we're all in it together
Submitted by antarchi on February 13, 2011 - 04:56
A report last week by HSBC Holdings Plc, drawing on a YouGov Plc survey, concluded that the richest British households -- defined as those earning 100,000 pounds ($161,000) a year or more -- planned to increase their spending by 7.8 percent this year, even though some of that will be financed by saving less. Not much sign of austerity there.
The ordinary British family isn’t doing so well. The median pay increase was 2.2 percent in the last three months, less than inflation, which is running at 3.7 percent. In effect, the average person is getting poorer in real terms -- but those at the top are doing fine...
Of course, inequality has been rising for some time. In the U.K., the Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of disparity in incomes, rose from 28 percent in 1983 to 34 percent in 2008/9, according to the Office for National Statistics. A score of 1 means incomes are evenly distributed, while 100 means just one person holds all of a nation’s wealth. Since 2005, it has been relatively stable. Now inequality is rising again.
