As you can see from the graph above, the 1 percent owned 34.6 percent of all the US wealth, which includes homes, cars, boats, ships, stocks, bonds, gold, politicians, U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and other things. You can’t afford to buy stuff if you don’t have the cash. The reason the rich have so much cash to buy all of this stuff is because Wall Street Senators like Ron Wyden and Mitch McConnell are constantly pushing legislation that redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent. They’ve had spectacular success at doing this.
When it comes to accumulating wealth at the expense of everybody else, note that the figures in the graphs above and below are out of date. The 2007 data is the most current. It doesn’t reflect the impact of the housing market crash, massive unemployment, and the rise of permanently out of work members of the 99 percent, all of which has occurred due to the corrupt and bankrupt economic policies championed by Wyden, McConnell and others, like Wall Street Congessman Earl Blumenauer.
In 2007, the bottom 60 percent of US citizens had 65 percent of their net work tied up in their homes. The top 1 percent had only 10 percent of their bucks invested in their homes. The bottom 60 percent lost a lot more during the crisis. However, the 1 percent have pulled the levers of political power to further swell the share of total net worth they hold.
The Federal Reserve, for example, handed out $26 trillion in loans to banks and rich investors that have never been paid back. And they never will be. See Breakdown of-the-26-trillion-the-federal-reserve-handed-out-to-save-rich-incompetent-investors-but-who-purchase-political-power–JohnHIvely.wordpress.com. The Fed also continues to purchase billions of dollars of worthless home mortgage backed bonds from the rich at their face value. In other words, the Fed insured that the value of assets possessed by the 1 percent rocketed upward, while the bottom 99 percent slumped.
One other thing needs to be mentioned. The relatively recent rise of the stock market has inflated the wealth of the 1 percent by massive amounts, and this has occurred at the expense of the 99 percent. Wages are still dropping for working folks, their jobs are still being shipped away, and the difference between the old, higher US wages and the new, lower overseas wages are still going into the pockets of the 1 percent via record corporate profits, increased dividends and surging share prices. This money gets invested right back in the stock market, bidding up share prices prices, and inflating the wealth of the 1 percent further, all at the expense of the 99 percent.
There’s too much for me to mention in this post about everything else being redistributed to the 1 percent from the 99 percent.
The result of all of this is simple. Nowadays, in the summer of 2013, the top 1 percent own somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the total US wealth, those in the 90-99 percent own about 25-30 percent range, and the bottom 90 percent are most likely in the 15-20 percent range.
BTW, your government, Wall Street and the corporate media don’t want you to know this.
This is a very common fallacy. It’s based on the idea that wealth is a fixed pie and that Person X accumulates wealth at the expense of Person Y.
I agree that the bailouts were wrong for a variety of different reasons.
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I agree with you that wealth is not a fixed pie. However, what I’m saying in the story, and perhaps it wasn’t clear, is that the 1 percent is using its economic might in the political markets to purchase legislation that redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent. That gives the 1 percent more income to purchase more wealth, and the 99 percent has less money to purchase wealth. Ergo, wealth is a function of income redistribution because this legislative income redistribution process has been going on for at least 33 years. Therefore, wealth is not fixed, but as income is redistributed, so too is wealth in the process.
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Since when is 73.1% equal to 2/3? Way closer to 3/4. In any case such extreme wealth accumulation is obscene because it is not from natural consequences. These assholes are always declaring that they “earned” their wealth and “played by the rules” and I say “yeah, by gaming the system” like the hedge fund managers who made over $1 billion in 2011 but only paid 15% federal income tax because they got a voodoo law passed saying that their income was “special.” The other 24% or $240,000,000 they should have paid in federal taxes just goes to make them even more obscenely rich. And don’t cry for them because of their awful tax rate, think about how they can barely feed their families on the $610,000,000 they would have had left.
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