WHAT DON’T YOU KNOW ABOUT THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN AMERICA?

By Robert P. Bomboy

In the past few weeks we’ve seen Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives pass a federal budget that will add a trillion dollars to our national debt and give much of that to the richest one percent of our citizens.

Nearly nine months ago I wrote a column titled “The Rich Are Not Like Us,” quoting the 20^th century novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Week after week, I’ve pointed to facts showing that the rich have taken over America: The 400 richest people in our United States have more money than the bottom 150 million of us put together:  They own a third of the stock market, a third of all the property in America, and a third of anything else that can be owned. They own Congress; more than half of all its members are millionaires. Being rich, behind their guarded walls, has separated them from ordinary people like us. Being rich, they've lost whatever empathy they once may have had, and they are using the power that accompanies their money to exert vast political influence, cut their taxes – as in the current budget, and derail consumer-protection regulations, as the Trump administration is doing

Americans are not generally aware of the extent of what’s going on. In most developed countries, there is a direct relationship between income inequality (gross income gaps like that ) and the public's views about the need to address the issue – but not in America, where the gap between the rich and the poor is huge but the concern is low. The most commonly accepted measurement of income inequality, the Gini Index, ranks the United States sixth-worst among 173 nations.

Since March 2016 I’ve been adding these and nearly 400 other terrible and disheartening facts to a free, directly attributable, and easily searchable database at https: onepercentsearcher.blogspot.com. If you scroll down through it, alphabetically, or by date, or by pressing the Microsoft Command and the f keys on your computer you’ll see facts like these that ought to make you think:  

1. Did you know that the amount of money that was given out in bonuses on Wall Street this year was twice the amount earned by all of the minimum-wage workers in America combined?

2. Did you know that the top 25 hedge fund managers earn more each year than all the kindergarten teachers in America combined? Some Wall Street hedge fund managers earn billions of dollars annually.

3. Did you know that the slice of the national income pie going to the wealthiest one percent of Americans has doubled since 1979?

4. Did you know that the 400 Americans I mentioned above have more wealth ($2 trillion), than half of all the rest of us combined? Two trillion dollars is 2,000 billions.

5. Did you know that, in 1962, the household median wealth of America's top one percent was 125 times our average median wealth? That gap has now grown hugely to more than 288 times ours.

6. Did you know that the poorest half of the U.S. owns only 2.5 percent of the country’s wealth? The top one percent owns at least a third of it.

7. Did you know that 25 of the largest corporations in America paid their CEOs more money last year than they paid in taxes?

8. Did you know that corporate tax rates have dropped from 30 percent in the 1950s to under 10 per cent today.

9. Did you know that tax rates on the highest-earning Americans have plunged from an almost 70 percent tax rate in 1945 to, in the new federal budget, around 24 percent today.

10. Did you know that the super rich .01% of America, each take home on average six percent of the national income - around $23 million each every year?

11. Did you know that in 81 percent of American counties, the median income, about $52,000, is less than it was 15 years ago? This is despite the fact that the economy has grown 83 percent in the past quarter-century and corporate profits have doubled.

12. Did you know that, in 1970, a woman earned about 60 percent of the amount a man earned? In 2005 a woman earned about 80 percent of what a man earned. Since 2005, there has been no change in that figure.

13. Did you know that, since 1979, high school dropouts have seen their median weekly incomes drop by 22 percent?

14. Did you know that more than 20 percent of all American children live below the poverty line? That is higher than almost all other developed countries.

15. Did you know that, in 1946, a child born into poverty had about a 50 percent chance of rising into the middle class? In 1980, the chances were 40 percent. A child born in poverty today has about a 33 percent chance.

16. Did you know that, between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. borrowed $1 trillion in order to give tax cuts to households earning over $250,000? With the tax cuts for the rich in the new federal budget, we’re essentially doing that all over again.