The United States of America is likely the wealthiest nation in human history. Still, many ordinary people are overworked & underpaid; where's all the wealth?
The United States of America is incredibly wealthy, but we don’t all experience it in the same way. People live with vastly different levels of wealth ranging from the 770,000 homeless people sleeping out on the streets to the three richest billionaires with a combined net worth over half a trillion dollars. If you add up the collective wealth of the richest 15 billionaires on the Forbes Ranking of America’s Richest People list,
it totals just over $2 trillion. $2 trillion is also the collective net worth of the least wealthy 50% of America. 15 billionaires have as much combined wealth as 165 million Americans. America is extraordinarily wealthy, but that is also paired with extreme wealth concentration among the economic elites. According to the Congressional Budget Office;
“In 2019, families in the top 10 percent of the distribution held 72 percent of total wealth, and families in the top 1 percent of the distribution held more than one-third; families in the bottom half of the distribution held only 2 percent of total wealth.”
the bottom 50% of our population owned 2% of our nation’s wealth,
the 51st to 90th percentiles possessed 26%,
the top 10% owned 72%
And the top 1% owned more than 33% of our nation’s wealth.
The top 1% in America possesses more wealth than the bottom 90% of our population. Compared to the bottom 50%,
“Top 1% Of U.S. Households Hold 15 Times More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Combined
According to the latest Fed data, the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion…while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined.”
We live in an America with half our population, 165 million people, sharing about 2% of America’s collective wealth. Meanwhile the top 1%, 3 million people, possess over 30% of our nation’s collective wealth. The top 10%, meaning households with a minimum net worth of $2.9 million, collectively controlled 72% of our nation’s wealth; more than double the total combined wealth of the remaining 90% of our society. After the millionaires and billionaires take their cut of our nation's wealth, they only leave 28% left to be shared among 90% of our population. So even though the United States is the wealthiest nation on Earth, probably the wealthiest nation in human history, we are truly a nation of the Have’s and the Have not’s. We are a nation of the elites like Jeff Bezos versus the working class like Amazon workers, of the Walton Family versus Walmart employees, of the rich versus the rest.
Mostly everyone can agree that some income inequality is reasonable; some occupations are more demanding, skilled, or valuable to society than others and their compensation should show it. The question is at what level of inequality should society make changes to lessen wealth concentration among the elites. Well, in the 2020 election cycle Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren said it was the time for government to step in and address inequality. They offered ideas like a wealth tax on the fortunes of the economic elites to be redistributed to the rest of America.
Even the mainstream media like CBS Morning News began to talk about wealth inequality in America; this was an incredible segment from January 2020 asking ordinary Americans about inequality;
Sadly Bernie’s ideas did not make it out of the Democratic Primary. Instead in the general election Trump ran against the “radical socialism” of the Democrats and Joe Biden moved away from the wealth tax idea by saying “I Beat the Socialist” to deflect from Trump’s attack.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump then went around courting the economic elites during the 2020 election cycle. Biden’s campaign was eventually funded by about 100 billionaire oligarchs influencing his agenda to stop Bernie’s ideas from taking over;
Altogether, 94 billionaires and their spouses…donated to Biden’s presidential campaign. Twelve percent of America’s billionaires…
Donald Trump then spent the next few years guaranteeing the economic elites that he would serve their interests better than Biden. This viral video of Trump sucking Musk's toes is more than an AI generated insult, it is an accurate metaphor for how Donald Trump serves the economic elites;
Now we live under Donald Trump’s Plutocracy once again with Elon Musk acting as the most clear cut Plutocrat in American history.
As I wrote in Adam Smith & the Origin of Capitalism, most of what I assumed to be foundational capitalist principles were actually modern American alterations. The Father of Capitalism actually endorsed taxation and a progressive tax system as well as some economic regulation like using government to prevent market monopolization and to level out the ne…
This is class warfare and the economic elites are dominating. The class made up of billionaires and multi-millionaires have more combined wealth than 300 million working-class Americans. We’re all Americans, but we do not all live in the same America. As Bernie Sanders explained in “Two Americas, the people vs. the billionaires;”
“One America consists of less than a thousand billionaires who have an unprecedented amount of wealth and power and have never ever had it so good.
The other America, where the vast majority live, consists of tens of millions of families who are struggling to put food on the table, pay their bills and worry that their kids will have a lower standard of living than they do.
In the first America, the uber-wealthy buy $500 million yachts with helicopter pads, $270 million mansions with 30 bedrooms, private islands, a fleet of jets to take them all over the world and rocket ships that blast off to the edge of outer-space. They receive the best health care money can buy, send their kids to the best schools and can expect to live very long lives…
In the other America, the working class struggles just to provide for the basic necessities of life. In this America, over 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, millions work for starvation wages, 85 million are uninsured or underinsured, more than 20 million households spend over half of their limited incomes on rent or a mortgage and over 60,000 die each year because they can’t afford to go to a doctor on time…
In this America, the three wealthiest men (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg) own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – over 165 million people. And their wealth is skyrocketing. Musk, alone, is now worth over $450 billion and, combined, these three men are worth $955 billion.
And it is not just these three men. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90% – and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider every day…
If you use a social media account to get your news, chances are it is owned by billionaires Musk, Zuckerberg or Trump. If you read the Washington Post, Fox or the Los Angeles Times, your news is owned by billionaires…
But it’s not just the billionaire ownership and control over the economy and the media that should concern us. The uber-rich are also buying our government and undermining American democracy…
President Abraham Lincoln spoke about “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Well, today, we have a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class…
But let’s be clear. Our country is not just experiencing an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality. Today, we also have more concentration of ownership than we have ever had.
In sector after sector – health care, agriculture, financial services, energy, transportation – a handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we, as consumers, pay for their products. Unbelievably, just three Wall Street firms (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of more than $22 trillion. These three Wall Street firms are the major shareholders in about 95% of S&P 500 companies, exerting enormous control over the largest corporations in the world.
And that’s not all.
Never before in American history have so few media conglomerates, all owned by the billionaire class, had so much influence over the public. It is estimated that six huge media corporations now own 90% of what the American people see, hear and read. This handful of corporations determines what is “important” and what we discuss, and what is “unimportant” and what we ignore.
We are in a pivotal and unprecedented moment in American history. Either we fight to create a government and an economy that works for all, or we continue to move rapidly down the path of oligarchy and the rule of the super-rich.
Bernie was right all along. Today we are ruled by the economic elites for the economic elites, but it does not need to be this way. America is a nation of ordinary working-class people and our government should be led by people who truly represents us and our interests. It is time for radical, transformative changes in American society to usher in an era of widely distributed wealth and politcal power.
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