The Extraction of Wealth
Whoooooooshhh there it goes!
You may or may not know this, but there is a finite number of money in the world. It’s true, only a certain amount of currency is in circulation at one time. Now, that does not mean there are trillions of actual dollar bills floating around. Most of the money is just numbers on a computer, nothing you could break in and steal. In total circulation there are 1.9 trillion dollars of US currency in circulation. Now, that’s a lot of dosh. A lotta guacamole. A lot of….money. But, there is so much more.
Let’s talk about wealth. American citizens in 2018 held about $98 trillion in wealth. This is the total amount of assets people have while subtracting their debt. Out of the many many times i’ve pointed out to someone on the right or one of so many neo-liberals that Jeff Bezos has too much money I get a variation of the same response. “Even if you took all of his billions you could only run the economy for ..Even if you took his money and tried to do this you could only…” Let’s say we just evenly split the amount of wealth that exists in America and schmeared it all over the country evenly to every household. You would end up with about $343,000 per person.
As all of you know, the top 1% holds most of the wealth. They have about $25 trillion and the middle class has about $18 trillion. Since 1995 the middle class has been in a state of decline, while the 1% have grown in wealth by degree of magnitudes. Even after the 2008 crash of the economy due to rampant abuse of the system by the 1%, their wealth continued to grow.
It Just Keeps Going!
Now, the wealth of the already extraordinarily wealthy doesn’t grow in a vacuum (you see what I did there) and there is not an endless amount of money. When you turn on the news or scroll through twitter and see that the wealthiest 600 or so individuals in the country have gained at least $637 billion over the pandemic, know they are taking it. Some would call this “earning”. When half a million people lose their jobs, 30 or so million are facing eviction and have lost their healthcare and we are facing down the barrel of a recession we have not known since the great one, it makes you wonder. Wait, no it doesn’t. They have been and continue to rig the system, get more and more of the money, pay less and less of the taxes and ship more and more boat-fulls of cash overseas.
