We’ve all heard of the one percent. We know them. They are the the affluent and entitled and they have more money than you or I will ever have. The group you may not have heard of is the one percent of the one percent. This group has been solidifying its wealth in the United States, steadily, and now holds an egregious amount of American capital.
The growth though, according to new research from Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, has been disproportionately going to the already-wealthy. In fact, while the top one percent and one-thousandth percent groups are the only ones to have seen increases in their wealth since the 1980’s.
According to Zucman and Saez, there has been no increase in capital income and wealth since the 1980s.
Contrast that with the 0.1 percent group that has a minimum household worth of $20 million and the fact that they have more than doubled their share of wealth since the 1960s. This is a sign that while the egregiously wealthy have been gaining and gaining, the rest of us have been losing and losing.
America is developing a worker class that is being told it should be happy to be employed, even if “employed” is defined as an unpaid intern or a minimum wage position by which an individual is unable to sustain themselves – much less, support a family.
Couple that with the horrific statements the mega-wealthy have been making about the lower-class and you can start to see the writing that’s on the wall here.
Related: 1% to the 99%: “Consider Yourself Lucky”
According to Jordan Weissmann at Slate, the research so far has been evaluating relative value but they speculate that the 99% has also been losing in terms of absolute value. In the end, this means that while the pie has stayed relatively the same size, more and more of it is going to the top.
Joshua is a writer and researcher with Ring of Fire. You can follow him on Twitter @Joshual33.