Before I start on all of this it is important to note that under Bush the percentage went from 25% to 50%.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101038089
The 400 richest Americans are now worth a combined $2 trillion, according to Forbes.
$2 trillion is more than the combined net worth of half of all Americans. The bottom half, of course.
$2 trillion is more than the annual GDP of Italy, Mexico or Canada.
$2 trillion is equal to the Federal Reserve's holdings of publicly traded U.S. Treasurys.
$2 trillion is the estimated size of the underground economy, mostly unreported income.
$2 trillion would fund all government spending through July of this year.
$2 trillion is equal to about two-thirds of all taxes to be collected in the U.S. for 2013.
$2 trillion would pay for all of the existing home sales in the U.S. in 2012 AND2013 year-to-date.
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/...-more-wealth-/
The second part of Moore’s claim -- that the net worth of half of all Americans is less than that of the Forbes 400 -- is more complicated.
Moore cited a December 2010 Federal Reserve Board report that said the net worth for all U.S. households was $53.1 trillion in September 2009. That was the same month Forbes released its top 400 list.
That’s a starting point -- $53.1 trillion is the net worth for everybody.
Moore also cited a March 2010 "working paper" by Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University and Bard College. Wolff was a key source in Moore’s claim that was rated Mostly True by PolitiFact National.
Wolff’s paper said that as of July 2009, the three lowest quintiles of U.S. households -- in other words, the poorest 60 percent of U.S. households -- possessed 2.3 percent of the nation’s total net worth.
Moore then multiplied that 2.3 percent by the nation’s total net worth of $53.1 trillion and got $1.22 trillion.
In other words, he was saying the poorest 60 percent of U.S. households had $1.22 trillion in net worth, which is less than the $1.27 trillion in net worth for the Forbes’ 400 wealthiest Americans.
Of course, if the net worth of 60 percent of households is less than that of Forbes’ 400 wealthiest, the net worth of 50 percent of the households -- which is what Moore claimed -- would also be less.
We contacted Wolff, who said he had reviewed Moore’s calculations.
"As far as I can tell, they’re fine," he said.
Three economists -- Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Daniel Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute -- agreed.
We made one more check.
Since Moore’s statistics were for 2009, we sought figures for 2010.
The 2010 net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.37 trillion, Forbes reported in September 2010. That same month, the total U.S. net worth was $54.9 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Board report cited by Moore.
Wolff hasn’t updated his 2009 figures. So we used his 2.3 percent figure again, multiplied by the 2010 total net worth of $54.9 trillion, and found that the net worth of the poorest 60 percent of U.S. households was $1.26 trillion in 2010.
That’s less than the 2010 net worth for the Forbes 400.
How could it be that 400 people have more wealth than half of the more than 100 million U.S. households?
Think of it this way. Many Americans make a good income, have some savings and investments, and own a nice home; they also have debt, for a mortgage, credit cards and other bills. Some people would still have a pretty healthy bottom line. But many -- including those who lost a job and their home in the recession -- have a negative net worth. So that drags down the total net worth for the poorer half of U.S. households that Moore cited.
We also want to add one cautionary note, from Mitchell of the Cato Institute, about Moore’s methodology: The Federal Reserve uses hard numbers to calculate the net worth of all households, but Forbes uses assumptions and interviews along with hard numbers in estimating the net worth of the Forbes 400.
There’s no way to know how the differences between the two affect the net worth numbers, but Moore used the data that are available and there’s no indication he "cherry-picked" figures for a desired result, Mitchell said.
With that caveat, our assessment indicates that as of 2009, the net worth of the nation’s 400 wealthiest individuals exceeds the net worth of half of all American households.
We rate Moore’s statement True.
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/03/...-of-americans/
Moore is almost right when he said the Forbes listers have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the population. As you can see from the chart below, in 2007, the bottom 50% of American households (that is about 57 million households) had $1.61 trillion in wealth in 2007, the latest period for which such data is available. The Federal Reserve defines wealth as all financial and nonfinancial assets, including bank accounts, investments, houses, cars and debt.
The net worth of Forbes listers was a combined $1.537 trillion that year, but their wealth fell to $1.37 trillion for the 2010 list. (In an email, Moore cited The Campaign for America’s Future for his source).
We don’t know the current numbers for both groups. Presumably the Forbes listers are worth more today than they were last fall, given the stock market run-up. And the wealth shifts of the bottom 50% are unclear, though a report from the Federal Reserve shows the bottom 40% lost less on a percentage basis than any other group, simply because they had less real-estate and stocks).
As Moore, not a Forbes Lister but a self-confessed millionaire, told me, “Robert, please note: in my speech I used the words ‘more than’ but I had written ‘as much as.’ As that was the last year stats were available, I would guess that the 400 now have ‘more than,’ as most of the worth of the bottom 50% is in their homes, which have sunk in value since 2007.”
Fair enough. And again, his stat is basically correct for 2007.
Yet the part that begs clarification is the idea that this intense wealth concentration is new or somehow linked to the bailout.
The Forbes listers and the bottom have each held around 3% of the nation’s wealth for the past 20 years. (Reliable and comparable data don’t go further back than that.) Some years they tipped to 3.3%, other years to 2.7%, but basically their shares have move remarkably in parallel through so much economic change. (The Forbesers, of course, pay far more taxes, but that is another argument.)
The stats are undeniably troubling. But the fact remains that the wealth shares of the rich haven’t diverged from the bottom since the early 1980s. (The top 1% have also held roughly the same share of wealth since the the late 1980s.)
Stories of sudden wealth gaps funded by tax bailouts, of Wall Street heists and financial “coup d’etats” make for rousing speeches. But unfortunately, it is nothing new.
Do you think America could or should rebalance the wealth of the Forbes listers and the bottom halfers?
