Think back to the antebellum
South, in 1850.
The census of that year shows
that, of roughly 660,000 households in the southern states, the 1,000 leading
households of the plantation elite received about $50 million in annual income.
The rest of the population earned only
about $60 million annually.
Can you say “inequality”?
Any part of this sound
familiar?
Source:
Howard
Zinn, A People’s History of the United
States, 1492-Present (1980; repr., New York: Harper Perennial Modern
Classics, 2005), 236.
