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Obama: US inequality a ‘fundamental threat’

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US President Barack Obama has said that the US economy has become “profoundly unequal,” which is a “fundamental threat” to the American society.

During a speech on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., Obama said inequality in the US has become the “challenge of our time” and would be the focus of “all” of his administration’s efforts “for the rest of my presidency.”

“The 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income, it now takes half,” he said. “Whereas in the past the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273 times more, and meanwhile a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth of 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.”

“The combined trends of increasing inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream,” Obama added.

Obama called on Congress to raise the minimum wage in order to somehow alleviate the problem of inequality in the US.

Moreover, he said it should be a shame for the US that American children who are born into poverty have little chance of escaping it, no matter how hard they try.

Independent experts say many of the gains of the US economy since the recession have been restricted to the wealthy and Obama has done very little to address this issue.

The US unemployment rate remained high, at 7.3 percent, in October and millions of unemployed Americans are facing aid cuts as the government’s benefits program is set to end.

Meanwhile, food stamps for millions of American people were cut across the country after a food assistance law expired on November 1.

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