"Study Shows Economic Crisis and Response a Victory for the Rich"
by masaccio
This and other equally astonishing facts appear in a paper written by Edward Wolff (pdf).* Tables 3 and 4. Wolff’s paper is discussed in detail by William Domhoff here,** with better charts. Financial assets include all assets other than home equity.
Wolff provides some estimates on the impact on wealth of the Great Crash as of July 1, 2009. His rough guess is that the impact on the very rich was substantially less than on the other groups, and that as a result, the share of wealth of the top 1% went up from 34.6% of total wealth to 37.1%. The number of households with zero or negative net worth went from 18.6% to 24.1%. That is because housing prices made up the biggest part of the wealth of the bottom four quintiles, so the losses on housing value had a huge impact. The stock market has risen further since, and housing prices have continued to decline, so it’s fair to guess that if he repeated his calculations as of today, the rich would have advanced further.
One form of class war is the struggle over the allocation of the gains created by society. The rich won that struggle. It was not an accident. It didn’t have to be that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way going forward. Nevertheless, President Obama and his economics team are trying to put the old system back in place: low taxes on the rich, speculation, unregulated shadow banking, light-touch regulation of exotic securities, malleable regulators, the whole plan of the rich. Why would anyone except the rich support that?"
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