The upward redistribution of wealth over the past 45 years has shifted $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans.
@rbreich Trickle down economics works, but in reverse of the hype. What trickles down are the taxes the wealthy would be paying if they hadn’t been allowed to buy and own the government.
@rbreich The concentration of wealth among the top 1% is a significant concern, and we need policies that promote a fairer distribution of wealth and prioritize the needs of working Americans.
@rbreich point well taken but greed is infinite so it's more like a snowball vs a trickle or a gush. Would be great if there was a way to direct the snowball to work for everyone vs just pursuing its own end.
@rbreich
Trickle down economics, has never worked. In the 1970's and 1980's nothing trickled down. Two people had to work to keep a family surviving, just like now. Learn to save for tomorrow.
@rbreich Looks like the redistribution began 54 years ago
A while back, www.epi.org/ featured a clever web page showing wealth distribution by years. Here's the years leading up to the 1929 crash, the years of the Great Depression and the following years of building back the nation's wealth from 1929 to 1969 when I don't know what happened not being an economist but right then, according to this data, it redistributed the wealth to the wealthy again acording to these graphs...
@rbreich whenever someone reports earnings of over a million, they're either profiteering from their own employees or they're profiteering from their customers. Or both. I'm yet to be convinced there's any other explanation. Of a business does insanely well, why are the staff not treated like priority shareholders and properly compensated?
@rbreich If wealth trickled down, the Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Top 1% would either be constant or falling. In fact, the net worth of the top 1% has been increasing, on average, for a very long time.
Claims that wealth trickles down are easily dismissed by simply looking at the numbers.
@rbreich yet 100 million have given Zuck all their phones data permissions just to have the new Threads social media. So they want to help the billionaire class.
If only there had been a popular movement in the 2010s calling attention to this fact, and if only there had been a Democratic president in charge at the time.
@rbreich
And yet one of wealth's principal claims against socialism is that it "unfairly" redistributes wealth toward the Alfred P. Doolittle class of the "undeserving poor."
What's unfair is that in their view, they don't get everything, as if the ship owner were captain and crew, too. As with other forms of organizing and communal self-help, the wealthy deride others for using their most frequently used tools.
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