It was a good day for the rightwing Walton Family.
The family’s net worth grew by $5 Billion. In one day.
“Walmart shares rose 4.5% after the announcement on Tuesday that projected the company’s U.S. e-commerce sales would increase 40% in the next fiscal year. Rob, Jim, Alice, Christy, and Lukas Walton saw their combined net worths climb to $140 billion as a result of the increase in the company’s stock price.”
Income inequality and wealth inequality gets worse every day. Read the book “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Happier.”
We are not a happy society.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That’s more that 11 times what the most recent Powerball winner received. Moral: if you’re a Walton, every day is a Powerball day.
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The last powerball jackpot was $456.7 million. The Walton family does not receive an increase in their net worth of this amount every day. see
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/03/18/powerball-jackpot/436079002/
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The Walton family has a net worth of $140 Billion. They didn’t earn it. They inherited it.
What does the lottery jackpot have to do with the Waltons?
They won the lottery by being born into the right family. None of them ever has to work for a living.
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I also do not see a connection between the Powerball jackpot and the Walton family. (see GregB comment at 0909am)
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But you brought it up—the connection to Powerball.
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Now this is sick.
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The Waltons make King Midas and Croesus look like pikers. They have all this lucre and yet some of their employees have to apply for social benefits because their pay is so pathetic. Walmart, the largest private employer in the country and of course, non union and vehemently so.
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Here is the link to the FREAKIN’ ELECTRIFYING town hall meeting with Michael Moore, Liz Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Derrick Hamilton. I HOPE y’all will consider watching it if you have not already:
Actually, it is a source of news of sorts . . . . . All covering major aspects and components of income inequality. Be very prepared to become enraged and then empowered.
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Thank you for this forum on income inequality. It is the elephant in the room few even mention and fewer are willing to tackle.
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But, but. . . It’s the free market at work! (TIC if you don’t get it)
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I have cut back on my WalMart trips. Instead of going every week for groceries, I shop at my local store. I only go once every 6-8 weeks for the essentials that my grocery store sells at a really high price. I have never purchased clothing from WalMart. It’s my form of boycott. I wish more people would/could choose to shop local, even if it means paying slightly more for groceries/wares. Their employees are treated like garbage and the stores look like junk holes. The Walton billionaires don’t deserve to live lavishly when they treat their employees with such disdain.
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The latest “happy country” survey places Finland in the top spot, followed by the rest of Scandinavia and Switzerland. The US dropped from 14th to 18th place. Our politicians have nothing to say about the fact we are not in the top tier, but they always publish our middle ranking NAEP scores. Many people in our country are being left behind due to income inequality. CEOs and top management of companies are getting richer while the workers on bottom cannot live on their wages. Perhaps part of our drug problem is due to income inequality. Too many people in our country do not see access to opportunity so they opt to escape their reality.
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Government policies create and enforce segregation, charters provide false hope to parents. Ten years of mayor control in DC has shown us that education reform despite all of the proactive Washington Post marketing was no more than a bold faced lie. It was NPR and a teacher who exposed the truth. Ten years of students marching across a stage not getting the same type of education as Mr. Zuckerberg received but being told that they had a solid education. Newspapers still say good things happened with ed reform in DC. Yes, white people moved in and minorities moved out and for white students the schools improved, a familiar story. Then the scandal with the Chancellor wanting his daughter to go to a elite public school told parents your stuck with bad schools but I am special .It really exposed the lies.
All of these rich people destroying public education for a profit. Since we are solidly as a country on the road to income,racial inequality promoting the master and the servant concept, real history will not be kind to the likes of Rhee, Betsy, and the politicians who sang there praises knowing the lie they were promoting. For standing by the lie they received money for there reelection campaign’s. As we move forward to the world of A.I. then what?
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Such an excellent read! It explains income inequality in terms of shifts to the right over 50 years. A MUST read!!
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/16/100571/
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Diane,
Diane,
We are not a happy society? Is that a cry for socialism? Venezuela is crying!
Do you remember the CEO Who Made $70K His Company’s Minimum Wage back at
Aug 3, 2015?
Do you remember that guy in Seattle that owned the credit-card processing firm, Gravity Payments? Dan Price, made news back in April by announcing… He was making a million dollars a year plus as the CEO, and he made a big announcement with a lot of fanfare saying he had made a major decision. He read somewhere that $70,000 a year is the magic number for an employee to make, that with $70,000 a year you can pay your monthly bills. You can buy a car, have a decent house, a place to rent, and have disposable income left over. So he made the decision that every one of these employees was going to be paid $70,000 a year, including him. He was to take a pay cut from million plus down to $70,000 a year.
Wow, this is a guy who gets it! You know, the left is out there always talking about the inequality in what CEOs make versus what their grunt employees make. So this guy came along and he bought into that, and he heard that 70 grand a year was a magic number for employees. Everybody could live comfortably on that, with no stress, or at least as little stress as possible.
Happiness will exist! Hah!
But It’s not leading to a happy, unified, focused workforce. It’s divisive. It creates resentments.
This is a teachable moment.
Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to” pay entry-level people the same amount they were making.
New hires were making 70 grand just like people that had been there for life, just like people that had been there for years. It didn’t matter how long you’d worked there, didn’t matter how hard you worked, did not matter what your contribution to the company was. You made 70 grand a year.
This is pure, unadulterated socialism, which has never worked. That’s why I hope this company is a case study in MBA programs on how socialism does not work, because it’s going to fail
Long-term employees who valued themselves greatly would be resentful and lose their passion, and they would see people not working very hard or not caring and going on vacation, getting the same amount they were getting, and it just wasn’t gonna work.
Contrary to what the left is trying to force on us, nobody wants to be the same as everybody else. You might not want to be like somebody in this way or that way, but you don’t want to be the same, and you don’t want to be considered the same. You want to be considered unique.
Tthey posted a video at the New York Times of Dan Price discussing the impact of his decision.
PRICE: I’m working as hard as I’ve ever worked to try to make it work. I’m renting out my house right now to try to make ends meet myself. I haven’t made this little amount of money since I was in my early twenties. It helps that I’m 31, and don’t have any kids, too (laughing), and no girlfriend. No girlfriend to tell me I’m crazy.
Nobody’s more important than anybody else. That’s socialism to a T. The main policy or main flaw with socialism side from run out of somebody else’s money at some point is that we’re not the same and we are not equal.
There is no such thing as fairness. Fairness is always arbitrary depending on who has the power to define it, and there certainly is no equality. There’s equality of opportunity, equality of chance, equality before the law, but these people talk about equality in terms of outcomes, and there’s no such thing.
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Jscheidell,
I find your reactionary rants almost incomprehensible. But I must respond to your claim that there is no such thing as fairness. Equality before the law is supposed to mean that each and every human being is equal before the law. We have a long way to go before we as a nation keep our promises, but you have abandoned them. Let me ask you this: why do people like you fight for the lives of the unborn but are indifferent to the lives of the born?
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