Wealth Non-Existent For Most Americans

I have talked a lot recently about the income distribution in the United States. It is a fact that the policies pursued by Republicans in the past 30 years has resulted in record incomes for the richest Americans -- the top 1% have seen their incomes rise by over 240% since 1980, while the bottom 80-90% have seen their income growth stagnant and have actually seen their buying power decrease substantially.

But those failed economic policies have not only resulted in a vast inequality in income, but also in wealth. And some new number from Credit Suisse's World Wealth Report show that these Republican policies have resulted in an enormous shrinking of the wealth accumulated by most Americans -- a shrinkage that is far greater than in other developed nations where a more just economic policy was followed.

Americans have been told (and most of them seem to believe) that the economic system has been good for everyone in this country, and has resulted in Americans having a higher standard of living and more wealth than the citizens of other countries -- even other developed countries such as Japan or the European nations. But the Credit Suisse numbers show that is simply not true. Americans are actually much pooer than the citizens in those countries.

One way of looking at a country's wealth is by looking at the median wealth figure. That is the figure where half of the population would be below the figure and the other half above it. The median wealth figure for the United Kingdom is about $121,000. And figures on median wealth for other western European nations and Japan are in the same range. How does the United States compare to that? Very poorly. The median wealth figure for the United States is less than half of what it is in Europe and Japan -- about $53,000.

That's right, half of all Americans have a total wealth of less than $53,000 (and that figure includes everything they own -- house, car, bank accounts, pension plan, etc.). It's a good thing we have Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and other social programs in this country (all of which the Republicans would like to abolish) because these people certainly could not depend on their accumulated wealth to survive if they lost their job or had to retire.

And it really is even worse than that. It's not just the bottom half of the people in this country that are suffering because of the unfair economic policies. As the chart above shows, the richest 10% of the American population owns 83% of all the wealth in this country. That leaves only 17% of the country's wealth for the bottom 90% of Americans (and only 7% for the bottom 80% of all Americans).

The Republican "trickle-down" policies have not just destroyed millions of jobs and thrown the country into a serious recession -- it has also destroyed the wealth of most Americans. If there was ever an economically-unfair system, it is the one currently in practice in the United States. There are banana republics with fairer economic systems.

And what do the Republicans want to do? They want to give more massive tax cuts to the richest Americans, cut the programs that help other Americans (the ones who have been hurt by the recession and job losses), abolish Medicare, privatize Social Security, and repeal the recent health care reform that gives medical coverage to millions more Americans. How can they possibly justify such a mean-spirited agenda? And how can anyone justify voting for the Republicans and their horrible agenda?