En anden beregning ligeledes foretaget af Forbes Magazine i år estimerer, at der nu er 1,125 milliardærer på verdensplan. De 42% af disse bor i USA og ejer tilsammen 37% af den totale rigdom. Verdens milliardærer ejer tilsammen $4.4 billioner dollars, hvilket er 900 milliarder mere end sidste år. Disse 1,125 milliardærer udgør oprundet 0.000017 % af jordens samlede befolkning.
Mindst halvdelen af verdens befolkning lever for under $2.5 om dagen,
Mindst 80% af verdens befolkning lever af mindre end $10 om dagen.
Mindst 80% af verdens befolkning lever i lande hvor indkomstforskellene er stigende.
Antallet af børn i verden: 2,2 milliard.
Antallat af børn der lever i fattigdom: 1 milliard.
Kilde: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats
24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less)
10 percent of all Americans—15 million Americans—earn $6.79 or less
33.3 percent of African American works and 39.3 of Hispanic workers earn poverty wages.
The share of our entire national income hoarded by the top one percent is, as of 2005, 21.8 percent. The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.
We accept poverty as a fact of life in this country—partly because workers have not gotten the fair share of their hard work over the past three decades (in Republican and Democratic Administrations). If productivity and wages had kept their historic link (meaning, as workers were more productive, that translated into higher paychecks), the MINIMUM WAGE in the country would be $19.12. Yes, $19.12.
At the recent new minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, if you worked every single day, 40 hours a week, with no vacations, no holidays, no health care and no pension, you would earn the grand sum of $13.624. The POVERTY LEVEL for a family of three is $17,600.
47 million Americans have no health care and tens of millions more have inadequate or costly health care that can bankrupt them.
Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans—that means, pensions that give retirees a promised monthly amount—plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today. It’s a Dog Food Retirement future for millions of people.
All those numbers above do relate to the more narrow crisis in a very specific way: without being able to rely on their paychecks to survive, a lot of people got sucked into the housing bubble mania as an economic coping mechanism. Home equity credit lines substituted for decent pay, retirement and affordable, quality health care. And we know the rest.
http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view_post.php?content_id=9646
The New York Times February 2, 2005
Study Ties Bankruptcy to Medical Bills
By REED ABELSON
Sometimes, all it takes is one bad fall for a working person with health insurance to be pushed into bankruptcy.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans file for personal bankruptcy each year because of medical bills - even though they have health insurance, according to a new study by Harvard University legal and medical researchers.
"It doesn't take a medical catastrophe to create a financial catastrophe," said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who studies bankruptcy and is one of the authors of the study.
The study, which is scheduled to appear today on the Web site of Health Affairs, an academic journal, provides a glimpse into a little-researched area connecting bankruptcy and medical costs. About 30 percent of people said they filed for bankruptcy because of an illness or injury, even though most of them had health insurance when they first got sick.
Many lost their jobs - and their insurance - because they got sick, while others faced thousands of dollars in co-payments and deductibles and for services not covered by their insurance.
One person cited in the bankruptcy study, for example, broke a leg, missed a couple of months of work and then had $13,000 in unpaid medical bills, though his employer-based health plan had already paid for much of his care, Ms. Warren said.
Another respondent to the survey was able to pay for hospital stays for lung surgery and a heart attack but could not return to his old job. When he found a new job, he was denied coverage because of his pre-existing conditions, which continued to require costly medical care and contributed to his bankruptcy.
Policy analysts say these findings underscore the limitations of the nation's current system of providing health insurance largely through employers. Some argue that even for those with insurance, benefits can be ephemeral.
"You can lose it because it's tied to employment," said Joseph Antos, a health policy researcher with the American Enterprise Institute, who said people were also at risk if their employers went out of business.
To understand the effect of illness or injury on bankruptcy, the researchers surveyed 1,771 people who filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and interviewed 931 of them. They discovered a complex web of factors leading to bankruptcy, particularly as illness caused people to lose their jobs or cut back the hours they worked just as they were facing high medical bills.
Many of those families, Ms. Warren said, then "endured a one-two punch."
The researchers examined those who specifically reported that their bankruptcies were precipitated by financial burdens caused by medical illness. They also included in a broader category of medical-related bankruptcy people who had more than $1,000 in unpaid medical bills at the time of the bankruptcy filing or had mortgaged their home to pay those bills.
The researchers acknowledged that often there was no single reason why someone went bankrupt. "There's definitely overlapping reasons," said Steffie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard and one of the authors of the report.
They also pointed to gaps in coverage that left people vulnerable to financial crisis - particularly when workers switched jobs or were temporarily unable to afford contributions to a health plan. The high cost of continuing coverage under Cobra, the federal rule that allows former employees to stay on health plans for a time if they pay the entire cost, "is a cruel joke to these people," Ms. Warren said.
Even when people remain insured, the study also notes that many health plans have limits on certain kinds of coverage, like physical therapy or prescription drugs.
"If you're sick enough long enough, you're in deep trouble in our society," said David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, another of the study's authors.
While some policies do offer catastrophic coverage, which pays for care after costs reach a certain threshold, Dr. Himmelstein said that coverage "often kicks in after people are bankrupted" because they must incur high medical bills to qualify.
And employees, who often have little choice of plans and frequently do not understand the differences among plans, are increasingly offered policies with less and less coverage, some policy analysts say.
"There's a race to the bottom in terms of what health insurance means today," said Ron Pollack, the executive director of Families USA, a consumer advocacy group in Washington.
This area is ripe for additional research, said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a professor at Princeton University, who said that there had not been enough hard evidence about working Americans who became ill and then went broke. "We put together vignettes, but they are not powerful enough," he said.
The findings also raise questions about the effect of asking employees to bear a greater share of health cost through higher co-payments and the like. Many employers are shifting the increasing cost of care onto their employees, arguing that that trend gives workers an incentive to make judicious use of health care. But the researchers say higher co-payments and deductibles may well exacerbate the problem of medical bankruptcies.
The 50 Richest Members of Congress
By Paul Singer, Jennifer Yachnin and Casey Hynes
Roll Call Staff
22/09/08 "Roll Call" -- - Everything that you are about to read might be wrong.
Roll Call’s annual attempt to rank the riches of Members of Congress is hampered by one fundamental flaw: It is based on the lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms, which are extraordinarily unreliable sources of information.
The disclosure rules allow Members to report assets in broad categories, so there is no way to tell the difference between a $20 million investment and a $5 million investment. The top category on the Members’ forms is “over $50 million,” so it is impossible to accurately account for anything worth more than that — like a professional sports team, for example. There is also a gaping loophole for assets owned by the Members’ spouse or dependent children; anything worth more than $1 million in value can be reported as “over $1 million.” There is no way to tell whether that is $1.2 million or $1.2 billion.
The rules also don’t require reporting things of value that are not used to produce income — most notably any primary residence or other home that is not used for rentals. That loophole removes from most Members’ portfolios hundreds of thousands of dollars and in come cases millions of dollars worth of assets. Airplanes, fancy cars, antiques or other valuable items are not reported.
In filing a detailed disclosure form on behalf of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), his accountants added this editorial note, which sums up the problem: The form is meant to comply with Senate disclosure rules but “is not intended to be a complete presentation of Senator Corker’s financial position.”
Beyond all of these flaws, there remains the fact that many, many financial disclosure forms filed by Members of Congress are simply inaccurate. A check mark placed in the wrong box can inflate or deflate a Member’s apparent net worth by millions of dollars, and misunderstandings of the rules have led Members to understate some assets, overstate others and claim additional assets they no longer own.
Where the errors are obvious or have created noticeable discrepancies from prior-year filings, Roll Call has attempted to contact the offices to get a proper understanding of the actual value of the asset or assets in question.
What remains below is a ranking of the 50 wealthiest Members of Congress based on the minimum net worth reported on their financial disclosure forms. To achieve these numbers, Roll Call totaled the assets listed on financial disclosure forms filed in 2008 (covering calendar year 2007) using the lowest number in the ranges in which Members are required to report. An asset from $500,000 to $1 million is counted as being worth $500,000, unless the Member has provided a brokerage statement or other documentation that offers more specific detail.
Liabilities, which are also reported in ranges, are calculated based on the minimum value, and are subtracted from total minimum assets to establish total net worth.
Assets that are not included on the forms but have values that have been established by Roll Call or other publications are not included for the purposes of assembling this ranking, because the Members are not required to report these numbers. This ranking is based only on what is reported on the annual disclosure forms.
Se listen over de 50 rigeste ved at klikke på nedenstående link, jeg har valgt ikke at publicere den på bloggen, da den er for lang.
kilde: http://www.rollcall.com/features/Guide-to-Congress_2008/guide/28506-1.html?type=printer_friendly
