I did some quick not 100% spreadsheet work. Info from Forbes 400, and from Wikipedia articles on how many millionaires there are, plus a check at the Federal reserve site, which has available a downloadable 1000 plus page document showing everything you ever wanted to know about wealth and poverty but assumed your elected officials were paying attention to....
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2009/pdf/scf09.pdf
http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/index.html
The top ten US Billionaires are worth 270 Billion.
17 others are worth over 10 Billion each for an additional 211 Billion
Then 24 Billionaires have a pretty respectable 5-10 Billion for 154 Billion
Then there were 144 Billionaires worth 2-5 Billion for a worth of 404 Billion
And finally the poor merely worth 1-2 Billion, 195 of them worth 274 Billion.
Impressive Yes? About 400 Americans worth about $One Trillion Three Hundred Twenty Five Billion, which is about 3.3 Billion each, or $11226 per 118 Million US Households.
That is all interesting But lets look at Millionaires. I won't even bother with the several million mere millionaires. We only want to look at real money, as in my opinion in a real capitalist society everyone would now have to be a millionaire by retirement to merely have about enough to survive and live on, showing how badly our system works as the huge majority of us are going to go in to retirement not with a million or two million dollars of assets, but far far below that, if with anything at all. Looking at the IRS income stats that show about 50 million households having incomes below 40,000 and almost no assets at all.
In 1900 dollars a million would be worth about 30 million now and about 100 million in real GDP terms according to calculations of inflation and GDP growth. So lets use 10 million as the point of departure....And I am estimating from several sources not being 100% exact here as the concept is the point not if we are off by a few percent overall one way or another....
We have about 860,000 folks worth 10 million on average for a worth that beggars the billionaires overall 8 Trillion Six Hundred Billion.
And the the ultra rich but not Billionaires yet of whom there are about 40,000,
these 40,000 worth between 30 Million and 1 Billion have a total worth of another 7 Trillion Five Hundred Billion.
This is that One percent, and the top 100,000 or so are the ultra ultra rich 1/10 of 1% who command the US economy.
But what does it mean? Is it not good that we can aspire to join this group? After all there are a lot of them, almost 1 million, that gives odds way better than winning the lottery, supposedly about 1 in 120.
Of course the flip side is that 50 million households below $40,000 a year gives you about a 45 out of 100 chance of living a life of endless very low chance of getting out of the rut poverty. So 50/50 and 1 in 120.
This disparity has been made possible by our tax laws of the last 40 years not taxing the wealthy high enough, and distributing the wealth of the nation upwards to these individuals. In other words we have not built infrastructure, not built schools and hospitals, not upgraded science and technology, not done space exploration, not built a better society, neglected health and housing and the environment and taken away general protections that allow regular folks to get loans and housing and education at a fair rate,and exported manufacturing all done or omitted by the largest transfer of wealth upward ever in history.
The assets of those millionaires and billionaires if they were spread out to 118 million households would be $175,000 each!!!. Each and every american has largely been robbed of at least half a million dollars because remember they have been accumulating this stolen booty since the 1970's so they have spent and lost a lot of it and or transferred it around or shipped it over seas where we lost track of it, and as we know wealthy folks have ways of hiding assets in accounting tricks.
With a fair tax system and redistribution of wealth as well, the money being spent by 118 million would have over 40 years had a large different effect on the US and the global economy over the hoarding and consolidation of that wealth and the prudent investment by the hoarders over seas and in schemes that make rich richer rather than being spent and re spent in the economy of every day human servces and needs.
Basically this huge asset disparity means that the average American is poor, but there is no reason for them to be poor other than the reason that the wealthy and the corporations have fully captured the economic and political process and have plundered the US populace much in the same way that earlier generations had plundered the continent and stolen it from the original inhabitants. The end of easy land exploitation and resource extraction has forced the capitalist to turn back to the old school mechanism of exploiting and plundering the local population. And the discourse if completely diverted away from the real reasons that we the average people are getting poorer and poorer and the government is getting more and more in debt and the rich and corporations are at the same time getting hugely richer and richer at the same time year after year after year.
It is really very simple, through fair taxation, redistribute a very large percentage of wealth into productive human needs and services. That is ALL!
Those on top will continue to recapture the wealth in the process but less of it each time around and we will get better results because democratic and human based decisions will drive what is done with investment and building society and the pure insane so called rationality of making ever more profit will be curbed. If the Billionaires were reduced to mere hundred millionaires and the multi ultra millionaires reduced to mere millionaires, we would all be a lot better off.
I see that another decade or two of this plunder will lead back towards feudalism and slavery. Logically if we get rid of wage laws and mortgages to low cost home owners and small business loans go away as just not profitable and too risky, or too regulated to pursue, and building everything somewhere else is the mode of operation at some point the average citizen will become "Illegal", you won't have enough money to buy mandatory insurance, you won't have enough money to pay the interest and mortgage insurance premium for a place to live, and you won't have the money to get educated at a private school. At some point the ultra rich and the immortal corporation will have to offer to lend you a helping hand and take you in as chattel. They will pay for your "private insurance" and home you in a work camp for just a small, small to them fee, which you will be free to pay off by working on the 8 hours a night you have off to sleep. I think we could accommodate this non descriminatory slavery as it would be free market based and if we can get back to a theological based constitution slavery is after all very prominent in the Bible.
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