Who owns America? A question no one wants to answer.

The number ten censored story of 1978 revealed an alarming disparity of wealth in America.

Some of the statistics showed that only four percent of America’s population have estates worth $60,000 or more. Nine out of ten adults could pay their debts, sell everything they own, and not have over $30,000 left. Worse yet is the fact that over 50 percent of all Americans would have a net worth of $3,000 or less; at the top we find the richest one percent owns one quarter of the net worth of the entire population.

As far as the many wars on poverty, or efforts to redistribute the wealth go, it is easy to see that words are cheap. The poorer people are paying more taxes than ever before. While corporate taxes have gone down, state and local taxes which tend to be more regressive than federal taxes, as well as social security have continued to take large bites out of the low income paychecks. Even federal taxes have been more regressive.

Source for this story was the June 1978 issue of The Progressive.

Another warning signal in 2005.

The #1 censored story of 2005, confirmed that the trend toward economic disparity has only continued to grow.

Articles in the Multinational Monitor, May, July/August 2003, revealed that since the late 1970s wealth inequality, while stabilizing or increasing slightly in other industrialized nations, has increased sharply and dramatically in the United States. While it is no secret that such a trend is taking place, it is rare to see a TV news program report that the top 1% of the U.S. population now owns about a third of the wealth in the country (compared to a quarter in 1978).

Today most economists, regardless of their political persuasion, agree that the data over the last 25 to 30 years is unequivocal. The top 5% is capturing an increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95% is clearly losing ground, and the highly touted American middle class is fast disappearing.

Reported in 2009: Census: U.S. income gap widens.

More than three decades after the censored story of 1978, the Associated Press, on September 30, 2009, reported that “The recession has hit middle income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets.

“The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans – those making more than $138,000 each year – earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures.

“Household income declined across all groups, but at sharper percentage levels for middle income and poor Americans. Median income fell last year from $52,183 to $50,308, wiping out a decade’s worth of gains to hit the lowest level since 1997.

“Poverty jumped sharply to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.”

Source: http://dailycensored.com/2009/10/06/censored-in-1978-who-owns-america-th...