You ever been to India?
You want to see inequality in wealth, health, justice, human rights, etc, etc.
In comparison to many places in the world America is a fabulous land of opportunity in many ways and for a multitude of reasons but because it is a nation of 'strivers' it tends to focus on the negatives.
If only the USA could stop confusing themselves and everybody else with a pig ignorant foreign policy the world would be a better place, and so would the USA.

I just spent 6:24 seconds of my life watching your video. It's funny what people think "Average Americans" do for a living. Its very simple to understand why the bottom 40% of Americans are so poor. 8-10% of them are unemployed, quite a few of us are students, and the rest are somewhere between lazy and stupid (in other words working less than 40 hours a week for minimum wage). This topic is blown out of proportion constantly because of our free speech, but it really is not a problem. If you want to see a problem, look at the distribution in some of the middle eastern countries where the only way to make money is to own oil companies. Or China, because even though most of them are dirt poor, they have to work in terrible environments just to feed themselves because the Chinese government doesn't give handouts like we do. The USA is capitalist, if you don't like where you are on the damn chart, fix yourself and stop bitching about it to the world.

Exactly.

ahaha.... when the distribution is that bad there is no way you can blame it on laziness or whatever you think it is. people havent become more lazy in this past generation. i will tell you a secret of life people do not change. when mcdonalds has a job fair and a hundred thousand people show up looking for work, that is a sign that there is something wrong with the economy. and i knew some people who had a lot of money and some people with very little money and i can tell you there is not too much of a difference in terms of laziness.

what do you mean by capitalist? usa may be capitalist but it is in no way a free market. there is a monopoly on the creation of money and the government controls the economy to a massive extent.

i dont think the original poster was saying usa is the worst country in the world. this is happening everywhere. i dont know where you people are thinking that things are fine in america because they are not.

Well I was expecting a challenge to the presented wealth (note not income) figures themselves, rather than a vigorous defence of the new, relatively recently imposed , status quo. Interesting and revealing.

No, it wasn't an attack on the USA alone. Note the amended direct quote from the clip where I inserted the word 'world' in a bracket.

how does mcdonalds not qualify as "stupid or lazy"?

so people who are so desperate that they would line up for hours in the dim hope of landing a mcdonalds job are stupid and lazy. yes that makes sense. everyone knows working at mcdonalds is so easy that you would have to be truly lazy to do it. nobody willing to work hard would ever get a job there.

maybe i can explain it to you in a way you would better understand. there is a certain number of jobs the economy needs. if some people destroy the economy then that number is lower than when they are creating a bubble. right now about half of people who can work in america are. that 8% figure is for people actively going to the unemployment office, (and there are even more restrictions than that) which is much lower. if someone gets a job in an economy with a stable demand for employment, he typically has to take it from someone else.

there is no unlimited supply of jobs out there.

and at what point do you think people who do not have jobs are lazy? what about if it gets to a point where 20% of women are prostitutes? or 75% of people who can work are not working? if you hold this rigid belief that if someone isnt working its his own fault then you are holding a really high bar. what if there were only one job in the country and everybody ran a marathon and the fastest person got the job. would you then say, oh everyone else is just lazy or weak or stupid, since they couldnt get the job but clearly had a chance to get it?

What I have a problem with is that this article measures wealth and not income. Of course the wealthiest 1% would have most of the wealth in the country. Hell, their cars are worth more than most American's houses. Wealth includes stocks, property, inheritance. A more appropriate measure would be income inequality, which I have a feeling would not be as severe a gap as wealth inequality.

If there's no road you build one. If you can't get a job you create one.
With a lot of unemployed people it shouldn't be too hard to get something off the ground.
I know there are exceptions but almost everyone in the United States has a chance to make a living.

To give an example, if, like you said, the whole country was running a marathon to win the last job, I'd sell bottles of water on the sideline. Since it doesn't take a genius to think of that, most of the other people are apparently lazy or stupid. And if you can't find a job you go to another country. People in countries where there is an actual problem don't have that choice.

you are dodging the question. sell water to whom? so now you are arguing my point that the number of jobs is basically static given certain economic conditions? if nobody has money to buy water then there will be no jobs to sell water. if the people with wealth do not want your water then you cannot get paid selling water. the only service i can see that the wealthy will always want is prostitution.

basically if all assets are owned by a very few then the number of jobs is dictated by those few. if they decide they dont want new yatchs one year then the economy loses all those jobs. people keep thinking that jobs will just appear out of nowhere, but you need someone to buy your service that you are selling. that someone needs money to spend and has to want to spend it on your service.

people only have so much money to spend. so if you get a job doing something, selling water, it will take the money from those people that they would have otherwise used on something else, so it is another example of taking a job from someone else. the economy is controlled by the banks, basically, because they control the amount of money. if they restrict how much money people have, then there will be less money for people to spend, so less jobs like water selling.

then there is this theory that its ok because the government can beg the banks to make more money by borrowing money from the banks promising to pay it back at interest with future taxes from the people.

but at this point the government cant even continue borrowing all this money. so you dont have money in the hands of the people.

but actually when the government is borrowing money it then gives it to giant corporations and banks. so the people again do not get the money. and then the government raises the taxes on the people further, taking even more money from the real economy.

it is ridiculous how seriously they are restricting the money supply to destroy the economy. anyway bottom line less jobs are possible. it is impossible to have full employment given our current economic conditions unless bankers decided to start spending all the money they have hoarded which they are not.

I don't see the question I dodged, honestly, but doesn't matter, I'll answer the last 2.

Sell water to the runners who can pay for it. Most of them can. The ones who can't die unless charities help them. Sounds harsh but that's just how it goes.
The only point I see you making is that the worst case scenario sucks. Of course it does, but America is nowhere close to that. Everything's okay, except for the lazy and the stupid.

If you really can't create any jobs, which is a very hypothetical situation that has nothing to do with America, you could go to other countries where they have jobs, or supply yourself. The only reason no one does that is because there are jobs.

So yes, hypothetically, you're right, but in practice, almost no one has nothing in the United States. If you have nothing and don't get anything you die in a few days. That's not happening a lot in the United States, if at all. I understand your theory but it's just not happening.

Forgot to refresh and you made another post before I replied, so I'll reply to that too.

If banks hold on to money forever that money is in practice not in circulation. It just causes deflation, and since there's pretty much always inflation it clearly doesn't have a huge impact on anything.

Meaning less money doesn't change anything, since you can still buy the same stuff. The banks get richer because of that but as long as they don't spend it it doesn't matter a lot.