There are two types of households in the U.S.: the rich half and the poorer half.
And the data is quite striking in this regard.
This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao, breaks down America’s wealth (the total net worth of all U.S. households) by wealth percentile, and lists the number of households in each percentile.
Data for this chart is sourced from the Federal Reserve as of Q3, 2024.
For reference, the total net worth of all U.S. households is close to $160 trillion.
To look at the Pacific Northwest today one would never know that 25 years ago the region was an economic powerhouse at the forefront of technology and business innovation. At the time Portland and Seattle were known for constant rain as well as raining cash, and the “millionaire density” of the Seattle area was at historic highs. The tech boom and international trade with Asia had created a Silicon Valley of the northern coast.
Companies like Nike, Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon established corporate offices and generated tens of thousands of jobs, and many of those jobs were considered high income. People can debate the overall effects of the population surge to the region; there are many who would argue that Washington and Oregon were better off when they were considered backwoods fishing and lumber states. That said, it’s undeniable that for a time the Northwest was one of the most desirable and lucrative places to live in the US.
That’s all gone now. The wealthy are leaving Seattle like it’s a leper colony and all that’s left are millions of broke activists, poverty stricken residents and illegal immigrants. Some blame the constant riots or the steady stream of welfare recipients. Others say that the draconian covid mandates caused people to jump ship. However, a primary factor in businesses (and money) leaving the city was the institution of a progressive “Payroll Expense Tax”.
The PET is a quarterly tax approved by the Seattle City Council in 2020 in the middle of the Covid hysteria. It increases taxes on businesses depending on how many employees they hire and how much their employees get paid. In other words, it punishes companies that hire more people and pay them a good salary. The conditions of the PET are very similar to what Democrats say they want for their “Wealth Tax” – An extra tax on top earners and large companies beyond the income tax.
Democrats were high on their own supply in the early 2020s and in their fervor to destroy conservatives they instituted every suicidal policy imaginable, from defunding police to near-zero prosecution for property theft under $1000. It’s not surprising that wealth taxes were established at the same time to “stick it to the capitalists”. What they seem to have forgotten, though, is that communist tactics don’t work if people and businesses are able to walk away, and that’s exactly what has happened in Seattle.
Larger businesses are packing up and leaving the Northwest as quickly as they arrived. Amazon, Meta, Google and Expedia are the most prominent examples of companies exiting the Seattle labor market and hiring elsewhere to avoid the Payroll Tax, but there are numerous others.
A recent paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, titled “Access to Opportunity in the Sciences: Evidence From the Nobel Laureates,” found that 67 percent of science Nobel Prize winners have “fathers from above the 90th income percentile in their birth country.” The authors, affiliated with Imperial College London, Dartmouth College, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, claim that their paper reveals extreme inequality in the science world and suggests that undiscovered geniuses from poor backgrounds never had the chance to show what they could do for humanity.
The study received considerable press attention, including a piece in The Guardian claiming that it showed “a lot of talent wasted…and breakthroughs lost.”
“The Nobel prizes highlight that we have a biased system in science and little is being done to even out the playing field,” wrote scientist Kate Shaw in Physics World. “We should not accept that such a tiny demographic are born ‘better’ at science than anyone else.”
This study contains several statistical and conceptual errors, making its findings meaningless. It provides no evidence that unequal opportunity in science limits human progress.
For starters, how did the authors determine who was “born better” and thus had a better chance of winning a Nobel Prize? The study examined what their fathers did for a living. It found that since 1901, people with scientists for fathers had 150 times the chance of winning a science Nobel than the average person.
Scientists earn more on average, which allegedly shows that coming from a wealthier family gave them a boost. But it’s common sense that the children of scientists will have an advantage in winning Nobel Prizes. Children of successful people often excel in the same fields as their parents. The size of the advantage may seem surprising, but this is typical when you look at the extremes of the bell curve. Even small initial advantages can result in extreme differences in outcome.
Suppose instead of Nobel Prizes in science we were talking about an Olympic gold medal for the 100-meter dash. Suppose everyone in the world got to participate. There would be thousands of people a step or two behind the winner.
If you have enough money, you can buy just about anything. And when you are in a position where you can buy just about anything, you wield an enormous amount of raw power. Today, our world is completely and utterly dominated by those at the very top of the economic pyramid. Those in the top one percent of the top one percent are pretty much able to do whatever they want, and the rest of us are pretty much powerless to stop them. Unfortunately, the gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the rest of us just continues to get even larger. Last year, the total wealth of the world’s millionaires reached a staggering 86.8 trillion dollars…
The world has never had so many rich people and their investments in soaring stock markets have made them wealthier than ever recorded, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The number of “high net worth individuals” (HNWI) — defined as people with liquid assets of at least $1 million — rose by 5.1 percent last year to 22.8 million, according to consulting firm Capgemini.
Their total wealth reached $86.8 trillion in 2023, a 4.7 percent increase from the previous year, according to the annual World Wealth Report.
Meanwhile, 5 billion people have gotten poorer since the start of the pandemic…
Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost 5 billion people globally have become poorer.
How much power do the hundreds of millions of people around the world that are living on less than two dollars a day have compared to the billionaires in the western world that are constantly making headlines?
The truth is that they run the world and the rest of us are just living in it.
The pandemic has made the world’s wealthiest richer but led to more people living in poverty, according to the charity Oxfam.
Lower incomes for the world’s poorest contributed to the death of 21,000 people each day, its report claims.
But the world’s 10 richest men have more than doubled their collective fortunes since March 2020, Oxfam said.
Oxfam typically releases a report on global inequality at the start of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
That event usually sees thousands of corporate and political leaders, celebrities, campaigners, economists and journalists gather in the Swiss ski resort for panel discussions, drinks parties and schmoozing.
However for the second year running, the meeting (scheduled for this week) will be online-only after the emergence of the Omicron variant derailed plans to return to an in-person event.
Hellbound and Down 
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