Obama and the 0.1 Percent

Barack Obama vowed to be for the little man, Mr. Main Street. Too bad the little man doesn’t throw $35,000 a plate fundraisers. And that is why the Average Joe suffers under Barack Obama.

When it comes to wealth inequality in the United States, it looks like 1929. That’s because in the late 1920s, the top 10 percent of Americans controlled 84 percent of the country’s wealth.

Things got better under Reagan, but we are NOT under Reagan anymore are we? In fact, we are under the anti-Reagan.

So instead of closing the wealth gap, as Reagan did, under Obama, the richest Americans have a share of the country’s wealth almost big enough to rival those in the late 1920s.

The study, from Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, uses a greater variety of sources to paint its picture of wealth inequality in the US than other recent analyses, and the what it say is America’s overall wealth is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Forget the 1 percent, because the 0.1 percent is where it’s at.

According to an analysis of data sourced through 2012, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans have as much of the country’s wealth as the poorest 90 percent. Each group contains 22 percent of the total wealth, with the top 160,700 families having net assets above $20 million.

Still the bottom 90 percent isn’t doing too bad, with an average worth of $84,000. Regardless, this group is being squeezed, since they are making modest gains at best, but have soaring debt due mainly to the mortgage crisis.

And the news gets even better for the 0.01 percent. Because of the 22 percent total wealth held by the 0.1 percent, 11.2 of that percentage is with the o.01 percenters. A group of roughly 16,000 families with an average net worth of $371 million holds the largest percentage of wealth since 1916, the highest on record, according to the study.

“By that metric, wealth is ten times more concentrated than income today,” the authors write in their study.

Obama has been fantastic for the poor, right? If only they had jobs, and not EBT cards. One might think that the Fed relies on the poor.