这小说冠状病毒专家称，流行病只会加剧收入不平等，扩大美国的种族财富差距，让最富有的人变得更富有，同时让许多最贫穷的人失业。
随着COVID-19大流行席卷美国，随之而来的是前所未有的金融危机和自大萧条以来的最高失业率，尤其是黑人、西班牙裔和亚裔工人的失业率(5月分别为16.8%、17.6%和15%，而白人为12.4%)。自疫情爆发以来，至少有4500万人申请失业。
然而，根据华盛顿特区的进步智库政策研究所(Institute for Policy Studies)上周晚些时候发布的一项分析，在3月18日至6月17日这一流行病肆虐期间，614名美国亿万富翁的财富总和增加了5840亿美元。研究人员根据《福布斯》的实时数据计算了亿万富翁的财富收益。
专家表示，与美国其他地区相比，最富有的美国人的财富与股市的联系更为紧密。股市在危机爆发时崩盘，但自那以来一直在反弹——这在很大程度上与整体经济形势无关。
巴德学院利维经济研究所所长、前希腊经济与发展部长迪米特里·帕帕迪米特里奥告诉美国广播公司新闻，“这场流行病危机将扩大美国已经令人担忧的收入、种族和性别不平等水平。”。“这产生了一种恶性循环的因素:这种流行病及其后果不仅会加剧不平等;不平等将加剧病毒的传播，更不用说破坏任何随后的经济复苏努力。”
数据显示，该病毒对黑人和拉丁美洲人的影响不成比例，他们的住院率是非西班牙裔白人的4.5倍最新数据疾病控制和预防中心。颜色社区是任职人数也过多在那些通常不能在家工作，并且更容易接触到病毒的基本工人中。
2020年6月19日，在肯塔基州的法兰克福，失业的肯塔基居民进入肯塔基职业中心寻求失业救济。约翰·萨默斯二世/盖蒂图片社
“尽管大多数人会断言疾病或其他灾难对种族、信仰或财富的差异视而不见，但我们并不是‘一起在这场大流行中’”，帕帕迪米特罗补充道。“这种‘我们在一起’的假设分散了我们对COVID-19危机的社会经济层面的注意力。”
该分析的合著者、政策研究所不平等项目主任查克·柯林斯告诉美国广播公司新闻，他们的发现“反映了我们生活在一个极度不平等的时代，这并不简单，事实上是40年来不平等的积累和加剧。”
柯林斯说，随着美国进入大流行，“在某些方面，极端的不平等是预先存在的条件”。
致命的后果
流行病期间收入不平等的影响不仅仅与经济困难有关，它也可能是致命的。
伦敦经济学院美国中心的一组研究人员在5月份的一项分析中指出，“收入不平等程度较高的州更有可能报告更多的COVID-19病例和死亡病例。”
达拉斯德克萨斯大学经济学教授哈罗德·克拉克和埃塞克斯大学教授保罗·怀特利在他们的研究报告中写道:“不平等的影响是巨大的，它与人类发展指数联系在一起，人类发展指数是各州Covid死亡的第二强预测因子。”调查的结果。
研究人员使用基尼指数来衡量不平等，基尼指数是一个经济晴雨表，将收入不平等从0(完全不平等)到1(完全平等)进行排序，并发现它是COVID-19死亡的一个强有力的预测因子。纽约是基尼指数最高的城市之一，为0.52，同时也是全国死亡率最高的城市。但是排除纽约和新泽西，研究人员发现不平等仍然是一个强有力的预测因素。
哈佛陈校长学院FXB健康与人权中心主任玛丽·巴塞特博士对美国广播公司说:“美国迄今为止是世界上死亡人数最多的国家。”。“在美国，这些轨迹沿着种族界限，你会听到抗议者提出的种族资本主义的说法，即美国发展的那种经济不仅是资本主义经济，而且是依靠奴隶劳动启动的经济。”
“我们在今天看到了这一点，”巴塞特说。“在美国，身为黑人、拉丁美洲人或土著美国人，贫困的风险要高得多。”A布鲁金斯学会分析我发现在2016年，典型的白人家庭的净资产是黑人家庭的10倍(171，000美元比17，150美元)。
在宾夕法尼亚州米尔福德的示威游行中，一名男子举着标语牌。普雷斯顿·厄尔勒/SOPA图像/通过盖蒂图像的光火箭
“人们的收入决定了他们的日常生活，这包括他们获取信息的能力健康“服务——这总是对的，但是COVID-19彻底放松了，”巴塞特说我认为，美国在社会层面做出的一系列选择意味着美国更容易受到这一流行病的影响。"
帕帕迪米特里欧补充说，“收入不平等的减少是最重要的结构性变化之一，如果不是最重要的话，也是最重要的一个，这种结构性变化需要实施，这样美国经济才能在中期内回到可持续增长的道路上来。”
A公共政策简报利维经济研究所帕帕迪米特里奥的几个同事写道，结论是“如果这些问题已经得到解决，大流行对美国的影响就不会那么严重了。”
为什么超级富豪越来越富有，而穷人却受到伤害
哥伦比亚大学教授、《门口的狼:经济不安全的威胁和如何应对》一书的作者迈克尔·格拉茨(Michael Graetz)说，一些最富有的人在大流行期间看到自己的财富增长，部分原因是股票市场可能与实体经济脱节。
“一些股票，尤其是科技股，在大流行期间表现非常好，当然，脸书和亚马逊以及其他公司的很多股票都是亿万富翁的，所以他们的财富当然上升了，因为他们的股票价值上升了，”他说。“美国下半部分公众没有股票，所以他们没有分享这些收益。”
他补充道，在大流行期间，最底层的40%的收入者受到失业的伤害最大。
“因此，你会遇到这样一种情况，他们失去了工资，国会暂时给他们中的一些人提供了额外的失业福利，然后给他们发了1200美元的支票，但是对于这些人来说，收入分配中的下半部分人，在大流行之前一直过着不稳定的生活，”格雷茨说。
在大流行期间，国会提高了失业福利，并向自由职业者和其他通常不在失业保险范围内的人提供救济。但在某些情况下，人们不得不等待数周才能获得福利。刺激计划的支票也不是根据需求浮动发放的(尽管年收入超过198，000美元的已婚夫妇没有资格)。
格拉茨引用了2018年美联储的一项调查，该调查发现近40%的美国家庭表示他们负担不起意外的400美元支出。
“大流行造成的紧急情况远远超过400美元，”他说。
美国经济政策研究所种族、民族和经济项目主任瓦莱丽·威尔逊告诉美国广播公司，美国的财富不平等与种族财富差距有着内在联系。
威尔逊说:“如果我们看到的是总体上的财富增长不平等，那么几乎可以毫无疑问地说，种族财富差距也在扩大，因为在整个经济中，工资、就业和收入方面存在许多潜在的种族差异。”。“实现复苏的一部分是要解决这些因大流行而打开的漏洞。”
恢复努力
当决策者着眼于经济复苏努力时，理解危机期间加剧的严重不平等至关重要。
“第一件事就是如何确保当前的复苏计划和刺激计划减少种族财富差距，而不是让它变得更糟，”柯林斯告诉美国广播公司新闻。柯林斯说，一个解决方案是民主党支持的《英雄法案》，该法案为一线工人提供危险津贴以及其他救济，并对现有资金进行监督。
“我们正在花费数万亿美元，让我们不要重蹈2009年大衰退后的覆辙，当时我们出台了加剧种族贫富差距的政策，”他补充道。"作为复苏的一部分，这需要对种族平等做出某种有意的承诺."
巴塞特指出，“(在《关怀法案》中)动员了2万亿美元来拯救华尔街和大公司”，这证明“美国能够动员那种水平的资源来保护人民。”
“但这需要很大的政治勇气和目前不存在的选票，”她补充道。
柯林斯说，大流行期间的数据收集至关重要，对刺激和政府救济资金使用情况的审计也是如此。
最后，柯林斯指出，超级富豪需要缴纳他们应缴纳的税款。
“我们的经济、我们的公共卫生系统和我们应对这一流行病的能力准备不足的原因之一是，在过去的340年里，非常富有的人看到他们的税收份额持续下降，所以我们必须恢复税法的一些累进性，”他说。
帕帕迪米特罗说，应对流行病和金融危机的政策必须“对不平等现象保持敏感，避免加剧加剧社会、性别和种族差距的偏见。”
“如果我们忽视这种倒退的影响，或者不采取行动来减轻这些不平等的伤害，这不仅是对公平原则的冒犯，还会延长这种流行病，并使其更加严重，”他补充道。
2020年5月15日，在纽约布鲁克林区的巴克莱中心，人们排着长队等待接受食品银行的捐赠。斯蒂芬妮·基思/盖蒂图像公司
威尔逊指出，虽然人们会感到无能为力，但有很多方法可以让别人听到你的声音。
“我之所以觉得人们还有发言权，是因为抗议活动，这些活动与警察的暴行和针对黑人的暴力行为有关，”她说，但她指出，许多公司甚至政府机构都对此做出了回应。“我们厌倦了这种情况，我们希望这种情况能够改变，我认为同样的态度可以适用于这个国家如此多的不公正现象。”
'Extreme inequality was the preexisting condition': How COVID-19 widened America's wealth gap
Thenovelcoronaviruspandemic has only exacerbated income inequality, experts say, stretching the racial wealth gap in the United States and making the richest wealthier while leaving many of the poorest without jobs.
As the COVID-19 pandemic overtook the U.S., it brought with it an unprecedented financial crisis and unemployment rates at their highest levels since the Great Depression, especially among Black, Hispanic and Asian workers (16.8%, 17.6% and 15% in May compared to 12.4% for whites). At least 45 million people have filed for unemployment since the pandemic began.
Yet between March 18 and June 17, as the pandemic raged, the combined wealth of the 614 U.S. billionaires increased by $584 billion, according to an analysis released late last week by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C. The researchers calculated the billionaires' wealth gains based on real-time data from Forbes.
Experts said the wealth of the richest Americans is tied more closely than the rest of America to the stock market, which crashed at the onset of the crisis but has rallied since -- largely detached from the broader economic picture.
"The pandemic crisis will widen the already worrisome levels of income, racial, and gender inequality in the U.S," Dimitri Papadimitriou, President of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, and former Greek Minister of Economy and Development, told ABC News. "This engenders an element of a vicious circle at work: not only will the pandemic and its fallout worsen inequality; inequality will exacerbate the spread of the virus, not to mention undermine any ensuing economic recovery efforts."
Data has shown that the virus has disproportionately affected Blacks and Latinos, who each have hospitalization rates 4.5 times that of non-Hispanic whites, according to thelatest datafrom the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Communities of color arealso overrepresentedamong essential workers who are generally unable to work from home and more likely to come into contact with the virus.
"Even though most people would assert that a disease or other disaster is blind to differences of race, creed or wealth, we are not ‘all in this pandemic together,'" Papadimitrou added. "This assumption that 'we are together' distracts us from the socio-economic dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis."
Chuck Collins, the co-author of the analysis and the director of the program on inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies told ABC News that their findings are "a reflection of this extremely unequal time that we are living in and it's not that simple, it's really 40 years of accumulating, accelerating inequality."
As the U.S. entered the pandemic, "in some ways the extreme inequality was the preexisting condition," Collins said.
Deadly consequences
The impact of income inequality during a pandemic isn’t just linked to economic hardship -- it can also be deadly.
A team of researchers from the London School of Economics U.S. Centre argued in a May analysis that "states with greater income inequality are more likely to report more COVID-19 cases and fatalities."
"The effect of inequality is large -- it is tied with the Human Development Index as the second strongest predictor of Covid deaths in various states,” Harold Clarke, a professor of economics at University of Texas at Dallas and Paul Whitely, a professor at the University of Essex, wrote in theirfindings.
The researchers measured inequality using the Gini Index, an economic barometer that ranks income inequality from 0 (total inequality) to 1 (total equality) and found that it was a strong predictor of COVID-19 deaths. New York, which had one of the highest Gini Index numbers at .52 also had the highest number of fatalities in the nation by a margin. But excluding New York and New Jersey, the researchers found that inequality was still a strong predictor.
"The U.S. so far has had the most deaths of any country," Dr. Mary Bassett, the director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School, told ABC News. "In the U.S., these track along racial lines, and you'll hear the phrase racial capitalism now being raised by protesters that the kind of economy that the United States developed was not only a capitalist economy but one that was kick-started by its reliance on slave labor."
"We see that reflected in the present day,” Bassett said. "To be black or Latino or Native American in the United States is to have a much higher risk of being poor." ABrookings Institute analysisfound that in 2016, the typical white family had a net worth 10 times that of a Black family ($171,000 compared to $17,150).
"People’s income determines their everyday lives, which includes their ability to accesshealthservices -- that's always true, but COVID-19 broke down into stark relief," Bassett said. "I would argue that a series of choices that have been made in the United States at the societal level meant that the U.S. was much more vulnerable to this pandemic."
Papadimitriou added that "a reduction in income inequality is one of the most important -- if not the single-most important -- structural changes that needs to be implemented so that the U.S. economy can return to a sustainable growth path in the medium run."
Apublic policy briefwritten by several of Papadimitriou's colleagues at the Levy Economics Institute, concludes that "had these issues been addressed already, the pandemic’s impacts on the United States would have been less severe."
Why the ultra-rich are getting richer and the poor getting hurt
Michael Graetz, a professor at Columbia University and the author of the book "The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It," said some of the richest have seen their wealth grow during the pandemic in part because of how divorced the stock market can be from the real economy.
"Some stocks, the tech stocks in particular, have done extremely well during the pandemic and of course lots of shares of Facebook and Amazon and others are owned by billionaires so of course their wealth has gone up because their stock has gone up in value," he said. "The bottom half of the American public doesn’t own stocks so they haven’t shared in those gains."
The bottom 40% of earners, he added, have been hurt most by unemployment during the pandemic.
"So you have a situation where they’ve lost their wages and Congress has temporarily provided some extra unemployment benefits to some of those folks and then sent $1,200 dollar checks but for those people, the people at the bottom half of the income distribution, have been living a precarious life before the pandemic, Graetz said.
Congress boosted unemployment benefits during the pandemic and opened relief up to freelancers and others generally not covered by unemployment insurance. But people had to wait weeks in some cases for benefits. Stimulus checks were also not issued on a sliding scale based on need (although married couples making over $198,000 were ineligible).
Even before the pandemic, Graetz cited a 2018 Federal Reserve survey that found nearly 40% of American families said they couldn't cover an unexpected $400 expense.
"The pandemic has created emergencies that are much larger than $400," he said.
Wealth inequality in the U.S. is intrinsically linked to the racial wealth gap, Valerie Wilson, the director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, told ABC News.
"If we’re seeing growth wealth inequality in general then it almost goes without question to say that the racial wealth gap is widening as well because a lot of the underlying racial disparities throughout the economy in wages, employment, income,” Wilson said. "Part of getting to recovery has to do with addressing these holes that have been opened even more by the pandemic."
Recovery efforts
Understanding the rampant inequalities that are being exacerbated during the crisis are crucial when policymakers look towards economic recovery efforts.
"The first thing is just how to make sure the current recovery programs and stimulus programs reduce the racial wealth divide, not make it worse," Collins told ABC News. One solution is the Democrat-backed HEROES Act, Collins said, which provides hazard pay to front-line workers among other relief as well as oversight of current funding.
"We’re spending trillions of dollars, let's not make the same mistakes that we did after the great recession of 2009 where we put in place policies that worsened the racial wealth gap," he added. "It requires a certain intentional commitment to racial equity as part of the recovery."
Bassett noted that "$2 trillion [in the CARES Act] was mobilized to save Wall Street and large corporations" which proves "the U.S. can mobilize that kind of level of resource to protect people."
"But that would take a great deal of political courage and votes that currently don't exist," she added.
Collins said data collection amid the pandemic is crucial, as are audits of how stimulus and government relief funds are being used.
Finally, Collins noted the ultra-rich need to be paying their fair share of taxes.
"One of the reasons why our economy is so ill prepared, our public health system and our ability to respond to the pandemic, is because the very rich have seen their share of taxes continue to go down over the last three four decades, so we have to restore some progressivity to the tax code," he said.
Papadimitrou said that policies combatting the epidemic and financial crisis must "be sensitive to inequalities and to avoid exacerbating biases that increase social, gender, and racial gaps."
"If we ignore the regressive impact or refrain from taking action to mitigate these unequal harms will not only be an affront to principles of fairness, it will prolong the pandemic and worsen its severity,” he added.
While people can feel powerless, Wilson noted there are many ways you can make your voice heard.
"Why I feel people still have a voice is because of the protests, those are connected to police brutality and violence against Black people," she said, but noted that many companies and even government agencies have responded to them. "We’re tired of this, we want this to change, I think the same kind of attitude can be applied to so many kinds of injustices in this country."
