On February 8, 2019, Natasha Bach writes on YAHOO! Finance:
Wealth inequality is alive and well in the U.S.—and it’s only getting worse.
According to a new working paper on the topic by University of California at Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, wealth is distributed even more unevenly than that of income.
Zucman’s calculations show that the top 0.1% of the U.S. population possesses close to 20% of the wealth in the country—more than the bottom 80% of the population combined. When expanded to the top 10%, the share of the pie continues to grow: they own more than 70% of wealth in the country, or twice that owned by the bottom 90%.
But it’s not just about how much wealth the upper echelons possess. Their growing share of American wealth since the early 1980s has coincided with a drop in the share of wealthby the rest of the country.
For example, the 400 richest people in the U.S., or the top 0.00025%, have tripled their share of wealth in that time. Meanwhile, the 150 million Americans in the bottom 60% have seen a decline from a 5.7% share in 1987 to a 2.1% share in 2014.
As The Washington Post notes, “the wealthy are becoming wealthier…and there’s good reason to think it’s happening at the expense of everyone else.”
The grotesque level of wealth inequality, from a moral, economic and political perspective, is the great challenge we face. We cannot have a vibrant democracy or a just economy when so few have so much, and so many have so little.
Gary Reber Comments:
What to do about the concentration of productive capital asset wealth is not a subject anyone in the progressive “democratic socialists” camp is addressing. They put forth solutions at the edges, such a employee or worker ownership of corporations, which are necessary components of the solution, but they have yet to get to the core of the problem and the solution.
The problem: concentrated capital asset ownership and the continuation of such.
The solution: knocking down barriers to the extension of insured, interest-free capital credit to EVERY child, woman, and man (citizens). in which the lenders are insured against failure of the capital credit loans to pay off the principal solely out of the future earnings of the investments in the qualified corporations growing our economy.
While this is the core solution, there are other system components that need reform in support of the implementation of this core solution.
For a far more in-depth analysis, see my article “Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11.
