Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1%

Martin Luther King, Jr. was well aware of growing income inequality and the evils following in its wake in 1967.  This was when the 1% Club was only a gleam in Scrooge McDuck's eye. At that time, King wrote this:

"The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle [ah, those were the days] and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking."

Try this on for size.  If being super rich is at least partially relative to your surroundings, is it better to be in the 1% in, say, Clarksville, TN or Terre Haute, IN.? . . . Times up. It's Terre Haute, hands down. If you're raking in $241,000 per in The Haute, you are in the 1% and you're income is 8 times the median income of your neighbors. By contrast, Clarksville is a land of 1% opportunity and near equality by comparison. It _only_ takes $201K to enter the 1% golden circle and that is _only_ 4 times Joe/Jane Blow's median income.

Scout out the inequalities in your own community here:

What Percent Are You?