Days after the one year anniversary of the first Occupy Wall Street protests, Forbes Magazine released its annual list of the 400 richest Americans. The richest 400 saw their net worth climb 13 percent from August 2011 to August 2012 topping $1.7 trillion.
At first glance, it’s little more than an entertaining peek over the fence. Many of the usual business leaders appear on the list: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Koch brothers, and the Waltons hug the top. Poor Mark Zuckerberg, often touted as the country’s youngest billionaire, saw his net worth drop to $9.3 billion after Facebook’s stock value fell.
But the more important question: how is the rest of America doing? The answer is not so entertaining.
Hourly wages, according to a Christian Science Monitor article, have remained flat. One in five mortgage holders are “upside down,” owing more money than their property is worth. And household income is somewhere around 1990 levels.
The very richest Americans, in contrast, have seen rapid gains in their wealth over the last decade. Though many of the Forbes titans are extremely generous, gifting billions to charities, that doesn’t compensate for what average Americans are experiencing after years of trickle-down economics.
Regardless of who wins the presidential election in November, the country’s next president may soon discover that the threat to our security is not whatever is erupting overseas.
The instability is right here at home.
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2012.
About two-thirds of the Forbes 400 are self-made men born to modest means who not merely realized the American dream for themselves, but in the process created entire new industries and otherwise added substantially to our nation’s GDP.
If you’re so damn envious of them, why don’t you get off the couch, and go out and make something useful of yourself?
What a moronic comment. 2/3 of 400 is 267. So of all the working people in the US only 267 arrive at this vaunted category. It is statistically insignificant. That shows how RARE achieving great wealth is.
If it were so easy you would have done it by now instead of sitting at the keyboard denigrating others.
By PeTone
@PeTone: We addressed the 400 because that’s the subject of the original post.
But the cutoff of 400 is entirely arbitrary. No doubt you’d find a similar proportion if you looked at the Forbes 10 million or 50 million.
I’m not sure in what world 2/3 is considered statistically insignificant or rare, but I’d bet that whatever world that is, it has rainbow unicorns prancing about in it {:~)
Sheesh, indeed. Read. 2/3 of the 400 in the Forbes 400 are self-made. That’s 2/3, dispelling the meme/myth that success is only accomplished by luck and inheritance. The denominator isn’t the working population of the US. When you show that there’s something fundamentally unfair about only a fraction of Americans becoming billionaires or trillionaires, you’ll have a point.
C