this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Considering how much wealth is hoarded but so few in the US alone, this kind of sounds like bullshit. It’s not that it couldn’t be maintained, it’s that the forces that ensured employers respected employees were weakened, so greed ran amok again.
If we ate the rich and divided their assets amongst us, we’d meet and exceed that “old timey” quality of life for everyone.
I have as much problems with the hoarding of wealth as everyone else here does, but it’s not enough to change the calculus here.
The top 0.1% in the United States hold approximately $20 trillion dollars in wealth. If you “ate the rich” and handed this over to the other 99.9% of citizens evenly, that would give everyone a one-time payment of about $58 000. And sure — we’d all love to have an extra $58 000 in our pockets, but when you divide that by 40 years of inequality you’re looking at less than $1500 per year per person — and that isn’t going to make up for the fact that a lot of high-paying jobs left the US in that time because they weren’t needed anymore.
And you ignore the fact that the wealth that has been hoarded isn’t sitting in a Scrooge McDuck-like vault full of gold. Most of the wealth held by the top 0.1% is tied up in investments which back real, tangible industrial and civil infrastructure important to the US economy.
None of which changes the fact that as the rest of the world (re)industrialized post WWII, those other countries didn’t need to do business with the US as much anymore. The US didn’t become the global financial powerhouse it was in the 50s and 60s and 70s because people inside the US were wealthy — they did it by selling stuff everywhere around the world, because much of the rest of the industrialized world had to rebuild their infrastructure to build their own stuff. But now the US gets to compete with China and Germany and Japan and Taiwan and France in ways they didn’t have to back in the middle of the 20th century, and other countries are buying from these countries instead of the US. And no amount of US regulation was ever going to change that.
The US benefitted from a one-time bubble that can’t be repeated. No duh things changed for the worse.