the 99% movement - occupy

The 99% movement is something which is really kicking off at the moment, with protests going on all around the world with the movement growing and growing. The 99% movement is basically people standing up agains the worlds economy, being that 99% of the worlds wealth is owned just by the worlds richest people while the remaining 1% is everyone else. I dont really know much about the movement but it is something which could be really interesting to look into.


We are the 99% is a political slogan widely used by the"Occupy" protesters. It was originally the name of a Tumblrblog page launched in late August 2011 by an anonymous 28-year-old New York activist named "Chris." The phrase indirectly refers to the vast concentration of wealth among the top 1% of income earners compared to the other 99%, and reflects a commonly held belief that the common people ("the 99%") are paying the price for the mistakes of a tiny minority. The phrase was picked up as a unifying slogan by the Occupy movement. According to the Wall Street Journal, a person needs to earn at least $506,000 annually to be in the top 1% of the income distribution in the United States.
In 1987, SMU economics Professor Ravi Batra reached #1 on the New York Times best seller list with a book linking a rise in "the share of wealth held by the richest 1 percent" to speculative manias and depressions. During the 2000 Presidential candidate debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush, Gore relentlessly and memorablyacc used his opponent of supporting the "wealthiest one percent" rather than the welfare of everyone else. In 2006, filmmaker and Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson filmed adocumentary called The One Percent about the growing wealth-gap between America's wealthy elite compared to the overall citizenry. The film's title referred to the top one-percent of Americans in terms of wealth, who controlled 38% of the nation's wealth in 2001.Joseph Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel laureate and Columbia University economics professor, wrote an article for Vanity Fair in May 2011 entitled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" and claimed that the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens control 40 percent of the American wealth. In 2011, Dan Rather reported^[26] that independent media maven Priscilla Grim and her friend Chris launched the "we are the 99%" tumblr blog on September 8, that went viral.

"We are the 99%" is a political slogan and an implicit economic claimof "Occupy" protesters. It refers to the increased concentration of wealth since the 1970s among the top 1% of income earners in the United States. The Congressional Budget Office says that between 1979 and 2007 incomes of the top 1% of Americans grew by an average of 275%. During the same time period, the 60% of Americans in the middle of the income scale saw their income rise by 40%. Since 1979 the average pre-tax income for the bottom 90% of households has decreased by $900, while that of the top 1% increased by over $700,000, as federal taxation became lessprogressive. From 1992-2007 the top 400 income earners in the U.S. saw their income increase 392% and their average tax rate reduced by 37%.In 2009, the average income of the top 1% was $960,000 with a minimum income of $343,927. In 2007 the richest 1% of the American population owned 34.6% of the country's total wealth, and the next 19% owned 50.5%. Thus, the top 20% of Americans owned 85% of the country's wealth and the bottom 80% of the population owned 15%. Financial inequality was greater than inequality in total wealth, with the top 1% of the population owning 42.7%, the next 19% of Americans owning 50.3%, and the bottom 80% owning 7%. However, after the Great Recession which started in 2007, the share of total wealth owned by the top 1% of the population grew from 34.6% to 37.1%, and that owned by the top 20% of Americans grew from 85% to 87.7%. During the economic expansion between 2002 and 2007, the income of the top 1% grew 10 times faster than the income of the bottom 90%. In this period 66% of total income gains went to the 1%, who in 2007 had a larger share of total income than at any time since 1928.

 

Economist Paul Krugman writes that "the slogan correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite and also gets past the common but wrong notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated." However, he says that if anything, the 99 percent slogan aims too low because a large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population. Krugman argues against even further tax cuts for the very rich because they are "job creators", calling it propaganda. He argues that very few of the super-wealthy are job innovators, most of them are "corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers", and he refers to a recent analysis that found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. Commenting on the ongoing economic crisis he writes, "[the] seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong".Following the recession of the late 2000s (decade), the economy in the United States continued to experience a jobless recovery. New York Times columnistAnne-Marie Slaughter described pictures on the "We are the 99" website as "page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out loans to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses and a piece of the American dream, worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up unemployed or radically underemployed and on the precipice of financial and social ruin." With market uncertainty due to fears of a double-dip recession and the downgrade of the US credit rating in the summer of 2011, the topics of how much the rich pay in taxes and how to solve the nation's economic crisis were predominant in media commentary. When Congress returned from break, proposed policy solutions came from both major parties as the 2012 Republican presidential debates occurred almost simultaneously with President Obama's September 9 proposal of the American Jobs Act. On September 17, President Obama further announced an economic policy proposal for taxing millionaires known as the Buffett Rule. This immediately led to public statements by House Speaker John Boehner, President Obama, and Republican Mitt Romney over whether the Democrats were fomenting "class warfare".