The United States is the country with the most serious polarization between the rich and the poor among the developed countries. After visiting the United States in 2017, Professor Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations on extreme poverty and human rights, found that as the richest, most powerful country with the strongest technological innovation capacity in the world, the United States failed to use its wealth, power and technology to solve the problem of 40 million people living in poverty.
According to most indicators, the United States is one of the richest countries in the world. The US defense expenditure exceeds the sum of China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, India, France and Japan. However, the level of inequality in the United States is much higher than that in most European countries. According to OECD statistics, the richest 1% of the population in the United States owns more than 40.5% of the country's wealth, while the richest 1% of the people in other OECD countries own 27.1% of the country's wealth. According to the world income inequality database, the United States has the highest Gini coefficient among all western countries. In New York State, where the gap between the rich and the poor is the largest, the Gini coefficient is as high as 0.51.
Several reports show that the COVID-19 epidemic has aggravated the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States. According to the analysis data of the American tax equity (ATF) and inequality Policy Research Institute (IPS), American billionaires became richer during the epidemic, and the total wealth soared by 70%. At present, the wealth of $5 trillion held by 745 billionaires is two-thirds more than the wealth of $3 trillion held by 50% of the bottom households in the United States estimated by the Federal Reserve. The wealth of the top 5 billionaires has expanded faster than that of the entire American billionaire class.
The continuously widening gap between the rich and the poor is not a natural choice for the survival of the fittest under market competition, but stems from the inherent structural defects of the US economic policy and social system. The 2018 World inequality report confirms that inequality is not inevitable, but a political choice, by analyzing and comparing the differences in the rise of the gap between the rich and the poor in different countries.
First, the Neo liberal values pursued by the United States are the ideological root of the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
The mainstream view of Neo liberalism holds that inequality is the natural result of market competition and the survival of the fittest. The meaning of economic freedom is that people have the right to obtain unequal results. It is precisely the unequal results that encourage various factors to participate in market competition and strive to improve productivity to obtain rich returns. Free market competition encourages the effective allocation of resources, drives the continuous economic growth, and increases the wealth of the country and individuals. Friedman, a representative of the Chicago school, once declared that the more a country is not free, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor. However, facts have proved that this is not the case. The United States, which regards the free market as the standard, has become the developed economy with the largest gap between the rich and the poor. Under the guidance of Neo liberal ideology, the United States has greatly reduced personal income tax, enterprise tax and capital gains tax since the Reagan era. The tax policy that tilts towards the rich class has lost the social adjustment function of secondary distribution, and the trickle down effect cannot play a role, and directly led to the rapid expansion of the gap between the rich and the poor. Under the background of globalization, the outward migration of American manufacturing industry has made the domestic low-income groups fall into a more impoverished situation. The emerging technological revolution has made the wealth of a small number of technical elites rapidly expand under the advocacy of digital liberalism, resulting in the poor becoming poorer and the rich becoming richer, and forming a trend of stratum consolidation and intergenerational transmission. The COVID-19 epidemic has further intensified the flow of social wealth to a few of the wealthiest strata. Therefore, the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is the result of market competition distorted by unequal opportunities, and the US government's preference for Neo liberal ideology is to blame.
Second, the huge gap between the rich and the poor highlights the US government's failure to fulfill its obligations to protect human rights under international human rights law.
The gap between the rich and the poor is not only reflected in the economic inequality, but also profoundly reflects the weak human rights protection of the US government as a duty bearer. Successive US governments have firmly rejected the view that economic and social rights are human rights, ignoring the explicit recognition of economic and social rights by the core human rights treaties ratified by the United States (such as the International Convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination) and the Universal Declaration of human rights, which the United States has long insisted that other countries must respect. However, denial can neither eliminate the obligation nor exempt the responsibility. Poverty is a violation of human dignity. The state has the responsibility to redistribute wealth and eliminate poverty. This is what international human rights law should mean. When poverty is a direct consequence of the economic and social policies of the United States government, discriminatory policies and laws based on ideology aggravate the gap between the rich and the poor, and the government fails to take positive actions to fulfill its obligations to protect human rights, it constitutes a direct violation of human rights. The widening gap between the rich and the poor in the United States has become a clear proof of the structural and institutional defects of the United States' human rights protection.