"U.S. Has Greater Income Inequality Than Russia or China"

If there’s a lesson from Occupy Wall Street, it’s that anger, tents, and drumming are no threat to the global financial system. Which is not to say that the Occupiers missed their mark. They wielded a brilliant array of indicators and statistics, held aloft for the world’s cameras and honed to inflict maximum damage to American self-esteem. For instance: “The U.S. has greater income inequality than Russia, China, and Cameroon.” In a dozen words the whole premise of American exceptionalism—that only here, under liberty, do fortunes rise and fall on merit—gets body-slammed. It’s a picket sign that leaves bruises. It also happens to be true.
The Gini index, devised by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912, measures income distribution on a scale of 0 to 1. Zero is a perfectly shared pie; one is a population in which a greedy actor hoards it all. In 2011 the U.S. Gini stood at 0.475, a 1.3 percent rise over the previous year and the first significant annual increase since 1993. The 1.2 million households that make up the top 1 percent of wealth saw their earnings increase by 5.5 percent last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the 96 million households that made less than $101,583, roughly 80 percent of Americans, earnings dropped 1.7 percent.

- Josh Tyrangial, Businessweek

The Gini coefficient is reliable enough that the CIA uses it to assess world conflicts and used comparatively here U.S. income inequality is even worse than you might expect. Perhaps most damning is China, significantly more equal than the U.S. with a Gini coefficient of 0.415, where the severe income gap has been a source of worsening political instability for almost 20 years.

Income inequality is more severe in the U.S. than it is in nearly all of West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. We're on par with some of the world's most troubled countries, and not far from the perpetual conflict zones of Latin American and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our income gap is also getting worse, having widened both in absolute and relative terms since the 1980s.

- Max Fisher, The Atlantic

The gap between rich and poor in America has gone from very bad to pathetic. Barack Obama will raise taxes on the rich and get healthcare help for the poor among other measures in order to address the gap but Mitt Romney will do little but set back with the rest of his wealthy Republican friends soaking in the "good" life letting things go on just as they have let things go on into the pathetic state of our present inequality.

This is essentially where the 30 year extension of anti-government Reaganomics has brought us. Tear down the unions, make the way for reckless globalization, eliminate government regulations and lower taxes.

There's the chart. A little more Republican red and you see what you get.