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The wealthiest 1% has taken $50 trillion from working Americans
and redistributed it, a new study finds. Here's what that means.

Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming | Nick Hanauer
"It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam" ""

Inequality is a huge problem worldwide. And becoming more of a problem in Australia too.

Note also Business Insider isn't exactly left-wing.

Paul Constant
Sep 18, 2020, 11:05 PM


Protesters calling for higher wages for fast-food workers in Oakland, California, on December 5, 2013. REUTERS/Noah Berger

* Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics .. http://www.pitchforkeconomics.com/ " podcast with Nick Hanauer .. https://www.businessinsider.com/category/nick-hanauer .. and David Goldstein.

* In the latest episode of "Pitchfork Economics," Carter Price, a senior mathematician at Rand Corp., discusses a new report from Rand's researchers.

* The report found that $2.5 trillion is redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the wealthiest 1% of Americans every year.

* The median college-educated American worker would have seen their annual pay double without this theft.

In a Pew poll conducted last fall .. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/most-americans-say-there-is-too-much-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s-but-fewer-than-half-call-it-a-top-priority/psdt_01-10-20_economic-inequality_0-0/ , 61% of all respondents agreed that there was too much income inequality in America these days. Virtually everyone can feel that the difference between the wealthiest Americans and the poorest is growing out of control, but we don't understand how big that gap is, or how fast it's expanding, or how many Americans are losing money because of it.

That's why a new report from the nonpartisan Rand Corp. is so important. Rand's researchers analyzed American incomes between 1975 and 2018 to determine who is earning less money, who's earning more money, and where the money has gone. The results are jaw-dropping.

The true cost of income inequality: $2.5 trillion every year

Each year, $2.5 trillion — yes, trillion with a "T" — has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the wealthiest 1 % of all Americans.

That's roughly $50 trillion —again, with a "T"— that used to go to middle-class and working-class Americans that has instead been rerouted to the pockets of the top 1%. When viewed through the data in this report, that huge gap in income inequality doesn't look so much like a law of nature as it does a massive heist.

Thanks to the proliferation of trickle-down policies like tax cuts, wage suppression, and stock-market deregulation, 90% of all Americans are demonstrably worse off financially than they were 45 years ago.

Even those Americans who are lucky enough to be in the upper class — from the 90th to the 99th percentile — have basically been treading water these past few decades. People of color, women, and white men have all lost massive sums of money over the past few decades. It's only the top 1% that has benefited from this $50 trillion transfer of wealth.

Of course, unless we're talking about astronomy or counting grains of sand on a beach, it's difficult for humans to comprehend figures with 12 or 13 zeros. So let's bring those numbers down to a personal level. Let's say you're a median American college-educated worker. Most people would call you comfortable — you likely have a house and a car and a family and all the other trappings of the American dream.

If the ultrarich hadn't rigged the system in their favor, your annual pay would be doubled — somewhere between $48,000 and $63,000 higher per year.

That's about $1,000 or more per weekly paycheck that you could have spent in your community, invested in home improvements, or saved for a rainy day, but which instead went to the wealthiest Americans.

--
So if it feels like you're working harder for less money than your parents' and grandparents' generations, that's because you are.
--

Think about what you could do with an extra thousand dollars a week. We've all heard the statistic that nearly half of all Americans are only one $400 emergency away from catastrophe .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/25/the-shocking-number-of-americans-who-cant-cover-a-400-expense/ . This is why Americans don't have that $400 — that money, and much more, has gone to some rich guy's offshore bank account.

"To be clear, this is not some fantasy," and those numbers aren't hypothetical, David Goldstein said in the latest episode of "Pitchfork Economics .. https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/inequality-is-costing-workers-50-trillion-with-carter-price/ ."

"That is what you would have been earning had income distributions remained constant, and had incomes broadly continued to grow at the same rate as the GDP, as they had done in the three decades prior to 1975," he said.

"If we just kept things the same" as they were in the early '70s, Goldstein added, "the median worker would be earning twice what they are now."

Even someone in the very-well-to-do 90th percentile of all workers making $133,000 per year in 2018 would instead be earning $168,000 a year if more equal pre-1975 economic conditions had persisted.

The episode features an interview with Carter Price, a senior mathematician at Rand who coauthored the report, about his team's findings.

"If you look at income from 1947 to 1975, it more or less grew with per-capita GDP across the board," Price said.

The incomes of the poorest Americans and the wealthiest Americans were all growing at roughly the same rate. "If you look after 1975, we see a big difference between what those at the bottom of the income spectrum were making and those at the top," he added.

Was Price surprised by the final $2.5 trillion-per-year total?

"A little bit," he said. "Had someone just asked me to work it out on a napkin, I probably would've come up with about a trillion — that would have been my guess. Obviously this is two and a half times that, and so I was surprised. We definitely checked those numbers a lot of different ways because it was such a large number."

--
This kind of wealth concentration isn't just wage theft on a massive scale
— it's terrible for the economy.
--

"There have certainly been a lot of studies that indicate that lower inequality supports faster economic growth," Price said. "It's not a clear-cut case, but there is very strong evidence that that's the case."

Or as Nick Hanauer, the host of "Pitchfork Economics," wrote .. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/11/republican-tax-cut-for-rich-economy-215696# : "I already earn about 1,000 times more per hour than the average American, but I couldn't possibly buy 1,000 times more stuff. I only own so many pairs of pants. My family and I can only eat three meals a day."

The possibilities of what America's workers might have done with the 2018 equivalent of an extra $2.5 trillion in every one of the past 45 years is staggering. It's not hard to imagine the streets of our COVID-19-ravaged communities filled with bustling shops and service providers, and the generations of young low-income Americans who might have been able to transform their parents' extra cushion of savings into greater possibilities.

Instead, that exact same money now sits, basically unnoticed, hoarded in the untapped capital of the wealthiest humans in history.

Ultimately, Price said, the paper's findings showed that "a rising tide has not been lifting all boats, and that's understandable and observable. We're hoping that this helps people better quantify that and better understand."

Now that we understand the real price of income inequality, it will be easier to press our leaders into getting our money back. Hanauer urges everyone to share the Rand report with political candidates and everyone else in power.

"Our elected leaders must reckon with this data and grapple with this problem at the scale of the problem," he said.

"If they understand this as a $50 trillion problem," Goldstein said, "we have a better shot at getting a $50 trillion solution."

Keep reading
Bernie Sanders blasts GOP critics of Biden's student-loan forgiveness
plan, says he didn't hear them 'squawking' over billionaire tax cuts
https://www.businessinsider.com/sanders-gop-critics-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-tax-cuts-wealthy-2022-8?inline-endstory-related-recommendations=

https://www.businessinsider.com/wealthiest-1-percent-stole-50-trillion-working-americans-what-means-2020-9

See also (again from the previous post)

See also:

Wage gap between CEOs and US workers jumped to 670-to-1 last year, study finds
Dominic Rushe @dominicru
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-ceos-workers-institute-for-policy-studies-report

When Ayn Rand Collected Social Security & Medicare, After Years of Opposing Benefit Programs
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168641828

Since America was the wealthiest country in the world, it looked obvious...
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167482163

American Democracy Is in Crisis
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=143616577

Actually, the ‘billionaire class’ might be more progressive than Sanders says
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=143528888

Repeat - The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats
"Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer"
By NICK HANAUER
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131184160
.. linked in post headed ..
Some of relevance: It's no surprise Trump loyalists believed Trump wasn't planning for a Trump Tower Moscow up until the 2016 election.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=146232267
"Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on reports apparently questioning Trump’s loyalty to U.S."
.. here ..
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=146244360

Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer
By Nick Hanauer Dec 1, 2011 11:01 AM ET
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69590223

...rooster, wrong. Trump lags behind his predecessors on economic growth
[...]
The Early Economic Records of Presidents from Kennedy to Trump
President GDP Business Investment Investment in Equipment
Kennedy 7.0% 8.3% 14.2%
Johnson 6.3% 10.7% 11.9%
Nixon 0.0% -1.6% -0.3%
Carter 2.7% 8.2% 12.2%
Reagan -2.1% 3.0% -3.0%
Bush-1 2.6% 0.5% -0.2%
Clinton 3.5% 7.7% 13.5%
Bush-2 1.1% -4.7% -6.1%
Obama 2.2% 1.5% 14.7%
Trump 2.6% 5.9% 9.0%
,, with others ..
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=142497306

AOC inequality - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=146242369

Everyday Obama stared down the barrel of slander and malicious propaganda and still comported himself with decency.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=142943882

shermann7, Opinion: Trump tax cut undermines most dynamic parts of the economy
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=144262854
.. 0ne of replies ..
The American Economy Is Rigged
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=144356035

Robert Reich
Page Liked · 7 hrs ·
The latest jobs report is good. Does Trump have anything to do with this? Not likely. But...
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=141257902

Trump and the Aristocracy of Fraud
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=144051354

Robert Reich: 20 of Trump's Biggest Broken Promises
You bought what he was selling, but it hasn't arrived.
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How Democracy in America Can Survive Donald Trump
[...]
Can the Trump presidency serve as a wake-up call to stimulate the reclaiming and rebuilding of American democracy? Three things will have to happen during the coming year and beyond. First, in order to win back Congress, Democrats will need to build coalitions that reach across political divides, bringing together discontented voters who demand economic fairness and opportunity and reduced inequality, and who can be persuaded to put aside differences on social and cultural issues to achieve these demands. Second, Republicans who have facilitated the Trump attacks on democracy will need to be punished at the polls for their role in promoting polarization and obstruction. The lesson of Federalist Number 10 is that democracy is destroyed by political parties that see issues as winner-take-all power struggles rather than mandates for democratic compromise. .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=138803856

Here's what I think about them and definitely what I think about you.
You are race baiting garbage.
Adolf Hitler also published a list of crimes committed by groups he didn’t like
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=141951774

Follow the Money: Behind Europe’s Debt Crisis Lurks Another Giant Bailout of Wall Street
ROBERT B. REICH,
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
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'This is going to end badly for everyone': Wealthy venture capitalist Nick
Hanauer is on a mission to fix the American economy before it's too late
.. with a number more at bottom ..
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=146491885]