Colombia Is Taking On Its Billionaires - Why Can't We?

[99th_Monkey]

Colombia Is Taking On Its Billionaires - Why Can't We?
Thursday, 18 September 2014 13:52
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

America's billionaires are driving this nation's poverty epidemic. But it doesn't have to be that way.
As we speak, working-class Americans are getting screwed over by policies that favor the wealthy elite, and leave everyone else in the dust. As a result, more and more Americans are living in poverty.

In 2013, over 45 million Americans were living in poverty, including one in five children, and today, around 4 percent of our population lives on $2 per day or less. Unfortunately, our lawmakers in Washington would rather continue pandering to the needs of the rich and famous, than confront the very real poverty epidemic that is crippling our country.

Like America, Colombia is struggling with its own poverty epidemic brought on by extremely high levels of wealth inequality and by wealthy Colombians who aren't doing their fair share to help the economy.

Colombia is the seventh most unequal country in the world, with a staggering 32 percent of Colombians living in poverty. In rural areas of that country, the poverty rate jumps to just under 47 percent.

Meanwhile, just like here in America, there is a small number of very wealthy people who are doing very little to help the Colombian economy and working-class Colombians. But that's changing.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/26293-colombia-took-on-its-drug-lords-now-its-taking-on-its-billionaires-why-cant-we

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. The answer to that is simple.

Colombians resent the billionaires in their society; Americans envy theirs. (Mostly because of the American myth that "if you work hard enough then you too can be fantastically wealthy"; all that Horatio Alger horseshit that people actually believe, despite the evidence that it just isn't true.)

[DontTreadOnMe]

2. plus the fact that we have A LOT MORE BILLIONAIRES

makes it easier for the rich to buy influence and protection.

Do you realize that most of the 1% of this country already have armed security guards to protect them and their children.