The Fed's Distributive Financial Accounts
18 Jun '19 03:151 editGood news for the right wingers here who think the rich deserve the vast majority of society's wealth because they work so hard and are so obviously superior to everyone else; the net worth of the top 1% of Americans climbed about 250% in the last 30 years.
Even better, the lazy, shiftless American workers who comprise the great majority of the bottom 50% in wealth now owe more than their assets.
These figures come from the Fed's Distributive Financial Accounts report which is summarized here:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-fed-just-released-a-damning-indictment-of-capitalism.html
The findings are summarized thus:
America’s superrich have grown about $21 trillion richer since Taylor Swift was born, while those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution have grown $900 billion poorer.
And you can see why our right wingers here aren't crazy about this whole democracy thingy:
Does the average American believe that, over the past three decades, our nation’s richest one percent have contributed roughly $22 trillion more to our collective well-being than the poorest 50 percent have? Does she think that the tens of millions of working-class people who spent the past 30 years cooking other Americans’ dinner, cleaning their toilets, caring for their children, harvesting their crops, ringing up their groceries — and performing the countless other poorly remunerated forms of labor that our society demands — collectively produced an infinitesimal fraction of the value that America’s corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists, specialist physicians, heirs and heiresses, and other high-paid professionals did?
Survey data (and common sense) says otherwise. In 2011, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University published a study on Americans’ views of how wealth was distributed in their society, and how they felt it should be distributed. They found that, in the average American’s ideal world, the richest 20 percent would own 32 percent of national wealth. In reality, the top quintile owned 84 percent as of 2011. And that share has grown in the intervening years. Today, the one percent alone commands roughly 40 percent of all America’s wealth.
Of course, a lot of the rich's "hard work" was from passive investments like stocks, bonds and corporate equities, not from (horrors, Lovey!) actually working:
As Vox’s Matt Yglesias observes, much of the explosion in wealth inequality that the Fed documents can be attributed to the fact that the one percent began 1989 owning a wildly disproportionate share of corporate equities and private businesses.
How many here (besides quackquack who thinks American workers make too much money and should be paid more like say Cambodians) believe this is all hunky dory?
Even better, the lazy, shiftless American workers who comprise the great majority of the bottom 50% in wealth now owe more than their assets.
These figures come from the Fed's Distributive Financial Accounts report which is summarized here:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-fed-just-released-a-damning-indictment-of-capitalism.html
The findings are summarized thus:
America’s superrich have grown about $21 trillion richer since Taylor Swift was born, while those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution have grown $900 billion poorer.
And you can see why our right wingers here aren't crazy about this whole democracy thingy:
Does the average American believe that, over the past three decades, our nation’s richest one percent have contributed roughly $22 trillion more to our collective well-being than the poorest 50 percent have? Does she think that the tens of millions of working-class people who spent the past 30 years cooking other Americans’ dinner, cleaning their toilets, caring for their children, harvesting their crops, ringing up their groceries — and performing the countless other poorly remunerated forms of labor that our society demands — collectively produced an infinitesimal fraction of the value that America’s corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists, specialist physicians, heirs and heiresses, and other high-paid professionals did?
Survey data (and common sense) says otherwise. In 2011, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University published a study on Americans’ views of how wealth was distributed in their society, and how they felt it should be distributed. They found that, in the average American’s ideal world, the richest 20 percent would own 32 percent of national wealth. In reality, the top quintile owned 84 percent as of 2011. And that share has grown in the intervening years. Today, the one percent alone commands roughly 40 percent of all America’s wealth.
Of course, a lot of the rich's "hard work" was from passive investments like stocks, bonds and corporate equities, not from (horrors, Lovey!) actually working:
As Vox’s Matt Yglesias observes, much of the explosion in wealth inequality that the Fed documents can be attributed to the fact that the one percent began 1989 owning a wildly disproportionate share of corporate equities and private businesses.
How many here (besides quackquack who thinks American workers make too much money and should be paid more like say Cambodians) believe this is all hunky dory?
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