Examining Economically Depressing Data

The grassroots movement, Invade Wall Street, has made their rallying cry of “We are the ninety-nine per centers” fairly well-known. By segregating that one percent of the wealthiest Americans, they hope to spotlight just how much of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of this tiny minority. What that slogan doesn’t do, though, is show how little a very sizable percentage of Americans have.

By consulting some facts compiled in a web article entitled “Five Facts You Should know about the Wealthiest One Percent of Americans” (you can google the title to find it online), we find that this aforementioned group does, in fact, control forty-two percent of the nation’s wealth. But when you begin to look at slightly larger percentages of the wealthiest in this country, that’s when you find just how much of the total wealth of the United States is now concentrated in a few hands, and how small the percentage is that controls this wealth.

For instance, instead of looking at the top one percent of the wealthiest, let’s look at the top five percent. This small group of the elite controls sixty-nine percent of the nation’s wealth. When you examine the top ten percent of the richest citizens, that percentage of the nation’s wealth controlled by the oligarchs increases to eighty percent. And when you check out what the top twenty has, that’s a whopping ninety-two percent of the richest country in the world.

That would leave the bottom eighty percent of Americans to split up the remainder of our nation’s wealth. Yes, all the rest of us can get fat on the thinnest piece of pie from this graph, with what represents seven percent of America’s riches.

Scarier than that, though, is the bar graph that shows the growth of income from 1980-2007. This comes from a bar graph shown on a website called Igmur.com. Here you’ll see that the growth is heavily skewed in favor, again, of the top one percent. In that time frame, the one per center’s income increased by 261%. And while the top twenty percent saw their income increased by 95%, if you exclude the top one percent, that figure drops to 31%.

From here on down, the increases in income are far more equitable Those wage earners in the 61-80 percentile, for instance, saw their wages increase by 33% while the bottom 20% had to manage with a more modest 15% increase in their take home pay.

The truth is America has not seen this much economic inequality between its wealthiest citizens and its poorest since the Roaring Twenties, and it can be argued that it was the size of that gap then that played a major part in the Great Depression. In fact, that gap is greater today than it was in that period before the worst economic disaster in our history.

This is what has citizens pouring out in support of the aims of Invade Wall Street. Everyone in the middle class has reason to be concerned, from the young college graduates who find themselves unemployable after taking on huge financial burdens to get that sheepskin to workers who never worried about unemployment until the financial meltdowns that began in President George W.’s second term to those whose life’s savings were taken by the swindlers from that same era.