Five Facts About America's Pathological Wealth Distribution | Common Dreams

Five Facts About America's Pathological Wealth Distribution | Common Dreams

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  4. "We should all cheer for the stock market" is a big scam.

The mainstream media would have us believe that the whole country depends on a rising stock market. But the lowest-earning three-fifths of Americans -- 60% of the population -- own just .2% (one-fifth of one percent) of all wealth outside the home.

The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute claim that wealth inequality has remained steady over the past century, even in the last 30 years. Both organizations cite a paper by Kopczuk and Saez, which shows that the share of wealth owned by the top 1% has decreased from the early 1900s to the early 2000s, possibly because the "democratization of stock ownership...now spreads stock market gains and losses much more widely than in the past."

While it's true that the percentages of net worth and financial wealth for the top 1% barely budged from 1983 to 2007, the percentages for the rest of the richest 5% increased by almost 20%. And the percentages for the poorest 80% of the population DECREASED by almost 20%.

In other words, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% leveled off because the "democratization of stock ownership" spread the wealth among just 5% of the population, those earning an average of $500,000 per year. A few people -- 5 out of 100 -- got very rich, but everyone else lost ground.