Tuesday, January 12, 2016

The 0.01%

1. The .01% Have as Much Wealth as 80% of America .The combined net worth of the 16,000 richest Americans is approximately the same as the total wealth of 256,000,000 people. Details for this statistic and other facts to follow are at You Deserve Facts.

2. Americans with up to a Quarter-Million Dollars are Part of the Nearly 80% of Americans with Less Wealth Than the .01% . The 80% includes all Americans with a net worth up to about $277,000.

3. The .01% Own about as Much as 75% of the Entire World.  The world's poorest 75% own roughly 4 percent of total global wealth, approximately the same percentage of wealth owned by the .01% in the United States. Again, calculations are shown here.

4. The .01% - Who Are They? It starts with the billionaires, the Forbes 400 and 136 more, for a total of 536 individuals with a total net worth of $2.6 trillion at the end of 2015. It continues with more Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWIs). These loftily-named people, over 15,000 of them, are worth hundreds of millions of dollars apiece, bringing the total .01% wealth to about $6.2 trillion, based on 2013-14 data. But U.S. wealth has grown by about 30 percent in three years, and the Forbes 400 has grown by 38 percent, and thus the total wealth of the .01% has grown to over $9 trillion.
In contrast, a recent Institute for Policy Studies report calculated that the bottom half of America has about $732 billion in total wealth, and further calculations on the same data show that the bottom 75% of America owned about $6.2 trillion in 2013.

The .01% will not stop until they own 100% and the rest of us own nothing, which of curse many of us do. The poor have been thrown on the garbage-heap of society by politicians serving and empowering the wealthy. Idiots that attend the Republican rallies or think that Donald Trump or Ron Paul represents liberty (for anything other than corporations) are the ones who go along with this program where the working class give to the rich. But blaming capitalists for being greedy makes as much sense as blaming squirrels for eating the nuts I put in a bird feeder to feed the birds. Capitalism itself is the failed economic system. The governments of the world may rule the world but they don’t own the world – that is the common property of humanity.

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