for the top 1%

3) Raise taxes for everyone else.

We have been following this formula and look where it's gotten us. Just a bit more tweaking and we'll be number one!!!