You are a One Percenter - Income Equality and Wealth Redistribution Starts with you

If fairness in income and the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor is something that is important to you, don't think that those who are leading this effort have limited it to within the borders of the United States.  In their eyes, people are people and the lesser ones all across the globe need to be lifted and that can only be done by redistribution.

By some measures the top 1 percent looking earthward reveals an income of $34,000 or more per person per year.  With the global median income estimated to be between $10,000 and $18,000 in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars per person per year, income equality worldwide, according to these folks, will have to come from the top one percent - those making $34,000 or more.

Purchasing Power Parity dollars are an equalizing calculation based upon the cost of living in different countries.   Since an American Dollar will buy more in Chad than it would in Luxembourg, to compare income from country to country parities have to be made.  Comparisons are made based upon what $1 will buy you in the USA.

The numbers and the parity calculations, which certainly could be questioned, have been compiled by the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) and only wage earners in 72 countries were counted.  But the discrepancy between the top one percent and the lower 99 percent in earnings no matter how they are compiled and analyzed, and the average wage determined in this study in the US at $37,000, puts most Americans well above the top one percent.

The $37,000 average for Americans is twice that of the higher end of the estimated average, putting even those who are defined by the Federal Poverty Levels as poor well above the median for the world ($10,000 to $18,000 per person per year) make our poor, in a global sense, if not rich, upper middle class, indeed.

To think that the income equality people are limited to Americans, or that the Americans who advocate this kind of fairness will not expand their sense of fairness globally is, of course, shortsighted. If you are one of these, but do not think that it would be fair to share your income with the rest of the world, your hypocrisy may exceed the premise of my writings.

There are a number of initiatives underway to accomplish this equality, but they will take time.  The agents of change have learned that people will accept the most radical of changes if they are imposed gradually as small cultural steps under the guise of kindness.

1. Opening our borders, first to Mexico, Central, and South America, and eventually accepting the poor as refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and other depressed income regions.  
2. Create labor, regulation, trade, and tax policies that make it attractive for American corporations to leave the country to provide jobs and income in poorer nations.
3. Support and pass global regulation treaties and accords that favor leniency for lessor income nations and come down expensively hard on the US.
4. Divert the corporate welfare to off-shore corporations that transfers wealth from the US taxpayers to underdeveloped countries.

In the time that these factors have been in place, global income inequality has successfully fallen somewhat, but remembering the essential definition of equality, much more will need to be done.  At the same time these factors have increased income inequality within the US, an acceptable side affect for the egalitarians for the time being.  As the wealth is transferred from the American poor and middle class to the poor of other nations, the rich in the US will get richer, see here.

But, if you take the opposition's approach of wealth not being a zero sum calculation, there is hope only in the creation of additional wealth worldwide.  From a redistribution aspect, if there is more wealth worldwide, even in the hands of the rich, there is more wealth to redistribute.