The middle class is eroding. Every day, regular, working people are struggling to keep their heads above ground. All the while the people on top, the billionaires, the 1%, stare down and hoard their wealth like dragons.
The wealth disparity in the United States alone is staggering — but just how much so? Upward redistribution has given the top 1% an astonishing $50 trillion as of 2020, that would have otherwise gone to American workers over the past several decades.
To put this into perspective, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said it would cost $267 billion annually to achieve zero hunger by 2030. If that investment was made over the next seven years, it would amount to $1.869 trillion.
If the top 1% truly cared about the common man, they could pool that $50 trillion together over the past several decades to end world hunger 26 times and still have money left over.
According to a study published by the Statista Research Department, 69% of the wealth in the United States is held by the top 10% of earners. This feels like a slap in the face to the bottom 50% who only hold 2.5% of the country’s wealth.
Over the past 50 years, the gap between a CEO’s salary and a worker’s salary has gotten larger and larger, causing the gap between the poor and rich, the people actually doing work and those taking the credit to expand even more, slowly and systematically destroying what we once knew as the middle class.
If this continues, there will eventually be no middle ground for the people — it will simply be the extremely wealthy and everyone else. Inequality is currently and will continue to trample the lives and livelihoods of common people.
This wasn’t always the case, however. From 1947-1974 middle and lower class people saw their growth at the same rate as those on top. For a while post-World War II, there was prosperity for everyone, but in the ‘70s, the economic state of the United States came to a decline. This poor economic situation led to new laws and policies being put in place that ended up favoring the wealthy.
But what if it’s simply a skill gap? It isn’t. Since 1975, the number of adult workers with a high school education or less has fallen, while the number of workers today with a four-year degree has more than quadrupled. This isn’t a matter of people needing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps — by the way, that was an originally sarcastic saying and meant to suggest impossibility since pulling yourself by your bootstraps is impossible.
Even a college-educated, full-time worker making $191,000 a year is earning less than 78% of what they could’ve earned if the growth rates held between 1947-1974 were still held today.
Are you a college-educated, prime-aged, full-time worker making $72,000 a year? Depending on the inflation index, you could be making $48,000 to $63,000 more, if not for rising inequality.
If you or your family is struggling financially, it is not your fault — or at the very least, not entirely.
The people in power are hoarding wealth and not using it to help the people around them because they do not see the common man as around them, but instead as below them.
It is imperative that the people of this nation push for the government to make policies that give more opportunities to those with less and push for them to get out of the pockets of billionaires. When some economists are theorizing that the wealth gap is the largest it has been since right before the Great Depression, we should not just stand by — we should push for change.
We have to stand to bridge the gap between the rich and poor, and we should hold our leaders to this standard.
If we aren’t going to, does that make us more foolish or cowardly?
