Money and the population

I want to show you two excerpts from an article entitled "Attack of the Wallmart-istas?" The first is actually quoted from a second article called "The U.S. today - an oligarchy with inequality growing worse":

The top 10% of income earners in the United States now owns 70% of the wealth, and the wealthiest 1% owns more than the bottom 95%, according to the Federal Reserve. In 2005, the top 300,000 Americans enjoyed about the same share of the nation's income -- 21.8% -- as the bottom 150 million...New York is an especially bleak case study. The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now makes 52 times what the lowest fifth makes -- $365,826 annually compared with $7,047 -- roughly comparable to income disparity in Namibia. Meanwhile, the ratio of average CEO to worker pay in the U.S. shot up from 301-to-1 to 431-to-1 in 2004. The average CEO now earns substantially more in one day than the average worker earns all year. Adding insult to injury, taxpayers actually give tax breaks to corporations for those salaries, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

And here's something I've been predicting for a long time and wondering why the CEOs of the world didn't realize it from the get-go:

Last month WallMart announced lower earnings expectations going forward. The company's chief financial officer noted the reason being that, "Clearly our customers are running out of money before the end of each month."

Well, yeah. Duh.

If you lower people's wages enough, then eventually you lose your customer base because the people don't have enough money to buy your stuff. You know, a five year old could get this.