Wealth Disparity Greater Than Any Time Since 1929

by JASmius



Fascinating, isn't it?  Wealth disparity, income inequality, these are the bread & butter of socialist classism.  They propelled FDR's landslide election triumph in 1932, his "New Deal," and the ensuing eighty years of "progressivism" (with the lone capitalist breather of the Reagan years), culminating in the hardcore Marxism of the Obama Ascendancy.  And after all that, all the tax hikes, all the runaway deficit spending, all the suffocating regulation, all the income and wealth theft, all the trillions of dollars "redistributed," here we sit in 2014 and....wealth disparity hasn't narrowed at all since 1929?

Seriously?:

Wealth inequality is greater than anytime since 1929, new research from Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics reveals.

"The share of wealth held by the top 0.1% of families is now almost as high as in the late 1920s, when 'The Great Gatsby' defined an era that rested on the inherited fortunes of the robber barons of the Gilded Age," the economists write in a blog post for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

Wealth concentration has followed a U-shaped trend in the last hundred years, Saez and Zucman write. Wealth disparity was high in the beginning of the 20th century, fell from 1929 to 1978 and has increased since then.

The bottom 90% of the population held 15% of total wealth in the late 1920s, they write in their paper, "Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data." The share rose steadily rose to 35% in the mid-1980s, the economists say, pointing to rising pensions and housing wealth. The share then fell to 23% in 2012 due to increasing mortgages and other debt.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10% is taking a larger share of the economic pie, as incomes at the top surged and savings rates between top earners and the rest of the population diverged.

The return of wealth inequality is almost entirely due to the top 0.1%, a small group of about 160,000 with net assets over $20 million in 2012, getting richer. The overall share of total household wealth owned by that small group increased from 7% in 1979 to 22% in 2012, creating a level of disparity not seen since 1929.

I really detest this sort of garish envy.  It never fails to amaze me how the same people who admonish evangelical Christians to stop "peeping" into their bedrooms had no qualms whatsoever about reaching into the wallets of those that they imperiously deem to "have too much".  You want us to leave your sex lives alone?  You keep your hands off our bank accounts.  Deal?

I have a pile of money.  A remarkably large pile, given the struggles and adversities of my career, though molehill-sized compared to "the top 0.1%" (who are almost all "progressive" Democrats, BTW).  And you know what?  I earned every dime of it.  So do almost all of us who don't live "paycheck to paycheck".  Those that have more than most worked correspondingly harder, were more talented, took fuller advantage of their opportunities.  They shouldn't be begrudged, and have their "stashes" plundered; they should be celebrated and held up as examples to be emulated.  Rather than wanting to tear down "the wealthy" (who have the resources to resist that sort of thing, or there wouldn't still be any "rich"), the orientation of public economic policy should be to encourage and facilitate the entrance of greater numbers of Americans into their ranks.

In a free-market, capitalist economy, the rich do get richer - but so does the middle class, the working class, and the poor.  Upward economic mobility is the coin of that realm, and income and wealth levels are a fractal chaos of constant movement, with the general trend moving ever upward.  My career exemplified that: it started out slow, but there were always opportunities to advance, move up, and I eventually found my niche and had a nice twenty-year run to middle/upper middle class range.  That, combined with old-fashioned frugality and thrift, has yielded me my "pile" and afforded me the luxury of not having to panic during this time of transition to a new career.

Which brings us to why income inequality has spiked at four times the rate under Barack Obama that it ever did under George W. Bush.  And the answer is simple: No jobs.  No upward economic mobility.  Economic opportunities have vanished, and the "wealthiest Americans" can either hunker their fortunes down in "shelters" and wait for better times or corruptly sell out to the Obama Regime.

You cannot amass wealth if (1) you cannot earn it and (2) you're not allowed to keep it.

Given that one half of the aforementioned study came from UC-Berkeley and the name of this outfit - "The Washington Center For [No] Growth" - you can probably guess what their policy prescription is:

To reduce wealth inequality, or at least to slow growing income inequality, the economists recommend progressive income taxes, estate taxes, providing quality, affordable education, controlling healthcare costs, minimum wage policies and "policies shifting bargaining power away from shareholders and management toward workers."

In other words, more of the disease.  Make the rich a little poorer (unless they sell out) and the middle and working classes a lot poorer, and correspondingly more dependent on animal pols of the poisonous mindset of Messrs. Saez and Zucman.  The perfect formula for exacerbating income inequality and wealth disparity.

Here's a clue for you, guys: Most people know they're never going to be rich.  What most people care about is to be able to earn a comfortable living.  Have a nice house, couple of cars, a few PCs, maybe a plasma screen TV, go out to eat once in a while, see a few pro sporting events, maybe vacation at Disneyland annually, and be able to save a nice retirement nest egg.  We get that and we'll be content, no matter how much lucre Bill Gates or Warren Buffet amasses.

And you jagovs want to stand astride that path, stick your hands out at us, and yell "STOP!  Welfare line is that way!"  See the problem?

Exit question: How much do you two earn a year?  What's the size of your respective estates?  What's your job security level?  Indignant minds want to know.