90 PERCENT OF ALL AMERICANS ARE POORER TODAY THAN IN 1987

Are you feeling it?

According to both a new study and the head of the Federal Reserve 90% of all US household are poorer than they were back in 1987.

Where did the money go? It didn’t just evaporate.

All that money didn’t go to the poor, it went to the wealthiest Americans.

“The wealthiest five percent of American households held 54 percent of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61 percent in 2010 and reached 63 percent in 2013,” stated Federal Reserve Board Chairwoman Janet Yellen . “By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution ‒ families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million ‒ held 43 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 36 percent in 2013.”

Americans are being fleeced. Our entire economic system is a scam to move wealth from the middle and lower classes to the wealthier class. This is self-evident.

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

–Henry Ford

“The middle class, in other words, missed out on the big bull market in stocks, but not on the even bigger bear one in housing. That’s why the recovery has restored so little of the wealth that the recession destroyed,” O’Brien wrote. “In fact, the bottom 90 percent have actually kept losing net worth the past few years, in large part, due to rising student loan debt.”

Yellen also focused on education debt as part of the problem.

“Rising college costs, the greater numbers of students pursuing higher education, and the recent trends in income and wealth have led to a dramatic increase in student loan debt. Outstanding student loan debt quadrupled from $260 billion in 2004 to $1.1 trillion this year,” she noted. “The relative burden of education debt has long been higher for families with lower net worth, and that this disparity has grown much wider in the past couple decades.”

While things are bad, they could still be worse. A recent report from Credit Suisse found that the US ranked in seventh place when it comes to wealth inequality around the world, with 74.6 percent of its wealth held by the top 10 percent, just behind Thailand, with 75 percent. Russia is the most unequal country, with the 84.8 percent of its national wealth held by its top 10 percent, CNBC reported.

And historically it’s also been worse in the United States. The top one percent now own over 41 percent of all the wealth in the country, which is the most since 1939. But O’Brien noted that “it’s still well below the all-time high of 51 percent set in 1928… In other words, this new Gilded Age might get even more Gilded.”

Tim Worstall, however, argued that no one knows if wealth inequality is actually rising or falling. Every report citing statistics “absolutely every single commentary and research paper,” he wrote for Forbes, “is telling us only about marketable, financial wealth–property, private pensions, stocks, bonds and shares and so on. And it’s not particularly evident that that’s the majority of the wealth in our societies, or even the most important part of it.”

He gave an example of a fireman with a $150,000-a-year pension. Under the NBER paper’s definition of wealth ‒ because the annuity is funded from the employer’s current operating expenses (which he notes is not an unusual circumstance) ‒ that fireman “is defined as having no wealth,” Worstall noted.

“So now we’re actually ignoring the entire effect of the totality of the welfare state? This is getting worse, isn’t it? For the real point that they make in this paper is that wealth inequality is getting back to what it was before WWI. When, you might recall, there was no welfare state at all,” the Forbes contributor wrote. “And we deliberately went out and created that welfare state in order to deal with the effects of income and wealth inequality.”

Yet Worstall ignores what the Credit Suisse report focused on: that the increasing consolidation of wealth in the hands of a very few ‒ just 0.7 percent of the world’s population ‒ is a “worrying signal”that the world could be on the brink of a new catastrophic economic failure, similar to that of 2008.

Source: 

http://www.truthandaction.org/90-percent-americans-poorer-today-1987-2/2/