Quote:
Originally Posted by RogerWilco
This thread is talking about the 3.5 Billion people. None of them live in this country and the Brothers you work for were never one of them. Of course in Canada, or the US, or Europe you can pull yourself up if you really go for it. Even the people living in this country under the poverty line supporting a family on $12,000.00 a year probably make 10 times the amount that any one of these 3.5 Billion people do.
Why is everyone talking about what you can do if you work hard here, in the western world. None of that applies to the 3.5 Billion that the report talks about.
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Is that really true? This study uses wealth, not income, to describe the "problem". The common definition of wealth is assets net of all liabilities. If Oxfam uses this definition, then thousands of people in this country and millions of Americans are among the "poorest" people on the planet.
6.4 million households in the US find their mortgages underwater to the tune of almost $400 billion in negative equity. Add in all the people with huge amounts of consumer debt and this number grows further. It takes a lot of people with minimal wealth just to make up for all of this negative wealth to get this number back to break even.
The starving families living in the slums of India don't have much for assets, but not much for debt either. Depending on the definition of wealth used, you could twist these statistics to say a homeless man with no debt and a garbage bag full of cans has wealth greater than millions of Americans combined. Although they're quite poor, these examples can't come close to contributing as much as the negative wealth of a family finding their mortgage hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater.
It takes a heck of a lot of people living in the world's poorest countries to erase this huge amount of negative equity that was racked up by North Americans and Europeans.... Maybe around 3.5 billion of them or so.