Forum Post: Who are the 1%?
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 9, 2011, 5:12 p.m. EST by randallburns
(211)
from Washougal, WA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
One key to understanding this is the writings of Ed Wolff at NYU.
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/.../may03interviewswolff.html http://www.bostonreview.net/BR21.1/wolff.html http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_502.pdf
The press has a lot of confusion around wealth and income. Wealth is hard assets like stocks, bonds, real estate. Income can be something much more fleeting. We have Yuppies on wall street that may have what seems like a high income-but that is counterbalanced by absurd living expenses in Manhattan-and long working hours.
Wolff is the leading economist on the distribution of Wealth. Nearly half of all hard assets in the US are controlled by 1% of the population. Think families with more than $5-10 Million per family. That is even more important when you exclude things like home ownership and pensions. That means the real control of the US economy rests in rather few hands.
Some of the very wealthy like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates support the idea of increasing the higher end income tax. The thing is: they know perfectly well their income is small compared to their assets.
During the Great Depression, the Socialist Party and Huey Long seriously proposed taxing assets instead of income. That was a move that attacked the very wealthy at their core. It can be argued the New Deal was a compromise meant to distract the left from moving towards assets taxation. If you look at the Socialist Party Platform, they got EVERYTHING they asked for except taxation of concentrated assets.
See also this great article about who the top 1% are and how they came to appropriate most of the gains in the American economy over the last three decades: Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States, available at: http://pas.sagepub.com/content/38/2/152.full.pdf
I think the 1% can be defined as "if you know your net worth, you're not in the 1%"
Not really. Bill Gates has a pretty good estimate of his net worth because most of his assets are in a publicly traded company. Owners of property or closely held businesses are in a little trickier situation
You are right. I have been saying that the income tax was a sham to protect bundled wealth.
The way it works: The income tax tends to protect the very wealthy from folks that might offer them real competition.
When we are talking wealth past $5-10 Million, assets are more about control than security or living standards.
Bingo! Same goes for regulations and deregulation. There is so much criticism of deregulation, but people need to realize that industry writes regulations, too. The regulations serve to impose insurmountable entry costs to would-be competitors.
So, there is no easy answer, but there are some very easy-to-spot problems.
one of the early economists that wrote how businesses will write regulations to stifle would be competitors was Henry George.
Now, regulations can somewhat limit trickle up effects. However, in general we have to realize that in a global economy the trickle up effects in a country like the US are huge.
Being EXTREMELY generous, using million man march math, there are 100,000 protesters in the OWS movement. There are 307,006,550 people living in the US right now. 99% if that number is - 303936484. The 100,000 (using million man march math) protesters in the OWS movement are approximately .03% of that 99%. The hilarity of that 0.03% of the population (being EXTREMELY generous in my estimate of their numbers) having the audacity to say that they speak for the other 98.07% is pretty overwhelming.
I'll add that the biggest trigger of OWS is unemployment and a large percentage of the 99% are not unemployed, however fearful they might be about becoming unemployed.
But as revolutions go, 30% is a fairly good number - reportedly only 30% of the colonialists were in favor of separation from the King of England. So it doesn't have to be a majority, but I agree .03% isn't close. Also my observation is that Wall Street is within 20 miles of 15 million people, so even a 1% turnout would be 150,000 and the reports I read are of a few thousand at most...
Yeah, I'm trying to be VERY generous. I admit I'm using Million Man Math. Its probably more like 0.0003% if we were to look at this honestly.
The question is: can 0.03% give a better voice to the 99% than the media or government has to date.
The concentration of wealth, media, political power and control of corporate institutions is such that literally all the information most people have comes from rather few sources. However just having an education process can help a lot here.
Your point is made but in the grand scheme of things those who have money and are interested in increasing it through manipulation of the policies of the government are the issue for most of us. Most people will feel much better when they see their government representing a consensus (on issues not involving rights) rather that an extremely small minority (whether it is 0.5 or 3.2176%) because of the size of campaign contributions or less savory incentives. The "bad guys" aren't just Wall Street but they are a reasonable metaphor for them. We can all get into the weeds later.