On March 15, 2013, Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post:’
The stock market has roared back to record-high territory — and the number of U.S. millionaires is not far behind, according to a new report.
The number of U.S. households worth $1 million or more, excluding the value of their homes, surged to nearly 9 million in 2012. That is just below its pre-recession peak of 9.2 million, according to a report by the Spectrem Group, a Chicago area financial consultant firm.
The firm said the stock market rally lifted the number of households with $500,000 or more in net worth to 14.3 million in 2012, up half a million from a year earlier.
Meanwhile, the number of what Spectrem calls high-net-worth individuals — those whose wealth is between $5 million and $25 million — reached 1.14 million at the end of 2012, up from 1.078 million a year earlier.
The benefits being reaped by those at the top of the wealth ladder from the booming stock market is in sharp contrast to the gains of many Americans. More than 12 million Americans are unemployed, incomes are flat and more than 40 percent of the jobless have been out of work for six months or more.
In a paper released in November, Edward N. Wolff, a New York University economist, pointed out that stock ownership is highly concentrated among the affluent. In 2010, he found, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned 35 percent of households’ stocks, including retirement accounts and mutual funds. The next 9 percent of wealthiest households held 46 percent of stocks.
Though millions of Americans own diluted stock value through the “stock market exchanges,” purchased with their earnings as labor workers, their stock holdings are relatively miniscule, as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners.
Broadened private ownership and thus economic control is the path to greater prosperity, opportunity and economic justice, and should be the GOAL for America.
President Obama should convene a national discussion using the national media and social media, and our educational institutions, to open up a discussion on EVERY CITIZEN AN OWNER opportunity. He needs to educate at this time because academia, the media, and our so-called leaders are not addressing how people make money and the significance of OWNING income-producing physical productive capital assets. He needs to get people to understand that without system reform, as with today, in the FUTURE, we will continue to experience the exponential disassociation of production and consumption, which is the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being. This is a crucial understanding because at present for the 99 percent of the nation a JOB is the ONLY source of income to support themselves and their families.
Providing a way of legitimately getting productive capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it is the solution to America’s economic decline in wealth and income inequality, which will result in double-digit economic growth and cause EVERY American’s income to significantly grow, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle, and provide the necessary tax base to gradually pay off American debts. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
