In order to be in the top 1% of income your household needs to have earnings of around $380,000 a year. Unless your definition of "haves" excludes households like that, there is an upper limit of $380 a year for "have nots" in order for your statement to be true. There aren't very many, if any, US households with income of less than $380 a year.
Of course, on HN I wouldn't be surprised to hear that $380k/year is working poor.
What do you think the net worth of the people he is describing is?
[1] http://www.nasdaq.com/article/americans-have-relatively-poor...
1,000,000 (one million) / 1,000 (one thousand) = 1,000 (one thousand) not 100,000 (one hundred thousand).
The average income in the US in 2013 is $52k.
The "haves" are not the arbitrary top 1% which starts at $380k, no, the "haves" are the people with millions or BILLIONS of dollars. It's not about yearly income, it's about net worth.
The difference between someone making $52k a year and someone with BILLIONS of dollars to their name is far more than 1:1000. Assuming just $1 billion to $52k the difference is about 19,230:1.
And that's assuming the people with $52k income "have" $52k. But they don't really, they're probably in debt.
You don't seem to have any grasp of why this is a problem, let alone how to begin to deal with it.
On the other side of the line that 52k $ is arbitrary. Why is "average income in the US" the relevant #? I bet the average income in Detroit is lower. Or what about average african american income which is surely lower than that? I bet there are people in Detroit who earn essentially no money? Surely that number is relevant when talking about a wealth disparity ratio.
I was just saying that there are much much much better measures of wealth disparity than the #s you came up with.