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America’s richest 1% now has more combined wealth than the entire bottom 90% of people in the country and the top 10% have more than double the combined worth of the bottom 90%.
It’s enough to make one wonder if that giant piggy bank dangling from the ceiling that’s filled with millions of dollars in cash on Squid Game is based on what the top 1% actually have sitting in their homes.
According to FederalReserve.gov, the top 1% of the richest people in America possess $45.78 TRILLION.
By comparison, the bottom 90% of people in America have $45.48 trillion in wealth.
So if you extrapolate that out, around 3.3 million people have more wealth than the remaining 298 million people. (I know this isn’t precise, it’s just to illustrate a point. Investing website DQYDJ.com claims the top 1% involves 1,313,064 households or 1,784,529 workers, which actually kind of makes the difference even more stark.
Now, if we take the top 10% of people based on wealth in America, they possess $100.59 TRILLION, or more than twice what the bottom 90% have.
According to Patrick Cooley of The Messenger, “The top 1% controlled around $30 trillion in wealth in the first quarter of 2020, for example, while everyone outside of the top 10% had a little more than $33 trillion.
“And in the first quarter of 2009, when the nation was emerging from the 2008 financial crisis, the top 1% had roughly $15 trillion in wealth, while the bottom 90% had roughly $19 trillion.”
So the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 90% is getting wider by the decade.
That is because the more money the people at the top have, the more money they make.
“Wealth begets more wealth,” Belle Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told The Messenger. “There’s lots more money at the top. Those people are able to save a lot.”
Makes perfect sense because the rich have more money freed up to put into investments like real estate or the stock market.
“It becomes a circular process,” she said.
The rest of us poors are too busy dumping all of our cash into things like food and shelter to grow our incomes in the same fashion.
The ultra-wealthy also have way more money to spend on lobbying efforts and donations to political leaders, which means the top 1% have WAY more influence on issues that affect everyone.
“The greater the resources, the lower the barrier to access the state,” said Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. “That’s not good for democracy. It makes institutions unresponsive to voters.”