TRUMPERNOMICS: Bankruptcy filings surge among older Americans

Bankruptcy filings surge among older Americans

Dwindling income, medical bills, debt push seniors into financial ruin

By Kate Randall
7 August 2018

For an increasing number of older Americans, life in retirement is the diametric opposite of the “golden years.” Instead of being comfortably cushioned by a pension and Social Security, a significant section of the senior population faces dwindling income, vanishing pensions, inadequate savings, mounting health care costs and rising debt. Debt collectors are visiting them at their low-paying jobs or knocking at their door.

A new study by the Consumer Bankruptcy Project finds that this “perfect storm” of adversity is translating into desperation. “When the costs of aging are offloaded onto a population that simply does not have access to adequate resources, something has to give,” the study states, “and older Americans turn to what little is left of the social safety net—bankruptcy court.”

The research documented in “The Graying of US Bankruptcy: Fallout for Life in a Risk Society,” finds that the rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991. The same age group also accounts for a far greater share of all bankruptcy filers. The study suggests that this surge in filings by seniors is being driven by a three-decade-long shift of financial risk from the government and employers to individuals.

Seniors must wait longer for full Social Security benefits (age 70 rather than 65), defined benefit pensions have been replaced with 401(k)s, and older people are spending more out of pocket for medical care not covered by Medicare. Stagnant and declining incomes, job loss and the inability to find a decent-paying job to make ends meet are compounding the problem. Many seniors are one illness, accident or income drop away from financial ruin.

The Consumer Bankruptcy Project, in operation since 1981, is currently led by the authors of the study: Deborah Thorne, University of Idaho; Robert M. Lawless, University of Illinois; Pamela Foohey, Indiana University and Katherine Porter, University of California, Irvine. The project, financed by their universities, collects and analyzes court records of bankruptcy filings. Their latest study is based on sample personal bankruptcy cases and questionnaires filled out by 895 filers, ages 19 to 92.

Excerpts from the questionnaires give a glimpse of the respondents’ precarious personal and financial situations.

* The consequences of inadequate retirement and employment income:

All things went up in price. Retirement never went up. Had a part-time job that was helping to meet monthly payments. House payment kept going up. Was fired from my part-time job that I had for over 10 years without any warning. Being 67 and having back problems, not many people will hire you even as part time worker.

* The financial risk from plans like 401(k)s, which individuals are left to manage on their own:

Mismanaged my retirement savings due to depression. Invested in stock market but over-leveraged my account. Tried to restructure my debts but creditors refused. Unable to find suitable employment to pay my credit cards. Filed bankruptcy.

* The impact of debt and debt collectors:

My wife developed medical problems and had to leave her job, resulting in a loss of income. About two years later, I developed medical problems and was not able to continue working. We got to a point where we simply could not handle the debt load. The constant calls from bill collectors forced us to contact an attorney for help.

* Forced to forgo medical care, exposing the inadequacy of Medicare and Social Security to cover health care costs:

I went without medical and dental. Even with Medicare and supplemental dental insurance, the co-pays were more than we could afford. I still need dental work. It will have to wait until I can save up the money. Our income is just over the limit to get [governmental] help.

The authors provide background to the rise and fall of the social safety net in America. “During the nineteenth century, only the wealthy could count on familial care in their final years,” they write. “Most others were shunted off to poorhouses, which were ‘dreary, vermin-infested, and laden with human waste.’ Elderly poor were regarded as ‘a burden on the local taxes’ and were ‘despised and often treated as outcasts.’” [1]

In the wake of the Great Depression, approximately two-thirds of older Americans were impoverished, living the “stark terror of penniless, helpless old age,” the study says. The Social Security Act was signed into law in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Following World War II, workers began to receive public pensions with defined benefits. Medicare and Medicaid followed, signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. [2]

None of these reforms were granted out of the beneficence of the ruling elite—they were wrested from them in great struggles by workers. Conceding these social improvements bought time for the ruling class to hold back a movement of the working class. Now, with the plundering of the economy by the financial oligarchy—with the inflation of stock values serving as a mechanism for the upward redistribution of wealth to the super-rich—workers have seen their wages stagnate and decline in real value.

As the two big-business parties authorize trillions for the Pentagon budget and war, income inequality is soaring to new heights. Bankrupting the economy to enrich their bank accounts, the financial aristocrats are demanding that what’s left of the social safety net be dismantled.

The plight of growing numbers of seniors who are being forced to file for bankruptcy is a direct result of this process. The study quotes Stephen Katz, who describes the political establishment’s efforts over the past several decades to destroy Social Security, Medicare and pensions as pressure to “responsibilize a new senior citizenry to care for itself.”

As explained by the study, it is the poorest sections of the senior population that face the greatest financial squeeze. In 2001, about half of households headed by someone 60 or older had some debt. By 2013 this had risen to more than 61 percent. The median amount that older adult households owed more than doubled, from $18,385 in 2001 to $40,900 in 2013.

Since 1991, younger Americans’ rates of filing for bankruptcy have been steadily decreasing. During this same period, older Americans’ rates of bankruptcy filing have increased two- and three-fold, for those 65-75 and 75 and older, respectively. One in seven bankruptcy filers in America is 65 or older, a nearly five-fold increase over two-and-a-half decades ago. Among those age 75 and older, there has been a near ten-fold increase in filings since 1991.

The study says that financial problems facing seniors likely have resulted from “inadequate retirement income, job loss, or from jobs that pay older people less.” Seniors are also paying in retirement for student loans for their children.

The study also notes that “bankruptcy is not and never has been a panacea, especially for older people.” Compared to younger people filing bankruptcy, seniors were more likely to report “that their financial situations were either worse than or as bad as when they initially filed bankruptcy.”

Those filing for bankruptcy after age 65 had far more debt that their non-bankrupt peers—reporting median total debt of $101,560 compared to $1,000. Non-bankrupt older Americans also had an average $251,500 in wealth, compared to bankrupt seniors’ average net negative wealth of $17,390.

As in all of American society, a tiny fraction of the super-rich over-65s can pay out of pocket for whatever they need, while the vast majority of seniors struggle to get by. These conditions contribute to ill-health and even premature death under conditions where medical science has developed the ability to treat and cure all sorts of diseases and prolong life.

The study’s authors correctly point to the significance of the rise of senior bankruptcy filings for the greater population. As the World Socialist Web Site has often explained, the attack being waged by both the Democrats and Republicans on Social Security and Medicare is aimed at the working class as a whole. The attack on the right of older Americans to live a financially secure, healthy and dignified existence after a lifetime of work must be opposed by all workers and young people.

The Democrats have stood by in virtual silence as the Trump administration has pursued a ruthless policy ultimately aimed at privatizing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The working class must adopt a socialist perspective, independent of the two big business parties, that fights for the social rights of the working class, including a secure retirement, high-quality health care, education and housing.

Trump administration cuts in rent subsidies compound US housing crisis

By Kate Randall
6 August 2018

In Washington DC, the nation’s capital, a worker needs to earn $34.48 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental home. A worker earning the minimum wage in DC, $13.25 an hour, would have to work 91 hours each week to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent.

While DC has the second-highest housing shortage for extremely low-income renters, following Hawaii, no state in the US has an adequate supply of rental housing for this household income group. The stock of affordable housing for extremely low-income households spans a low of 22 per 100 units needed in Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, Florida to a high of only 47 per 100 units needed in Providence-Warwick, Rhode Island.

While rents continue to rise and construction of affordable apartments lags far behind need, the Trump administration is implementing a punitive policy that will only exacerbate the already dire housing crisis facing the working class. This is part of the White House’s war on the poor, which includes attacks on Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor serving 67 million people, and moves to gut the SNAP food stamp program, serving an estimated 42 million, through the imposition of work requirements and time limits aimed at purging beneficiaries from the rolls.

This year, the Trump administration proposed to slash $8.8 billion from the most important housing programs run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The administration’s main housing initiative was unveiled this spring by HUD Secretary Ben Carson. His sadistic proposal would triple the minimum rent for subsidized households with an adult younger than 65 from the current $50 to at least $150.

Carson’s proposal would also raise rents for those receiving federal housing assistance from the current 30 percent to 35 percent of gross income. In addition, local public housing authorities would be able to impose work requirements on those receiving benefits.

The typical household affected by the HUD secretary’s plan would be a single mother with two children with an annual income of $2,400, or just $200 a month. After paying rent, this family would have only $48 a month left to pay for necessities like clothing, diapers, school supplies and food or medical needs not covered by other assistance.

An immediate threat to affordable housing is the tax bill passed by Congress last year, which threatens the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, one of the most important sources of long-term housing funding. Demand for the $9-billion-a-year credit could shrink as investors realize savings through the tax cuts, according to Novogradac & Company, which provides analytics for the construction and finance industries. It estimates that nearly 235,000 fewer apartments will be built over the next decade as a result.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) earlier this year published “The GAP: A Shortage of Affordable Homes.” The group found that the US has a shortage of more than 7.2 million rental homes available and affordable for extremely low-income renter households. This group of renters is defined as those with household incomes at or below the poverty level or 30 percent of area median income.

Of the 11.2 million extremely low-income renter households, 71 percent, or 8 million, are severely cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than half of their incomes on rent and utilities. According to NLIHC, 84 percent are seniors, persons with disabilities or people who are in the labor force.

This statistic puts the lie to Trump and Carson’s claims that individuals in these households are shirking work responsibilities and living off the government, and require a push to propel them out of poverty. The reality is that the vast majority are either too old to work, disabled, or are in fact working but earn so little they cannot find affordable housing.

Severe housing cost burdens have direct negative consequences for household members’ physical as well as mental well-being, NLIHC found. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies, severely cost-burdened households with children spend 75 percent less on health care and 40 percent less on food than similarly poor households that are not cost-burdened. The situation is bleak for cost-burdened seniors as well, who spend 62 percent less on health care than similarly poor seniors.

The administration’s housing proposals will lead to increased hunger, malnutrition, forgone health care and early death for millions of poor adults and children, who will be forced to choose between paying the rent, purchasing nutritious food or going to the doctor.

United Way data made available this spring found that 50.8 million US households cannot afford a basic monthly “ survival budget,” including housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a smart phone. This included 16.1 million households living below the official federal poverty level, an absurdly low $24,300 for a family of four in 2016.

While maintaining their laser focus on claims of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and Trump campaign “collusion,” the Democrats have sounded no alarm bells about the affordable housing crisis ravaging vast swaths of the US population. They have called no congressional hearings or town hall meetings on Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and housing aid.

Any serious policy to confront the attacks on the social rights of the working class, including decent, affordable housing, must take as its starting point the rejection of the policies of both big business parties and the fight for an independent, socialist perspective.

TRUMP’S SECRET AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/john-binder-globalist-donald-trumps.html

"During the same month that Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”

 

agenda, Nielsen’s committee released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting

 

the European migrant crisis as a win for big business who would profit greatly

 

from a never-ending stream of cheap, foreign migrants."

 

 

AMERICA: ONE PAYCHECK AND TWELVE ILLEGALS AWAY FROM HOMELESSNESS!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/rick-moran-los-angeles-mexicos-second.html

 

A dashcam video of downtown Los Angeles on Christmas day reveals a stunning sight: hundreds of tents and lean-tos on the sidewalks that serve as shelter for the homeless. The scene is reminiscent of a third-world country. RICK MORAN / AMERICANTHINKER com

 

 

HOMELESS CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES, MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST CITY, WORSENS BY THE DAY…. Approximates the great depression

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/homeless-crisis-in-mexicos-second.html

HOMELESS AMERICA’S HOUSING CRISIS as 40 million illegals have climbed U.S. open borders.

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/homeless-in-america-hundreds-of.html

 

EVERY AMERICAN (Legal) only one paycheck and two illegals away from living in their cars.

E-VERIFY – Why both parties hate the word!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/mark-krikorian-wheres-e-verify-dont.html

Putting employers of illegals in prison would end the foreign invasion today!

Bottom 40 percent of Americans have a negative net income

By Gabriel Black
3 August 2018

The bottom 40 percent of households in the United States have an average net pre-tax income of negative $11,660 a year, according to a new report by Reuters.

The report, “Poorer Americans Buckling as US Economy Booms,” published July 23 and written by lead author Jonathan Spicer, exposes how life really is for most Americans in the midst of the supposedly booming economy. While the official unemployment rate is low and growth rates are rising, the reality is that the working class is stretched to its limit, relying heavily on borrowing and working two or more low-wage jobs to survive.

The report’s data shows that the bottom two quintiles of households make, on average, $11,587 and $29,414 a year in pre-tax income, respectively. Their expenses, meanwhile, are $26,144 and $38,187, respectively. This means that the bottom quintile has an average net loss of $14,557 a year and the next quintile a loss of $8,773, prior to taxes.

How is it that the bottom 40 percent of households are losing, on average, well over $10,000 every year?

The data covers students, who are taking on student debt, and recipients of food stamps and federal benefits, who may receive small sums to help pay for expenses. However, the bottom 40 percent of households is overwhelmingly composed of low-wage workers, who, despite their immense sacrifices, are unable to cover the basic cost of living.

The next 20 percent, the middle quintile of the country, is not faring well, either. With an average pre-tax income of $51,379, it is able to achieve a net income of only $2,836 before taxes. A family making $50,000 a year in 2017 would have to pay $3,448 in federal income tax, plus state and FICA taxes. This means that even the middle 20 percent of the population is unable to save money and is, on average, taking on some form of debt.

This growing burden of debt on the bottom 60 percent of the population is expressed in the sharp drop in the US personal savings rate over the past three years, declining from 6 percent in 2015 to between 2.5 and 3 percent in the past few months. Likewise, the rate of credit cards becoming seriously delinquent rose from 3.5 percent in 2016 to 4.7 percent in March 2018. Subprime auto loan delinquencies are now higher than what they were at the height of the financial crisis.

This data from Reuters exposes the real character of the post-2008 “economic recovery.” It is a recovery for the rich at the expense of the living standards of the majority of working people. While the stock market has surged to astronomical heights, and the wealth of the millionaires and billionaires has surged alongside it, the majority of the American people are substantially worse off than they were prior to the financial crisis.

This is no accident.

The post-2008 recovery, led first by Barack Obama and now overseen by Donald Trump, was based on slashing the wages and living standards of the working class to extract more profit for the capitalists. Starting with the autoworkers and spreading to every major section of workers in the country, employers demanded “sacrifices” that they, and the unions, promised would be made up after the recovery.

The “recovery,” however, has arrived, and none of the sacrifices workers made are being paid back. Instead, it is the ultra-rich that are cashing in. This year will see a record level of share buybacks and divided payments, exceeding $1 trillion. These parasitic financial measures, which take money out of investment in new jobs, research and infrastructure, allow people like Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, to pocket $250 million in a single year.

Data from Reuters shows that while the bottom 60 percent of the population generally saw its expenses outpace its income between 2012 and 2017, the income of the top 20 percent increasingly outpaced its expenses over this same period. On average, the top 20 percent of the population makes $188,676 and spends $112,846. This layer makes more money than all of the other income quintiles combined.

The amount the top 20 percent of the population is able to save each year ($75,831) is more than six times the average income of the bottom quintile and more than two-and-a-half times the income of the next quintile. Within the top 20 percent, there is immense social differentiation, its low end composed of workers in decent-paying professions and its high end composed of millionaires and billionaires.

The report notes that the surge in debt and general economic precariousness of the bottom half of the population threaten to trigger a new financial crisis. The authors write: “As many of the most vulnerable workers sink deeper into the red, the nearly decade-long economic expansion may be more vulnerable to a further spike in gasoline prices or an escalation of trade conflicts.”

The authors call attention to how, historically, US consumption growth is dominated by the top 40 percent of earners. However, in the past few years, the bottom 60 percent of earners has accounted for the majority of consumption as it ran down its savings. Consumption makes up for over 70 percent of all economic activity in the United States and plays a critical role in economic growth.

In the past few years, the United States has been wracked by opioid addiction, increasing suicide rates and declining life expectancy. The fundamental cause of this immense and growing social crisis is the impoverishment of the working class, the broad mass of the people.

President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers states that the war on poverty is “largely over.” This is obviously a lie.

The Trump administration and before it the Obama administration have been fighting a war. But, it is not against poverty. They have been fighting a class war to impoverish the working population in order to further enrich the financial oligarchy that they represent.

The working class, however, is ready for a counter-offensive. Heralded by the teachers’ strikes earlier this year in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, workers are prepared to enter into struggle to take back the wealth they have created and gain control of their workplaces.

Financial parasitism and the American oligarchy

The report of plans by the Trump administration to push through yet another $100 billion rip-off for the super-rich underscores the urgent reality facing the working class: American society can no longer afford the endless demands of the ruling elite for the accumulation of ever-greater personal wealth.

This is, of course, a global problem. As an Oxfam study found last year, eight billionaires control more wealth than the poorer half of humanity, some 3.6 billion people. Six of those eight are Americans, and nowhere is the conflict between the needs of working people and the insatiable appetite of the financial aristocracy so great as in the United States.

One mega-billionaire alone, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the world’s richest man, has seen his fortune rise nearly $50 billion in 2018—enough to pay a bonus of $100,000 to each of the company’s more than half a million workers.

The proposal for another massive tax handout is the latest expression of a bipartisan agenda of wealth redistribution, which has proceeded over the course of the past several decades under both Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, the greatest transfer occurred under the Obama administration in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, with trillions allocated to inflate the financial markets—the principal mechanism for engineering the bailout of the rich.

A recent report by the Roosevelt Institute and the National Employment Law Project reveals the staggering level of financial parasitism that characterizes the American economy. The report examined stock buybacks overall, and in detail for three major industries: restaurants, retail sales and food manufacturing.

Under the financial deregulation pushed by both Democratic and Republican administrations over the past 25 years, stock buybacks have soared from less than 5 percent of earnings in the early 1980s to 54 percent of earnings in 2012, and nearly 60 percent today.

Such figures put paid to the pro-capitalist mythology suggesting that high corporate profits will “trickle down” to the masses because companies will invest those profits in new machinery and hiring new workers. Actually, they spent well over half of their profits enriching big shareholders and top management, who hold the lion’s share of stock.

Remarkably, the restaurant industry spent far more on stock buybacks than it made in profits, 136.5 percent. That means that companies in this sector went into debt, borrowing money to give payouts to investors. The top five restaurant chains for buybacks included McDonald’s, YUM Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut), Starbucks, Restaurant Brands International (Burger King, Tim Horton’s) and Domino’s Pizza. If the same money had been divided among the workers, it would have raised wages by 25 percent.

The retail industry spent 79.2 percent of net profit on stock buybacks, and companies like Walmart, CVS, Target, Lowe’s and Home Depot could have given workers across-the-board raises of 63 percent instead. For food manufacturing (Pepsico, KraftHeinz, Tyson Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland, among others), the comparable figures are 58 percent of net profit going to stock buybacks, but the profits were larger and could have financed raises of 79 percent to workers.

Stock buybacks particularly enrich CEOs, who generally take the bulk of their income in stock, and thus benefit when the buyback drives up the price. CEOs reaping the most spectacular returns, named in a report this week by Politico, included Safra Katz of Oracle ($250 million), Thomas Kurian, also of Oracle ($85 million) and Ajay Banga of Mastercard ($44.4 million).

Another fact exposes the enormous sums being looted by the corporate and financial aristocracy. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that 350 Goldman Sachs executives and board members who received stock options in 2008, at the height of the global financial crash, will have accumulated $3 billion dollars by the time these options expire this year.

The flood of stock buybacks has been triggered by the mammoth $1.5 trillion tax cut pushed through by Trump and the Republican Congress last December with the complicity of the Democrats. Corporate America is funneling $2.5 trillion into the pockets of shareholders through buybacks, dividends, mergers and acquisitions, and other financial manipulations.

There was evidently some resentment in sections of the super-rich that the tax cut applied mainly to corporate and personal income taxes, and left the capital gains tax rate unchanged. In response, the Trump administration has indicated that it is preparing to reverse previous precedent and is considering an executive action to change the rules for taxing capital gains—the profits made from the buying and selling of stocks, bonds and other financial assets—so that the wealthy can deduct the effects of price inflation.

This will cut the capital gains tax by one-third, or $102 billion over ten years. Two-thirds of this sum, or $66 billion, would accrue to the top 0.1 percent of Americans.

Previous administrations had determined that adjusting for inflation would require authorization by Congress, meaning that a change by executive fiat would be illegal. But Mnuchin said, “If it can’t get done through a legislation process, we will look at what tools at Treasury we have to do it on our own and we’ll consider that.” 

This is an administration that demonizes millions of working people who come to the United States seeking safety and a better life, calling them “illegal aliens” because they are undocumented. But when it comes to the interests of the billionaires, there’s no concern over what is legal, only over how best to fatten their portfolios.

What sustains the Trump administration, in the face of mounting popular hostility to its retrograde social policies, flagrant attacks on democratic rights and unbridled militarism, is the character of the nominal opposition. The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, no less dedicated than Trump to defending the interests of the corporate and financial elite.

There is not a single social problem that can be resolved so long as the corporate and financial elite rules over American and world economy. An end to the domination of these social parasites means an end to the economic system, capitalism, that exists to maintain and expand their wealth and power.

Patrick Martin

Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019

By Gabriel Black
18 June 2015

Households with more than a million (US) dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

This large percentage, however, only includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held through managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion of the rich’s net worth.

At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.

In total, the world added $17.5 trillion of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth. In other words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.

This trend is the result of the massive infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks. The policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock market even while global economic growth has slumped.

While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.

In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.

Those families with wealth between $20 and $100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.

Coming in last in the “high net worth” population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth. These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.

The gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth accumulation has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not even begun to recover from the past recession.

An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56 percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014. Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the world’s wealth.

In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.

As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between 2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015 report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all from income growth.”

Another report by Knight Frank, looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014 these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.

The report also draws attention to the disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”