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Legend, Wealthiest Yellow
"Land of the Free, Home of the Poor" (Series Part-1) PBS Newshour 8/16/2011
(Series Part-2, Part-3, Part-4,, Part-5, Part-6)
Excerpt from transcript
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The opening chapter of an occasional series about inequality in America. It's a subject that's getting more attention in light of the weak economy and the ongoing debate around budget cuts and raising revenues.
Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Warren Buffett, who has argued in favor of higher taxes on the wealthiest, cited the growing disparity in an interview on PBS last night with Charlie Rose.
WARREN BUFFETT, Berkshire Hathaway: It should be a land of opportunity. And people that get rich. They -- nobody is going to confiscate everything or anything of the sort.
But the distribution in this country -- market system has led to extremes. A guy that is wired like me -- I don't have any special status in this world. I'm not -- a great nurse, a great teacher may be much more valuable to society than I am. I'm wired so that I can figure out what things are worth.
COMMENT: Buffett proves not all super-rich are greed-worshipers (me over everyone else).
More excerpts
PAUL SOLMAN: Psychologist Dan Ariely designed the quiz. First consistent finding: Most Americans don't realize how unequal our country really is.
DAN ARIELY, Duke University: People don't understand how much wealth the top 20 percent have. They actually have 84 percent of the wealth. And they think they have much less. And more disturbingly, people don't understand how little wealth the bottom of the distribution have. The bottom 40 percent of the U.S. have about 0.3 percent of the wealth, basically zero. And people think they have much more than that.
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RICHARD FREEMAN, Harvard University: In the last 30 years or so, the share of national -- of income that has gone to the upper 0.1 percent -- not to the upper 1.0 percent -- 0.1 percent -- rose by 10 percentage points. That is one of the most astounding patterns I have ever seen in data.
PAUL SOLMAN: Point-one percent?
RICHARD FREEMAN: Point-one percent, yes.
People sometimes say, oh, the rich, it's the upper 10 percent, it's the upper 5 percent. No, no, this is the 0.1 percent. Warren Buffett has this wonderful statement where he says: Yes, there's been a class war in the United States. And my class, namely the super rich people, have won.
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PAUL SOLMAN: But as Dan Ariely found in part two of his study, and as our own informal survey confirmed, when people didn't know which countries the pie charts represented, they overwhelmingly chose the one representing a much more equal and yet still prosperous country, Sweden, as the place they'd prefer to live. A function of their politics, we wondered?
DAN ARIELY: We had 7,000 people distributed around the U.S., different levels of income, education, wealth, political opinions -- 92 percent of the Americans picked Sweden over the U.S. When we broke it by Democrats and Republicans, Democrat, it was 93 percent, Republican, it was 90.5 percent.
So there's a difference, but the difference is tiny. And one of the possibilities is that, when we dig deep down and we ask people to examine their core beliefs about a just society, Americans are really quite consistent in terms of thinking this is way too much inequality, and we want something that is much more equal to Sweden.
Now all Republicans (citizens) have to do is to tell their leadership to DUMP the "no new taxes" plank and pledge.
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