Here’s Yet Another Reason to Believe in Skyrocketing Income Inequality

Continuing on our theme of the day, here’s the total net worth of the Forbes 400 list of the world’s richest people:

This might actually understate things since it’s a global list, not just an American one. But even at that, the wealth of the world’s richest people has gone up nearly 5x in the past 35 years.

My point in putting up all these charts today isn’t to prove that income inequality has gone up any particular amount. It’s just to show that there are lots of data points which simply aren’t consistent with the notion that income inequality has hardly gone up at all. You can look at the sluggish incomes of the middle class; the rising wealth of the top 1 percent; the skyrocketing wealth of the top 0.01 percent; or any number of other things, and they all point in the direction of income inequality that’s doubled or tripled or more over the past four decades. Given all this, it’s simply not plausible to argue that there’s nothing going on.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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