2014 Year in Review: Part 2 – David Collum | Peak Prosperity.
“Printing money out of thin air does not increase wealth, it only increases claims on existing wealth.”
~Charles Hugh Smith
In the olden days, claims that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer were a thinly veiled rallying cry for class warfare. Thomas Sowell reminds us that a growing economy lifts all boats, and those at the bottom strata percolate up generationally from garment worker to bookkeeper to doctors and lawyers (well, maybe just doctors). It feels different now, and the angst over wealth disparity resonates with growing numbers of adherents. It is no longer just the dregs of society but the increasingly struggling middle class, or what I prefer to call “the median class.”
“Only the wealthy can afford a middle-class lifestyle.”
~Zero Hedge
The contrasts are stunning. While 53% of adults earn less than $30,000 per year,ref 197 the rentier class—big-gun money managers—are muffin topping out at $3 billion.ref 198,199 David Tepper earned almost $500K per hour. Stevie Cohen ranked second in earnings as a full-time defendant for insider trading. The median retirement savings of a working-age adult is $2,000, yet we’ve got folks with the cash to pay for brain surgery on goldfish,ref 200 $60 million Steve Martin–like balloon art,ref 201 $500K watches,ref 202 and $2,000 glamburgers (“gluttonburgers”).ref 203 A full 47% of millennials are using >50% of their paychecks to pay down debt.ref 204Twenty percent of US families have no employed family members.ref 205 This is a problem demanding solutions for which none are obvious. The elite billionaire society, Beta Kappa Phi,ref 206 is dominated by the rentiers rather than wealth-creating capitalists. This is not about Bill Gates or Michael Dell. Wealth inequality is about the inordinately high pay for those who don’t actually create wealth and the inordinately low pay for those whose toils do. We have reached the apex of another gilded age.
