Top 1% Close To Surpassing Wealth Of The Middle Class

Republican economic policy has been very good for the richest Americans, but not so good for all other Americans. The gap between the richest people and the rest of the people is vast, and it continues to grow larger. The top 10% now have 63.8% of the country's wealth. And the top 1% will soon have more wealth than the middle class (the 50% to 90%). The top 1% has $35.5 trillion, while the entire middle class has $36.9 trillion. (The top 10% has $78.1 trillion.)

This is unsustainable. We are fast becoming a nation of haves and have-nots. We must institute economic policies that are fair to the entire population -- not just the rich. Of course that will not happen as long as the Republicans retain any political power. That's why they must be voted out of power next November!

The following is how Alexandre Tanzi and Michael Sasso report this economic unfairness at Bloomberg News:

The U.S.’s historic economic expansion has so enriched one-percenters they now hold almost as much wealth as the middle- and upper-middle classes combined.

The top 1% of American households have enjoyed huge returns in the stock market in the past decade, to the point that they now control more than half of the equity in U.S. public and private companies, according to data from the Federal Reserve. Those fat portfolios have America’s elite gobbling up an ever-bigger piece of the pie.

The very richest had assets of about $35.4 trillion in the second quarter, or just shy of the $36.9 trillion held by the tens of millions of people who make up the 50th percentile to the 90th percentile of Americans -- much of the middle and upper-middle classes.

Chalk up at least part of their good fortune to interest rates, said Stephen Colavito, chief market strategist at Lakeview Capital Partners, an Atlanta-based investment firm for high-net-worth investors. People can’t get much of a return on certificates of deposits and other passive investments, so they’ve pumped money into stocks and propped up the market overall, he said.

In turn, those investments make the wealthy eligible to put money into exclusive hedge funds and private equity funds. Many such funds require $5 million of investments to qualify.

“The wealthier that the wealthy get, the more opportunity they have,” Colavito said.

It may not be long before one-percenters actually surpass the middle and upper-middle classes. Household wealth in the upper-most bracket grew by $650 billion in the second quarter of 2019, while Americans in the 50th to 90th percentiles saw a $210 billion gain.

While the Federal Reserve data measure wealth, by another measurement the top 1% of taxpayers had incomes starting at $515,371 in 2017, according to the latest Internal Revenue Service data.

For now, those Americans in 90th to 99th percentiles -- well-to-do, but not the super rich -- still control the biggest share of wealth, with $42.6 trillion in assets.

The lone group left out of the fun: the bottom 50% of Americans. Those households have 35.7% of liabilities in the U.S. and just 6.1% of assets.