Comment on But how would they be able to live on that?
Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 2 months agoSecond of all, some of the biggest traders on the stock market are pension funds of common workers, appreciating their retirement money.
“The rich now own a record share of stocks,” Axios reported on January 10, noting that the top 10 percent hold about 93 percent of U.S. households stock market wealth.
ips-dc.org/the-richest-1-percent-own-a-greater-sh…
You’re being misleading, or have been misleading about the allocation of wealth within the stock market.
Retirement should be a public service, not a form of gambling within a system set up for the rich.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ok, lets do some math. The GDP of the US is $28 trillion. The population of 15 years and above is about 273.85 million. That gives about $102,000 annually per person in this category. The median personal income is about $40,500 annually. So almost 40% of the entire economy goes to wages and other income of normal people alone. And yes, it is median (not average) so we are talking normal people wages, not CEO wages. According to wikipedia, about 17.3% of the GDP is government consumption and 17.2% is capital investment. That leaves little over 25% unaccounted for. This will include everything not accounted above. Charities, rich people wages, lottery winnings, … and of course, stock market gains and dividends.
I can’t account for more of the 25% right now, but even if it all went to the filthily rich along with a proportional part of government consumption and capital investment, then the normal people still get 61% of the economy. In the absolute worst case. Seems to me like lot of the “ultra-wealthy own most of america” is just misinformation.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You shouldn’t be using GDP for this, as GDP is a notoriously bad metric for understanding the flow of wealth. If I pay you $100 to wash my car and you pay me $100 to wash your car, the GDP of our actions is $200 even though both of our wealth is unchanged. GDP is simply a measure of how fast money is circulating.
You need to be looking at that actual allocation of the wealth, as the rich like to use a myriad of loopholes to obfuscate their acquisitions.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite…
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So you are explaining why the rich get less than what I calculated because GDP is overestimated while the way I calculated income of median people is solid.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No. Not even close. I’m explaining that GDP is a terrible metric to look at this problem. You need to look at wealth holdings. And the rich own basically all wealth.
So this is wrong in two ways. The first bit with “wealth on paper” is wrong, because the rich own the wealth. Loads of it are tied up in stocks, sure, but it is still wealth. And they use it like we use other fiat currencies, so to them stocks are just as “real” as USD is “real”.
The second is that the economy is an finitely expandable pool that is itself finite. So it is ultimately a zero sum game.
There is a limited number of hot dogs that can be sold in a year. Every hot dog sold by vendor A is a hotdog that cannot be sold by vendor B. Every stock that is owned by rich asshat A is a stock that cannot be owned by worker B.
So yes, the rich owning all the wealth directly takes away from the rest of us.
“Who is able to buy X” isn’t a relevant question to the problem of wealth inequality/hoarding.
This analogy immediately falls apart, because I make about $40/hr.
Bezos makes about $8,000,000/hr
…yahoo.com/…/jeff-bezos-made-over-7-172628289.htm…
That is grotesque. The stock market, the economy, and all the wealth is owned by the rich.
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We need to fix this.