Dear America: The Wealth Gap Is Worse Than Ever

The wealth gap in the United States is more apparent than ever. The rich are getting richer with little support going to the lower classes. The top ten percent of Americans are control way over half the national wealth of the citizens.

A large problem in the United States is not just the top ten percent, but the top one percent of citizens in wealth possess over 30 percent of the nation’s money. Just one percent of the population has such a large influence on all of the United States as only a handful of people can control about a third of the entire country’s wealth.

From Statista the 90-99 percentiles in wealth possess another 37 percent of the United States’ wealth. Only nine percent have an astonishingly high percentage of our wealth.

Of the entire country, three multi-billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, coming to around over 160 million Americans. These super billionaires have a chokehold on all of the industries in the nation.

Around 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%. The CEOs of large corporations make an all-time high of 350 times what their workers earn.

The ratio between the two has greatly risen, causing the gap between rich and poor to grow. This gap is theorized to maybe be the largest gap that it has been since right before the Great Depression.

What is stopping many others from reaching a higher wealth is billionaires monopolizing entire industries. People cannot rise to the top because only a select few people are already there. Rising costs on everything as inflation has greatly increased only hurts the lower class as they have to work more which makes more money for the rich.

From the rest of the United States’ wealth, the 50th to 90th percentile have 28 percent of the wealth. 40 percent of the nation’s population has only 28 percent of the wealth.

The largest disparity of wealth comes from the bottom 50 percent of Americans. They only have an incredible three percent of the wealth. This needs to be improved for the American economy and more importantly for the lives of the people to improve.

During the last State of the Union address, President Joe Biden shared plans to boost the success of his economic plans, running on the idea that “we must build the economy from the bottom up and middle out, not the top down.”

Building off what is said before, a nationwide tax of 2 percent on wealth over 30 million dollars could have raised nearly $415 billion if it had taken place this year. With a similar tax applying only to wealth of whose more than $1 billion could have raised $62 billion. This wealth tax would affect just 1 in 400 households nationwide. The tax would affect such a small amount of Americans at such a high state of wealth it would have such a small impact on their lives.

Half of older Americans say that they have no future savings and taking some money from the rich who don’t need billions of dollars could help out many in need. It would not hurt the top percentile of people and would greatly help out who is in need. If we want a better country, and world, we have to learn to share.