U.S. billionaire Ray Dalio calls America's jarring inequality "national emergency"

Ray Dalio, a U.S.billionaire, recently said that America's jarring inequality is a "national emergency，" according to a Business Insider report on Monday.

"There need to be powerful forces from the top of the country that proclaim the income/wealth/opportunity gap to be a national emergency and take on the responsibility for reengineering the system so that it works better," Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, said in an online video chat with Sal Khan, the founder of education nonprofit Khan Academy.

Inequality in education, as well as low incomes for many in the United States, produces economic disparity, Dalio was quoted as saying.

"If you don't have a situation where people have opportunity, you're not only failing to tap all the potential that exists, which is uneconomic, you're threatening the existence of the system and I think that's coming to home very clearly with the downturn in the economy with this virus," the billionaire said.

"The American dream, it's become lost or it certainly does not exist when we take education, for example," he said, "That notion of what was fair, equal opportunity on a broad basis, was what the American dream was."

Low-income Americans are being disproportionately impacted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

This post is part of Business Insider's ongoing series on Better Capitalism.

(CGTN)