The facts to follow are primarily about the richest 1%, with occasional dips into the groups scrambling to make it to the top.
As evidence of the extremes between the very rich and the rest of us, the average household net worth in the US for the top 1% in 2009 was almost $14 million, while the average household net worth for the bottom 47% was almost ZERO.
The extremes are just as filthy at the global level. The richest 300 persons on earth (about a third of them in the U.S.) have more money than the poorest 3 billion people. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.
Thanks in good part to the derivatives market, the world's wealth has doubled in ten years, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion, and is expected to reach $330 trillion by 2017. The financial industry has figured out how to double or triple its buying power while most of the world has proportionately less.
If the richest 1% had taken the same percentage of total U.S. income in 2006 as they did in 1980, they would have taken a trillion dollars less out of the economy. Instead they tripled their share of post-tax income.
According to the New York Times, the nonprofit Independent Sector found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes, while those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent.
India just approved a program to spend $4 billion a year to feed 800 million people. Half of Indian children under 5 are malnourished.
In 2012, three members of the Walton family each made over $4 billion just from stocks and other investments. So did Charles Koch, and David Koch, and Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos.
The 400 richest Americans made $200 billion in just one year. That's equivalent to the combined total of the federal food stamp, education, and housing budgets.
Even all that is not enough for the very rich. About two-thirds of nearly $1 trillion in individual "tax expenditures" (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers. An astounding 75 percent of dividend and capital gain subsidies go to the richest 1%.
The filthiest fact, in terms of detestable extremes, is that much of Congress wants to cut the $4.35 a day food benefit to hungry Americans, almost half of them children, so that money can keep flowing to the top.
More from Paul Buchheit here
And yet, whenever any of us speaks urgently about creating a fair society, we are accused of agitating for "class warfare.
ReplyDeleteThat shuts everybody up.
It shouldn't. Class warfare -- by whatever means necessary (preferably nonviolent, of course -- is legitimate and essential. It's not going to happen any other way.