That's because the bottom 50% of the country own almost nothing. They rent and have debts. The net worth of the entire bottom quintile is negative -- if you have a dollar in your pocket you don't owe to someone then you have more wealth than the bottom 20% of the country.
That doesn't match with the headline "top 1% owns nearly 50% of wealth." If 50% of wealth couldn't sustain the government for more than a few weeks, then that government would be running already on lollipops and rainbows.
I don't know where you got this impression from, but that's not what the official data says. In relative terms, the bottom 50% hold a larger share of the total net worth than they have since 2003 (ignoring the obviously temporary Cantillon spike), which is over 5 times as much as they did in 2011, and finally comfortably above 50% of their record in 1993 (since 1990) [1]. In absolute terms, they hold twice as many real dollars as they did in 1990 [2], which they got to through the largest relative spike and smallest relative fall of all the tracked tranches. Meanwhile the relative wealth of the two rich segments of 99-100 and 90-99 have been flat for a decade and hardest-landed slightly above the all time low in 1996 [3].
It's truly remarkable to me that people don't remember just how bad things used to be. It's not even been eighteen years; what's the excuse for such short institutional memory? I even doubled the standard graph height and it still pretty much disappears both absolutely and relatively. Or perhaps the talking points are just a little under eighteen years out of date? In that case, there's some good news on the horizon: The yield curve has risen dangerously close to un-inverted [0], which has precipitated or tracked with every recession since the mid 50s, and will probably rise more soon as the market prices back out Powell's flinch in the face of thirty-five months of inflation over 3%; the poor usually take it on the chin the hardest during malinvestment blowups as they scramble to underbid each other for the remaining jobs that didn't fold under the weight of unprofitable compassion, so we can expect the reality of poverty to give wealth inequality rhetoric a comeback. Give it two good years and we can all join Alan Kay in complaining about "That [second] time the bankers stole all our money" once again when the data refresh our memories on just how bad they can get.
The bottom 4/5 of "the 1%" (and the next 19%) are the job creators and where innovation and disposable income (going back into capitalism) live.
The top-0.2% or so (and the distinction has more to do with social topology than income; many of them are not earning top-0.2% incomes) are a well-connected set of parasites who produce little innovation, hamper society by pushing the status quo, and generally produce no value. Yes, we have an upper-class problem in this society but it's not only about money. Income inequality is a symptom, but it's about connections.
The title assumes that this wealth was created by the bottom 90% and not by the top 1%.
I’d argue a better formulation is “the bottom 90% failed to force the top 1% to hand over $50T to them.”
The majority of people in any society just do not create wealth, just as the majority of people in society do not create beautiful art or useful science.
The idea that wealth created by some is owed to everyone in the country is a morally bankrupt relic of nationalism. And thankfully the structure of the global digital economy is finally starting to reflect that fact. This is just the beginning.
What wasn't mentioned explicitly in the video, but was clear from the graphics, is that the top 1% owns more total money than the bottom 80% put together.
Not the top 1% versus the bottom 20 or 40%, not the top 20% versus the bottom 80%; no, the top 1% versus the bottom 80%, almost the entire population.
The US is clearly not owned by the American people anymore. It's owned by a tiny elite that's completely separate from normal society.
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