US wealth distribution: 10% of US citizens own 70.9% of all US assets
Submitted by wd4freedom on Sun, 10/18/2009 - 10:45
Top 1% own 38.1%
Top 96-99% own 21.3%
Top 90-95% own 11.5%
And it gets much uglier as you proceed downward. Bottom 40% of population has 0.2% of all wealth.
The founders equated freedom to liberty which in their language meant you "owned" property (you were not in debt). The amount of property you owned had a proportional relationship to the amount of liberty you experienced.
Our system of freedom is skewed and is becoming very dangerous (approx. 100 million US citizens experience ZERO freedom). You can only cage humans for so long and then something has to give. When liberty is skewed into the hands of a very small number of the population, then our ability to "self-govern" becomes a complete and utter illusion.
I believe in free markets, but this distribution of wealth is not a normal distribution in any way (meaning it is not subject to natural forces- i.e. statistics 101). It can only exist within an un-natural (non-free) system, where the relative nature of freedom is constrained.
Is there any way to get other demographics?
Party affiliation, location. stuff like that?
It's hard to say what would
It's hard to say what would be the distribution of wealth in a free society, as we haven't had one since long before anything resembling our current technological sophistication, and neither has anywhere else in the world. It would likely be fairly skewed, as people are very different in their focus on acquiring wealth above all else. Even back when America was relatively free, some people invested every dollar towards attaining more and more wealth, while the majority seemed content to have "enough", and spent earnings on "living."
A much more issue as of now, is who this 1, 5 and 10 percent are rapidly becoming, as it is increasingly people either in, or very close to the banking industry. The closer one gets to the money printers, the more wealth is transferred in ones direction, as the printing itself slowly but surely redistributes wealth from everyone else. Wall Street welfare queens making millions are one obvious example, but so are looking at who gets promotions in US companies. With ever larger amounts of money being lent / printed into existence, those from the "financial" side of even manufacturing firms, end up being those who contribute the most value to the bottom line. Over time getting promotions, big bucks and strategic control of all of America's companies. Which again affects what line of work young people wants to get into, etc. etc. Until, like now, our manufacturing and other real economy companies end up focusing on, and being competitive at, only sucking off the Fed's teat, not actually producing anything of value at competitive prices.
The same thing has unfolded all over America. Another visible result is the distribution of wealth and jobs out West. Instead of ranchers, farmers, miners and industry dominating the economy, the economy is pretty much revolving around tourism and real estate, with most all the choicest property being being bought up by finance industry leeches or those at most a few degrees of separation from them, while the locals are increasingly left to do little more than clipping the toenails, changing the bed sheets and, if they're lucky, walking the trophy horses, of the above mentioned welfare queens. Or, for the truly ambitious ones, maybe they are blessed enough to become a local realtor, perhaps getting a few shekels for arranging the sale of yet another prime piece of land to welfare queen whose sole accomplishment in life is living close enough professionally, geographically and personally to Bernanke and his cronies, to be on the receiving end of the massive wealth transfers being directed at bankers every year, at the expense of everyone else.
Yogi Berranomics
90% of the economy is half welfare.
http://goldsteinrepublic.com
Well one thing is for sure,
Well one thing is for sure, when the government can't print anymore and it needs a shit load of money to continue operations, we know where to get it from. And I don't mean tax, I mean confiscate for fraud.
Oh maaaaannnn... if only you knew who you sounded like...
CHA-CHING!
CHA-CHING!
Unless you are the one
Unless you are the one printing money, all that you have has come from money circulation ...You have managed to squeek out some assets from earnings that have been circulated in your direction..All assets are paid for from circulating finances..Assets are the savings & growth of an economy..Wihout a viable circulation system everything stops ..As witnessed recently, businesses & corporations have taken the circulation venue out of America..This is the reason gov't must now take up the slack..To get money circulating again..When a small group of businesses or greedy persons take the circulation features from earnings & profit ability, they rob the economy of it's life blood...Remember the sucking sound we were warned about ? The crackerhead, (joking), was not to far wrong .The shift to outsourcing & NAFTA has left a huge gapping hole in our economy's ability to circulate the proper distribution of the wealth that did exist...Has there been a deliberate withholding of fund circulation to cause a crisis ? You tell me ..I'm not in the loop to know these things ..I can only observe.Our wealth has already been redistributed ..Our wealth WAS in our businesses & corporation which provided circulation outlets..We need not be told any longer to share our wealth ,.. Someone has already shared our greatest wealth..They have abandoned us to ourselves, now they want to steal our savings accounts.
.Our only liquid assets.
Good people do Good deeds
Good people make it happen
Thou shalt not steal, gov't hates the competition
The solution is NOT for government to try to force circulation
which of course, it is failing miserably in and always does.
The solution is to REMOVE the special privilege of issuing a fiat currency from the cartel of price fixing bankers known as the FED.
Other than that the only thing government should do is restore our monetary system as required by the Constitution.
Having real money in circulation is the only thing that will restore confidence and get our economic engine running again.
I really don't care what the distribution is.
(and no, I'm not one of those in the upper classes - far from it)
I'm more concerned with government granted privileges which distort the market. If we eliminate the privileges system (which includes corporations and other limited liability operations) then real business and property ownership can thrive. Doing so might very well have the effect of spreading the distribution flatter, but that is not the goal.
People who focus on distribution of resources, are opening their minds to Marxist thinking and are making the flawed assumption that wealth is a fixed pie that must be divided up by those with more "morals" and "compassion" than anyone else, and that ownership of property is thus a zero-sum game.
Wealth is constantly created by value being added to raw materials, either in production, or in service after ownership to extend useful life of such products.
Only the individuals who hold resources personally are best suited to decide what to do with them in their OWN self interest. Anything else is central planning. And this always fails, because no one is capable of making such decisions for someone else that is truly in that other persons best self interest. Every decision is unavoidably always made in the self interest of the person making the decision.
Equality of distribution of resources is not relevant. Lack of interference in the decision making process of what one can do with those resources, or how much in resources one wants or needs IS relevant and is the true mark of a free society. (that is because "society" is not an entity distinct from the individuals which make it up. Thus free individuals = free society. Anyone who considered "society" as a stand alone entity without treating it merely as the sum of the individuals in it and without regard to ALL of the individuals in it, is engaging in SOCIALIST thinking.)
You are missing the point.
You are missing the point. This observation has nothing to do with the redistribution of scarce resources nor the implication that our system should force such a thing. It is only looking at the data from a mathematical model perspective.
If we truly had a "free system" with free and open competition then mathematically, based on random events (unconstrained and free system) the wealth distribution curve MUST move toward a normal distribution (by the laws of nature- not any government system). Do you have any understanding of the probability density function and its representation of random events?
The data merely indicate and I surmise PROVE that our economic system has little freedom in it whatsoever.
Competition solves a lot of problems
I attended a course a long time ago on small business development. There was a comment something like 2/3 of jobs are provided by small businesses and 2/3 of taxes are paid by small businesses. A point made was that large corporations worked out arrangements with taxes that small companies couldn't get away with. I would think that with small companies nipping at large corporations, doing things like giving $10 million bonuses to CEOs while laying off employees wouldn't be going on. It seems to me that something is preventing normal competition going on and this is causing much of the huge earnings gap and with that the ability of the wealthy to leverage that against devalued dollar while the average American experiences decreasing income. I've been in the working world for a long time and it seems to me that in the past if some company was making boatloads of money competition grew up very quickly. Like IBM having the computer market nearly sewn up and then Microsoft growing up virtually overnight.
You don't appreciate your status.
People in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe have been born among the privileged elite of this world. One-fourth of the world's people lives on an income of less than $1 a day. While much of the world is concerned mainly about where its next meal is coming from, affluent North Americans spend most of their wages and waking moments planning unnecessary purchases. Please understand; it is not necessarily wrong to have life insurance or a savings account. This is what is important - each of us is responsible for how we follow God's call. But of this you can be sure: Unless there is repetance among Christians - individually and in concert as a community of believers - an awesome judgement will fall on America.
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It is good and proper to respect the U.S. flag, perpetuated with the blood of American heroes. It is a fatal mistake not to recognize those who wrap themselves in the same flag to cover up their crimes against the American people.
~ Sherman H. Skolnick
*****
"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."
~ Mohandas Gandhi
Where do you get the idea
Where do you get the idea that we were born into prosperity..Prosperity comes by hard work & determination ..Not to mention from the blessing of following God's principles.. ALL other Counties could have the same blessing & benefits if they would humble themselves before the LORD...America has ALWAYS paid beyond it's FAIR share & has robbed NO one on this man's Earth....America has been Nothing short of A Blessing to the World & many more people of the Earth than those who live here...Please stop the bashing of AMERICA's prosperity, because we have obeyed principles that lead to prosperity.
The fight I fight is an internal one, not one with the World.
Good people do Good deeds
Good people make it happen
Thou shalt not steal, gov't hates the competition
There are none so blind as they who will not see.
Many North American Christians live isolated from reality - not only from the needs of the poor overseas, but even from the poor in their own cities. Amidst all the affluence live millions of terribly poor people left behind as Christians have become all too ready to get involved in almost any activity that looks spiritual but allows them to escape their responsibility. The saddest observation I can make about most of the religious communication activity of the Western world is that little, if any, of this media is designed to reach unbelievers. Almost all is entertainment for the "saints". What a difference this is from the thus far Unreached parts of the world, where there are still 1,240 distinct cultural groups in the world without a single church among them to communicate the gospel of Love. These are the masses for whom Christ wept and died. Meanwhile, the Church in the United States is in spiritual decline. There is such an emphasis on church buildings in the United States that we sometimes forget that the Church is the people - not the place where the people meet. Instead, religion has become a multi-million dollar business. When a church board spends more time in consultation planning and committee meetings than in prayer, it is a clear indication the members have lost touch with the supernatural and have ended up, in Watchman Nee's words, "serving the house of God and forgot the Lord Himself." Churches need to develop the quiet disciplines they have lost - practices such as fasting, silence, reflection, meditation and prayer.
By faith, I see a spiritual revival coming, but for the time being all I can do is sense how wrong the situation is - and pray.
*******************
It is good and proper to respect the U.S. flag, perpetuated with the blood of American heroes. It is a fatal mistake not to recognize those who wrap themselves in the same flag to cover up their crimes against the American people.
~ Sherman H. Skolnick
*****
"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."
~ Mohandas Gandhi
They pay all of the taxes, also.
They have the bread. The people in control caused this. Even with paying most of the taxes, which is their argument for justifying what they do, they still have money to buy up everything. That is why they are called the elites.
Percentiles Ranked by AGI
Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 5%
up to $160,041
% of total: 60.63
http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6
It's been this way for centuries
The 'Have's' have always 'Had' and the 'Have-not's' have always languished. This certainly goes back to Roman times, through the Middle Ages, clear up to today. There have always been the wealthy, the elite, the privileged few who have power and influence.
If you're calling for a sweeping re-distribution of wealth then that could easily be Socialism or Communism. I don't see it happening in Capitalism, even with free markets.
If you don't have inherited wealth, then the next best thing is to invent a better mousetrap and make your fortune. We have all seen or heard inspiring stories of individuals who had nothing and - by their own resources - made out very well. Bill Gates is a good example. T. Boone Pickins, Red Adair, and others. America is - for now - still the land of opportunity for driven entrepreneurs.
Redistribution of wealth by
Redistribution of wealth by way of socialism or communism is a sure way to bankrupt the World ..If these forms of control would have been any good for other Counties , those Countries would have the prosperity they want America to share ...Why are non of these systems prospering in the past or present without America to consume their goods? Their systems do not work worth a darn..They have no wealth from which to redistribute....Other wise please pass the plate.
Good people do Good deeds
Good people make it happen
Thou shalt not steal, gov't hates the competition
In no way am I calling for a redistribution
I am only pointing out that our so-called "free market" is in no way "open and competitive". I want a true free market. I do ok and I am certainly not complaining about my personal situation, but this type of gross imbalance will result in a society that is no longer a society (one way or another).
Natural forces always correct systems and when you have this type of unnatural system in place it will self-correct. The interesting question remains- how will the correction occur?
I believe the Obama selection is rooted in the population of those who currently have absolutely nothing to lose (no equity, no property, no assets, no stake in anything). It becomes a phenomena that has nothing to do with Communism or Marxism or Capitalism or any other political philosophy. It is a significant population that see nothing and are looking for anything to alter their current state. And this has nothing to do with earnings or wages or welfare, etc. Regardless of what you receive in income, if a person owns nothing and owes everything, there is no sense of liberty and therefore no sense of ownership or responsibility.
We do not have a free market, and have not for over 150 years.
at the minimum.
See my reply above on why resource distribution is irrelevant. You are focusing on the wrong thing. Focus on the liberty to decide what you shall do with your resources that you do have, and the liberty to acquire all that you need and want instead. The end result might be a flatter distribution, but that is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is liberty. Everything else follows from that.
Yes, but without some form
Yes, but without some form of ownership -an asset of any kind, you have no liberty- period. In order to be a free person you must either be totally self sufficient (that means you own your own land, animals, garden , water resources, etc.) or you trade your talents into the marketplace to receive sustenance (your labor, your good works, your exceptional intellect, whatever). For you to trade your talents you have to have some means to get them into the marketplace; ie some form of assets that you own. Otherwise you are always in debt to something or someone else with the primary objective being to obtain a point of "positive equity" in order to experience freedom to market your talents. Without assets you will never experience liberty. This was the entire basis for our system of government- to ensure that we collectively kept the force of government at bay to allow free people to own and thus trade freely.
How do you experience liberty without owning assets (some form of property)? We have 40% of the population with NO assets. I agree that it only makes sense that these folks must invest their sweat equity to obtain assets and freedom. But the skewed deck is stacked so high that they either have to borrow significant sums to get to play in the "game" or spend significant amounts of energy saving (at a rate of continual relative loss) in order to try and trade up the wealth game. Its doable but unless you are born into wealth you better hope the dice are rolling in your favor- because without a college degree or technical education of market value (which costs about 8 years of an average labor rate to obtain), you will not make enough, to save fast enough, to beat the inflation rate in order to start to own something and thus experience the great American dream.
Or you could send your son up in an inflatable flying saucer and then get a TV gig out of it, become famous, write a book and make millions in an instant.
And finally you might hit the lottery and get off the hamster wheel.
Whatever happened to homesteading?
Worse yet, the U.S. government owns most property if we consider National Parks and Reservations. Not to mention that the government protects the wealth of corporations in a fascist way.
Where did you get your figures?
I am curious. Where can I find this study? I have no problem believing the numbers, I would just like to see the study.
Figures
Found these from several different websites - Google "US Wealth distribution". Fed Reserve published these in 98 (the ones I used) so it is probably much worse today as the trend has been negative (at least for us little guys) for past 40 years.
Of course your post is
Of course your post is correct ..Asset conrol is not your "worst" enemy ..As witnessed in the bailout procedures, cash FLOW is your nitemare..Even the asset holders MUST have cash flow for daily sustinance..Without private business there is no incentive to produce more than one individual needs.. There can be NO growing of the economy..Gov't spending is only a short sighted fix... A socialised economy is sure failure for the whole World, as witnessed in the past ..America did all the supporting around the globe ..God's blessing of America WAS the World's blessing ..Apparently the powers that be do not need God's blessing any longer, they snub their nose at God's principles..They believe by moving industry to other non christian principled nations they can force feed their world gov't...Lest they forget God ALWAYS protect His faithfull, even when put to death..
Though HE slay me , ( or they slay me ) , yet will I trust HIM...
YES and even God Himself enjoys excess, as a sign of blessing ..
The World can claim all that America has, But they cannot receive the blessing to make themselves fat.
HE created a fatted calf..Excess is not a BAD thing ..Only persons who do not the will of the FATHER receive not the blessings.
It WAS the christian principled nation that HAS feed the World ..SO, Go ahead destroy the thing .The World will only learn the fact of life.
America is what Israel should have been; A BEACON on a hill.
God will perform it in His time, not by human hands..
As of old, a person may not touch the ARK & live...God needs no help.
If there is 1 rightious, He will not destroy America.
A rightious person lives by faith ..That is all that is required. (1)
Good people do Good deeds
Good people make it happen
Thou shalt not steal, gov't hates the competition
You are right about
what we are experiencing now is not a normal distribution, and you're right because we don't live in a free market. Any economy like the one we have today when the government directs almost 40% of the GDP is most definitely not a free market.
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A recent history of the US economy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzze9xCPuok
You have made an erroneous conclusion about free markets.
Think about a plantation in the per Civil War south. Was there a normal distribution of wealth or a skewed distribution? Of course the distribution was skewed. You would have had the owners with most of the wealth, a small middle class of overseers, and the vast majority in poverty. Think about a typical banana republic with the masses in poverty, a small middle class, and a small group with most of the wealth. This is what a slave system produces. Contrast this with the early days of the US where there was a large middle class, a sure sign of a normal distribution.
I don't know how you possibly could conclude that free markets produce a skewed distribution of wealth. The whole point of government interference in the free market is to thwart the free market and give some advantage over others. The federal reserve bank has been around for almost 100 years. Don't you think that this great privilege of loaning money into existence and then collecting interest on these loans might just have something to do with creating poverty for the many, but wealth for the bankers. Everywhere the government involves itself in the economy it has an effect in distorting what freedom otherwise would bring.
You might want to read Rose Wilder Lane's "The Discovery of Freedom" where she chronicles world history and demonstrates that freedom produces economic advance, improvement of life, and a natural (normal) distribution of wealth, while one or the other of the various slave systems produce economic stagnation, human suffering, and a skewed distribution of wealth.
You error is in thinking that we have free markets instead of an economic system of plunder and controlled markets. Of course we are on a progression toward a more and more skewed distribution of wealth, simply because we are on a progression of more and more government. Freedom produces a normal distribution of wealth; we just don't have freedom and the evidence is the data you presented in this thread.
Where did you get your stats?
Do you have a source?
Can you explain what you mean by these statements.
"I believe in free markets, but this distribution of wealth is not a normal distribution in any way (meaning it is not subject to natural forces- i.e. statistics 101). It can only exist within an un-natural (non-free) system, where the relative nature of freedom is constrained."
Are you basically saying that we don't have a free market? If so can you explain why we don't have free markets in the U.S?
I am only looking at the "end results"
In a true "open system", and it can be any open system, the statistical distribution will tend toward a NORMAL or Gaussian distribution. If the USA had a "free" economic system (ie the barriers to wealth were randomly distributed) then the wealth distribution curve would continue toward a "normal" distribution around the mean and standard deviation. You would expect that roughly 68 % of the population would own 68 % of the total wealth. Now I realize that our system is not completely free or "random", but the laws of nature would tend toward NORMAL, not away from NORMAL as the numbers indicate over the past 40 years. It indicates that the system is not random- and in fact is highly "engineered". I am simply equating "freedom" with natural events. Otherwise in my simple mind you no longer have a "free" economic system you have an engineered economic system ( with man-made controls).
Let Dr Paul explain this for you
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticytEUvVhQ
I believe if the government did not penalize small business...
for simply existing as a small business, (due to over-regulation of everything) the free market would balance things out. But the free market has not existed in this country since possibly back to Lincoln.
-I favor extending to Israel the same honest friendship that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers urged us to offer to all nations. ...This means I also favor discontinuing foreign aid to governments that are actual or potential enemies of Israel,--Ron Paul
Libera-me,...Let the truth break what my fears make.
Libera-me,.. from this dark dream to the lifestream!
Leslie (AKA Sam) Phillips
I really don`t care who owns what as long as no one trys to
take my property. Those that have more than I have due to their hard work ,intelligence or talents, I can admire. Those who steal from others through corrupt government largesse , I detest.
" The force of a correction is equal and opposite to the deception that proceded it"
B. Bonner
Here richly , with ridiculous display,
The politicians`s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
-Hilaire Belloc , Epitaph on a Politician
I'd like to see
this broken down by age brackets.
Yeah
The baby boomers control about 98% of everything.
If 10% own 70% of all there
If 10% own 70% of all there is then does that mean 90% of us are scratching and competing after the remainder 30% left-overs? Does anyone still wonder why society is increasingly predatory? When Americans were mostly wealthy (or well off) America was a generous and kind nation. Things have changed...