Job seekers stand in line to attend the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. career fair held by the New York State Department of Labor. (Reuters / Lucas Jackson)
On August 8, 2016, Joshua Holland writes in The Nation:
If current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years. Absent significant policy interventions, or a seismic change in the American economy, people of color will never close the gap.
Those are the key findings of a new study of the racial wealth-gap released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED). They looked at trends in household wealth from 1983 to 2013—a 30-year period that captured the rise of Reaganomics, expanded international trade and two major financial crashes fueled by bubbles in the tech sector and housing prices. The authors found that the average wealth of white households increased by 84 percent during those three decades, three times the gains African-American families saw and 1.2 times the rate of growth for Latino families.
To put that in perspective, the wealthiest Americans—members of the Forbes 400 list—saw their net worths increase by 736 percent during that period, on average.
If those trends persist for another 30 years, the average white family’s net worth will grow by $18,000 per year, but black and Hispanic households would only see theirs grow by $750 and $2,250 per year, respectively.
The author is misleading the reader because he inaccurately describes white families as far better off and lumps them in with the 1 percent of the American population who are the wealthy capital asset OWNERSHIP class – the truly rich citizens who benefit from a rigged system that empowers them to continuously acquire more capital asset wealth. The reality is that the 99 percent are limited to earning income from a JOB only. And as companies continue to seek producing at the lowest possible cost and embrace job-destroying globalization and technological automation, good-paying job opportunities for the masses will continue to decline. EVERY citizens needs to be an OWNER.
Thus, in reality, the majority of Americans, no matter what racial ethnicity, will not be able to accumulate as much wealth as the current wealthy capital asset OWNERSHIP class holds today.
