Well a lot of that has to do with this notion that Westerners shouldn't be getting their hands dirty by doing "menial assembly line stuff"...so let's ship all that to developing countries and send all our people to college and give everybody cushy white collar jobs at desks and offices.
Well that little experiment didn't quite work.
We now have 40% of US households making over $100,000/yr being catered to while the other 60% are scrambling to stay afloat.
That's basically the bottom line. To make matters worse is when you have
both spouses in white collar jobs...then you have large numbers of $200,000 income households who really have lots of clout...
skewing things even more between the "haves" and "have nots".
That's when the big new houses start popping up everywhere and being sold quickly.
So there isn't an easy solution for wealth inequality. The US is a victim of its own success.
You going to ban two people from getting married or something? Tax them both at 75%??
How are you going to deal with a
large number of $200,000 income households while others are lucky to make $50,000? That's a 4X gap that isn't going to go away easily. You've got one group happily shopping for $20/lb+ steaks at
Whole Foods while the other group is struggling to find under $5/lb deals at Walmart.
