Last week I made a post describing how the capitalist system is a pyramid scheme, where people like us do all the work and the rich people who sit at the top of the pyramid keep all the rewards.
Let's use pyramids again to conceptualize how much the rich are siphoning up from the rest of us.
If we're talking about the share of income that the richest 1 percent take... in 2021 they took more than 22 percent of our nation's gross income before taxes and benefits. The richest 1 percent of income earners got more than 1/5th of the pyramid just for themselves. As recently as 1980 that number was only 10.4 percent.
That's income inequality... but of course the richest of the rich don't draw a paycheck like the rest of us. They live off their wealth. So how much of our country's wealth are the top 1 percent taking?
About 30 percent! If this pyramid represents all of the wealth in our country, the richest 1 percent own about a third of it. The remaining 99 percent have to share the remaining 70 percent.
But even this fails to capture the drama of the pyramid scheme that is capitalism.
If you examine the richest 10 percent of the pyramid, they are taking 70 percent of the total. This means that the bottom 90 percent of Americans only hold about 30 percent of the nation's wealth.
Wealth is measured in real estate, cash, cars, all of our worldly possessions. But stocks are perhaps the most telling indicator of how wealth hoarding happens in our society. Because critics will always be quick to say: But what about 401ks and IRAs?
The bottom 90 percent of Americans only hold 7 percent of the total stock market. The top 10 percent own 93 percent of the pyramid that represents stocks.
So there are some visual representations of how our capitalist pyramid scheme is dividing up our nation's wealth. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the share the rich take for themselves is too big. Especially since we are the ones who actually create wealth from our hard work. We're also the ones who spend most of the money in our society... consumer spending makes up 68 percent of US GDP, our national economy. Imagine how much healthier our economy would be if we had more money to spend - if we didn't allow the rich to take so much.Â
Let’s make them pay.