Action urged to close wealth gap

[Judi Lynn]

April 5, 2006, 9:20PM
Action urged to close wealth gap
Forum delegates complain boom in Latin America bypasses poor


By ALAN CLENDENNING
Associated Press

BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL - Latin American governments and lenders must do more to ease the deep divide between rich and poor because few benefits of an expanding economy are trickling down to the poor, delegates at a key economic forum said Wednesday.

Luis Alberto Moreno, the new president of the Inter-American Development Bank, said decades of efforts to attack the grinding poverty in Latin American and the Caribbean have been ineffective despite steady overall economic growth in the region.

He promised a stronger push by the region's largest development bank to deal with the problem as the development bank ended its annual meeting in this southeastern Brazilian city.

"The persistence of profound inequality is the region's main Achilles heel," Moreno said, adding that it "is intensifying the impatience and frustration of the most underprivileged."
(snip/...)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/3774351.html

[NYC]

1. I thought the headline applied to the U.S.

It applies, and they must know what they are doing, but they want all the money to flow to the top. Consequences be damned.

Some day in the distant future, I see the U.S. going through the same things as South America. Someone will try to make up for the 1% of the population holding all the wealth, etc. They see it coming. How can they not? But they'll let us slide for years.