Sunday, December 6, 2015

Wealth Hierarchy Would Look Better If It Were A Pyramid

Turns out that the wealth hierarchy in America no longer looks like a pyramid. It more resembles the Seattle Space Needle.

The real split is not between the 1% and the 99%. It is between the 0.00001% and everyone else.

The richest 20 billionaires in America have a combined net worth of $732 billion. That's more than the bottom half of the American population, or 152 million people. The richest 400 Americans have a combined net worth of $234 trillion – equal to that of the bottom 61 percent of the U.S. population, or about 194 million people.

And the Republicans still are working hard to make the split even wider. Just look at the tax cuts for the richest Americans and for corporations that Paul Ryan proposed this week.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/04/top-20-billionaires-worth-as-much-as-half-of-america.html