Sanders, who has previously run unsuccessfully to become a Democratic presidential candidate, published It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism in February. In it, he notes that one-tenth of 1% of the US population owns 90% of the nation’s wealth, among other things.
Can’t see how that’s true. US household wealth is around $150 trillion (rough idea, not looked up). 0.1% of the population is 350k people. 350k people own 135 trillion? There are 350k people with an average holding of near $400 million each?
Naaah*.
But then this is The Guardian:
Sanders countered that Walmart in many cases pays starvation wages to its 1.2 billion employees despite how rich the Waltons are.
Walmart’s big but not that big.
*The actual Sanders is that the top 0.1% own as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Which is really rather different, no?
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By ‘wealth’ owned by the tippy,tippy, top rich ( ©️ AOC), do they mean the money in various investments that keep the economy running, provide money for loans and credit: money which once it is invested is not in fact owned by the investor and, as the man says, values can go down as well as up?
So how much wealth do the 0.9% own?
Does anyone know how Sanders managed to become filthy rich?
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2022/10/the-wealthiest-0-1-of-households/
At the time of this writing, each of the wealthiest 0.1% of households had at least $38 million worth of assets. In total, those 130,757 households in the top segment held almost twice as much wealth as the 65 million households in the bottom 50%.
As an aside the old multiple home-owning hypocrite and highly paid writer nearly blew a gasket recently at the suggestion that his own net worth was $8m. “That’s a lie, you’re probably looking at some phony right-wing internet stuff” he spluttered while being careful to give no clue as to what the actual figure was.
“Does anyone know how Sanders managed to become filthy rich?”
Well, he’s a politician. QED.
Given that at any point a fair number of households will have negative, zero or near-zero wealth (for example a recent college graduate, even one with a very high-paying job and a very bright future economically) the top 0.1% will have more wealth than a big percentage.
Did they really say WalMart has 1.2B employees? in a country with 330-350M people?
Nothing to see here says the FBI.
Jane Sanders’ path to wealth is shrouded in mystery. However, some reports suggest that she may have earned a significant portion of her wealth from her tenure as the president of Burlington College…………….As previously mentioned, Jane Sanders’ net worth has been the subject of controversy. In 2016, it was reported that the FBI was investigating allegations of fraud related to Jane Sanders’ tenure as the president of Burlington College. The investigation focused on whether Jane Sanders committed bank fraud when she secured a $10 million loan for the college to purchase a new campus. Critics argued that the loan was too risky and that Jane Sanders overestimated the college’s ability to pay it back. However, Jane Sanders denied any wrongdoing, and the investigation ultimately did not result in any charges
https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/2017/07/21/unraveling-jane-sanders-burlington-college-legacy/486054001/
“There were no problems when I left. It was great. It was poised for soaring,” Sanders said in a 2015 interview with the Burlington Free Press during her husband’s presidential campaign.
“Starvation wages”, really? Sometime back they were interviewing a woman who complained she wasn’t being paid a living wage and hadn’t gotten a raise in 2 years. She was asked – if you’ve been getting too little to live on for 2 years, how are you still alive?
Why are there so may fat people on starvation wages? You see them everywhere nowadays, is it a fashion thing?
Like all good Socialists, Bernie Sanders owns three houses, despite the fact that he’s never held a meaningful job outside of politics in his life. Oh, and his wife? Social worker type… A field not known for overly enriching those employed within it.
I reckon a lot of this “Starvation wages but still obese” thing is coming from welfare queens who have some minimum hours job at the QuikeeMart and have some bloke living with them and paying the difference.
She can’t declare this, obviously, because she’d have to give up the welfare, so she doesn’t.
It’s welfare fraud and those “small payments” soon add up across a population to tens of billions.
Sooo… Walmart employs almost the entire population of China, or India….
That’s modern Journalism for you…
Remember when the Guardian still had pretensions to being a Serious Newspaper for the Clever People?
(It was before they started unironically quoting Quamina, founder of Dope Black Queers and printing headlines such as Cut Off Your Toddler’s Penis And Inject Xer Eyeballs With Vaccines For, Uh, The Environment? (sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation))
Where the Guardian is going, they won’t need eyes to see.
It is instructive to note that the ‘wealth’ calculation doesn’t include the wealth owned by the government. Millions of acres of land, forests, mineral reserves, oil deposits, prime real estate, and buildings. The estimate for government energy resources alone is $150 trillion. It is just as realizable as taking the the wealth from the 1%. The St Louis Fed estimates that the top 1% owns only 33% of US wealth.