FAIR MONEY

Face to Face with Inequality


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Measuring the Difference

Remember the Walmart siblings? Well, they are not the only ones who can give us a measure of how unequal things really are.

In “Off the Deep End,” Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies calculates that Wall Street bonuses for 2014 are double the size of the total earnings of all full-time minimum-wage earners in America combined. The approximately 1 million full-time minimum wage workers in this country all together pulled down about $14 billion. The bonuses of the 167,000 people on Wall Street came to $28.5 billion.

So if you took those bonuses, Anderson points out, you could just double the minimum wage.

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