Forget the 1%
It is the 0.01% who are really getting ahead in AmericaThe Economist, Nov 8th 2014
EXCERPT...
A new paper by Mr Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics reckons past estimates badly underestimated the share of wealth belonging to the very rich. It uses a richer variety of sources than prior studies, including detailed data on personal income taxes (which the authors mine for figures on capital income) and property tax, which they check against Fed data on aggregate wealth. The authors note that not every potential source of error can be accounted for; tax avoidance strategies, for instance, could cause either an overestimation of the wealth share of the rich (if they classify labour income as capital income in order to take advantage of lower rates) or an underestimation (if they intentionally seek out lower yielding investments for their tax advantages). Yet they believe their estimates represent an improvement over past attempts.
The results are enough to make Mr Piketty blush. The authors examine the share of total wealth held by the bottom 90% of families relative to those at the very top. Because the bottom half of all families almost always has no net wealth, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90% is an effective measure of “middle class” wealth, or that held by those from the 50th to the 90th percentile. In the late 1920s the bottom 90% held just 16% of America’s wealth—considerably less than that held by the top 0.1%, which controlled a quarter of total wealth just before the crash of 1929. From the beginning of the Depression until the end of the second world war, the middle class’s share of total wealth rose steadily, thanks largely to collapsing wealth among richer households. Thereafter the middle class’s share grew along with national wealth thanks to broader equity ownership, middle-class income growth and rising rates of home-ownership. The expansion of tax breaks for retirement savings also helped. By the early 1980s the share of household wealth held by the middle class rose to 36%—roughly four times the share controlled by the top 0.1%.
From the early 1980s, however, these trends have reversed. The ratio of household wealth to national income has risen back toward the level of the 1920s, but the share in the hands of middle-class families has tumbled (see chart). Tepid growth in middle-class incomes is partly to blame; real incomes for the top 1% of families grew 3.4% a year from 1986-2012 while those for the bottom 90% grew 0.7%. But Messrs Saez and Zucman reckon the main cause of falling middle-class net worth is soaring debt. Rising home values did little to raise middle-class wealth since mortgage debt also soared. The recession battered home prices but left the debt untouched, further squeezing middle-class wealth.
The really, really rich get much, much richer
On the other side of the spectrum, the fortunes of the wealthy have grown, especially at the very top. The 16,000 families making up the richest 0.01%, with an average net worth of $371m, now control 11.2% of total wealth—back to the 1916 share, which is the highest on record. Those down the distribution have not done quite so well: the top 0.1% (consisting of 160,000 families worth $73m on average) hold 22% of America’s wealth, just shy of the 1929 peak—and exactly the same share as the bottom 90% of the population. Meanwhile the share of wealth held by families from the 90th to the 99th percentile has actually fallen over the last decade, though not by as much as the net worth of the bottom 90%.
CONTINUED..
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1
= new reply since forum marked as read
Not brave? What about dodging those sniper bullets in Bosnia?
If she wants so badly to be brave (Bosnia), I'll give her that. 
I'm glad we got that straightened out! 
prayer wheel, does it mean I am technically praying? As a Pastafarian, I am not sure I should look at the wheel.
As long as you aren't chanting Om Mani Padme Hum while you look at it, the colander on your head will keep you safe. 
?itok=-QD9JH2_
More than 100,000 workers took to the streets in Brussels, Belgium on Thursday to protest austerity cuts and free-market reforms that are set to cut vital social services, freeze wages, and raise the retirement age.
Police used tear gas and water cannons to break up the protest, which saw laborers and other low-wage workers marching peacefully through downtown Brussels to mark the start of an anticipated month-long campaign against the country's newly elected center-right government.
The actions will culminate with a nationwide strike on December 15.
"They are hitting the workers, the unemployed. They are not looking for money where it is, I mean, people with a lot of money," one worker, Philippe Dubois, told the Associated Press.
Belgium's recently elected coalition, which shuts out the Socialist Party for the first time in decades, is made up of three pro-business parties and the centrist Christian Democrats. The coalition said it was forced to institute these new free-market reforms in order to comply with the European Union's budget restrictions.
But residents and other politicians disagreed. Former Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo, a Socialist Democrat, told Reuters UK, "I share the concern of the people and the measures of the government are unjust."
Rec
about sometimes. When we say the 1%ers...we really mean the .01%er.
Now get ready Octa, somebody will be in here sooner or later to defend those poor .01% by saying it's all a conspiracy etc.. 
Why don't we just talk about Bill Gates then?
Everybody else is near-poor or something.
To me, even the talk of the 1% is too NARROW, but some people want to narrow it even further.
Because, doncha know, 11.2% of the wealth is far, far more important than a mere 85% of the wealth. 
Sure, sure, I wrote about the "Fab 400" http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hfojvt/123
but I quickly widened it
"The cummulative loss since 1995, including 4% interest, totalled $88.7 billion in 2007. Again, a mere drop in the deficit bucket, but the fab 400 are also just the tip of the wealthy iceberg.
Their share of income was just 1.59% of all income. That is way up from the .49% it was in 1995, but still a fairly small slice. In 2005, those with incomes over $10 million (and there were 13,776 such families, including the fab 400) got 5.1% of all income...."
"Such pushovers, these Americans."
It seems like they're the ones who keep winning and we're the ones who keep losing. 
And they are the ones* screwing America now.
What's different today, is we don't have Smedley Butler or FDR to stop them.
Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush, share a moment and some information, back in the day.
* Of course, it's not just a few rich families's offspring who screw the majority today. They've hired help and built up the giant noise machine to continue their work overthrowing the progress FDR and the New Deal brought America for 80 years.
Why would the nation and world's richest people do that? Progress costs money. And they don't want to pay for it, even when they've gained seven times more wealth than all of history until 1981 put together.
Instead, whey continue to work -- legally, through government and lobbyists -- to amass even more, transferring the hard work and little wealth of the many onto themselves.
And instead of an armed mob led by a war hero, their weapon of enslavement is "Neo-Liberal Economics." To most Americans, that means Trickle-Down. To the planet, it means doom.
Thanks, Octafish. You always cut through the BS! 
