On November 3rd, Morning Consult’s Jon Reid bannered, “Poverty on the Rise in Nearly All House Districts” and he reported that, “A Brookings Institution study, released less than a week before the election, shows that the number of people living in poverty has increased in 96 percent of congressional districts between 2000 and 2010-2014.”
That finding fits along with others, such as that the economic ‘recovery’ after Barack Obama came into the White House in 2009, went virtually entirely to the very rich.
According to the top experts on wealth-inequality in the United States, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, American wealth-inequality soared faster during 2003-2013 than ever since the period 1923-1928, right before the Great Crash of 1929. Their study “Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913”, published in the May 2016 Quarterly Journal of Economics, reported that ever since the remilitarization of the U.S. from the 2003 invasion of Iraq onward (and continuing under Obama, with boosts to NATO, and invasions such as of Libya in 2011), the percentage of total wealth owned by the richest .1% of American families (those families whose net worth was $111 million or higher) rose from 15% of the total in 2003, to 22% of the total in 2013, and this means that the percentage going to the lower 99.9% declined from 85% down to 78% during that time.
America’s soaring inequality during the George W. Bush Presidency continued unaffected by the 2009 change of Presidential Administrations.