{"id":72734,"date":"2017-09-20T07:02:34","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T14:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/insanely-concentrated-wealth-is-strangling-our-prosperity"},"modified":"2017-09-24T07:30:30","modified_gmt":"2017-09-24T14:30:30","slug":"insanely-concentrated-wealth-is-strangling-our-prosperity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/insanely-concentrated-wealth-is-strangling-our-prosperity","title":{"rendered":"Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Just like the game of Monopoly, which was created to illustrate the operation of laissez faire capitalism, there is always one big winner at the end of the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cWealth concentration drives a vicious, downward cycle, throttling the very engine of wealth creation itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause: people with lots of money don\u2019t spend it. They just sit on it, like Smaug in his cave. The more money you have, the less of it you spend every year. If you have $10,000, you might spend it this year. If you have $10 million, you\u2019re not gonna. If you have $1,000, you\u2019re at least somewhat likely to spend it this month.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

These people could spend $20 million every year and they\u2019d still just keep getting richer, forever, even if they did absolutely nothing except choose some index funds<\/a>, watch their balances grow, and shop for a new yacht for their eight-year-old.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re thinking that they \u201cdeserve\u201d all that wealth, and all that income just for owning stuff, because they\u2019re \u201cmakers,\u201d think again: between 50% and 70% of U.S. household wealth is \u201cearned\u201d the old-fashioned way (cue John Houseman voice<\/a>): it\u2019s inherited<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bottom 90% of Americans aren\u2019t even visible on this chart \u2014 and it\u2019s a very tall chart. The scale of wealth inequality in America today makes our crazy levels of income inequality (which have also expanded vastly) look like a Marxist utopia.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just like the game of Monopoly, which was created to illustrate the operation of laissez faire capitalism, there is always one big winner at the end of the game. \u201cWealth concentration drives a vicious, downward cycle, throttling the very engine of wealth creation itself.\u201d \u201cBecause: people with lots of money don\u2019t spend it. They just [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/419"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72773,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72734\/revisions\/72773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}