In 1978, a member of the wealthiest one-one-hundredth of one percent had 220 times the wealth of the average American. In 2012, that same one American in ten-thousand had more than 1100 times as much as the average American, an increase of 400 percent.
In 1957, the year after I was born, Fortune magazine published a list of the wealthiest Americans. Of the 76 individuals and family trusts listed, 47 had fortunes in excess of $100 million dollars. When one adjusts the numbers for inflation, those are the individuals and trusts who had the equivalent of $1 billion dollars or more in 2014 money. Only one of those 47 individuals had a personal fortune of more than $1 billion 1957 dollars: oil man J. Paul Getty. With inflation and the doubling of our population, if the distribution of wealth had continued as it had in the 1950's, the United States should have a little over 100 billionaires today.
According to Forbes magazine in 2013, we had 492, almost five times as many as we should have if the distribution of wealth remained constant in this country. Their wealth came out of the pockets of the poor, working, and middle-classes, not by any creation of additional wealth for this country. As I stated earlier: the poor, working, and middle-classes have lost about fifteen percent of the nation's income, and more than twenty percent of the wealth in the last forty years, and has effectively found it's wages stagnant (in terms of constant dollars, i.e., $1.00 = one dollar in 2015). If you aren't making more than $250,000 per year, or its equivalent in constant dollars, for your whole forty-year working career, or whatever part of that forty-year cycle you are currently in, then you are losing ground, or barely breaking even.
Gaming the System
Paul Buchheit published an earlier article on AlterNet on 9 February 2014, titled, "5 Ways Rich People's Entitlements Cheat You and Me." Professor Buchheit begins the article with the following paragraphs:
"The word 'entitlement' is ambiguous. For working people it means 'earned benefits.' For the rich, the concept of entitlement is compatible with the Merriam-Webster definition: 'The feeling or belief that you deserve to be given something (such as special privileges).' Recent studies agree, concluding that higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.
The sense of entitlement among the very rich is understandable, for it helps them to justify the massive redistribution of wealth that has occurred over the past 65 years, especially in the past 30 years. National investment in infrastructure, technology, and security has made America a rich country. The financial industry has used our publicly-developed communications technology to generate trillions of dollars in new earnings, while national security protects their interests. The major beneficiaries have convinced themselves they did it on their own. They believe they're entitled to it all."
This is the reason I have for the last several years tried very hard to not describe programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), unemployment, etc., as "entitlements," but as "social insurance." These are programs we all contribute to (in theory) for those times we might discover ourselves in need of assistance, such as a downturn in the economy when we lose our job.
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