THE RICH ARE getting richer. For everyone else, there’s no such luck.
That’s the message from economist David McWilliams in Ireland’s Great Wealth Divide, a new documentary that airs on RTÉ One tonight at 9:35pm.
The programme sees McWilliams challenge austerity and its great promise of trickle-down economics, explaining how and why Ireland’s rich-poor divide has widened so drastically in recent years.
The recession has been challenging for everyone, he says, but those with assets and influence have fared remarkably better than the rest of us.
McWilliams argues that neoliberal economic policies have seen wealth transferred from the poorest to the better off, and that this concentration of wealth is reversing social mobility at a faster pace than many assume.
This is what you can expect to hear if you tune in tonight.
Incomes have stagnated over the past seven years.
The income of those who make money exclusively from shares and assets, though, has gone up by 500% since 2008.
Multinationals located in Ireland are paying very, very little tax.
American corporations based here make $970,000 profit per employee every year, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, but they only pay $25,000 tax per employee on these profits.
If they were to pay only twice as much tax per employee, McWilliams points out, they’d still be making over $900,000 dollars profit a year.
Ireland is significantly more unequal than we think.
The consensus from a Red C poll of 1,000 people commissioned for the documentary was that Ireland’s richest 20% had 60% of the country’s wealth and that the poorest 20% have 11%.
The reality? The most affluent 20% in Ireland actually own 73% of the country’s wealth and the poorest 20% own just 0.2%. As for the top 5%, their combined wealth is nearly double that of the entire “squeezed middle”.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say