Wealth distribution in U.S. unfair
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E-mail Xinhua, May 25, 2012
A widening gap existed between the extreme top and bottom in the U.S. showing the country's apparent unfair wealth distribution, said a report on the U.S. human rights record released by the Chinese government on Friday.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 was released by the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 issued by the U.S. Department of State on Thursday.
The report said it is not as what the U.S. claims that the country has a large population of middle class, with only very few impoverished and extremely rich people.
Moreover, the richest 1 percent of American families have the fastest growth of family revenue from 1979 to 2007 with an increase of 275 percent for after-tax income, while the after-tax income of the poorest 20 percent grew by only 18 percent.
In the last 20 years, incomes for 90 percent of Americans have been stuck in neutral, while the richest 1 percent of Americans have seen their incomes grow by 33 percent, said the report.
In 2009 the ratio of wealth owned by the wealthiest 1 percent to the wealth owned by median household was 225 to 1, the report said.
In the U.S., the best-off 10 percent made on average 15 times the incomes of the poorest 10 percent, the report said, adding that the wealthiest 400 richest Americans have 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars' worth of assets, the same combined wealth as the poorest half of Americans, which are more than 150 million people.
The report also listed more figures showing the gap between the highest class and the lowest class in the U.S..
The annual incomes of the richest 10 chief executive officers (CEO) were enough to pay the salary of 18,330 employees, said the report.
In addition, roughly 11 percent of Congress members had net worth of more than nine million U.S. dollars, and 249 members were millionaires. The median net worth was 891,506 U.S. dollars, almost nine times the typical household, the report said.
Contrary to the wealthiest 10 percent, the number of Americans living in poverty as well as poverty rate continued to hit record high, which is a great irony in the affluent America, the report said.
The report also said that the percentage of American who lived below the poverty line in 2010 was 15.1 percent, the highest level since 1993, and the recession would have added nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor by the middle of the decade, said the report.
According to the report, 12 states of the U.S. had poverty rates above 17 percent, with Mississippi's poverty rate standing at 22.4 percent.
The U.S. has grown into a country dependent on food stamps, and the percentage of Americans who did not have enough money to buy food grew from 9 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2011, the report said.
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