David_42
Registered Democrat.
- Aug 9, 2015
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... And he's not wrong!
Bernie Sanders says top 0.1% in U.S. have almost as much wealth as bottom 90%
Bernie Sanders says top 0.1% in U.S. have almost as much wealth as bottom 90%
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told Liberty University students on Sept. 14 that he didn’t expect them to agree with his liberal views on abortion and gay marriage.
But Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, sought common ground with students at the conservative Christian university in Lynchburg by casting wealth inequality as a moral issue.
"There is no justice, and I want you to hear this clearly, when the top 1/10th of 1 percent -- not 1 percent -- the top 1/10th of 1 percent today in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent," Sanders told the crowd, packed into the Vines Center arena for weekly convocation. "And in your hearts, you will have to determine the morality of that, and the justice of that."
We decided to examine Sanders’ statement that the richest 0.1 percent has nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent. It’s a standard line in Sanders’ speeches. Warren Gunnels, policy director of Sanders’ presidential campaign, said the senator’s source for the statistic is a Nov. 13, 2014, article in The Guardian, a British newspaper.
As our colleagues at PolitiFact Wisconsin have written, the article reported on the findings of a research paper, about wealth inequality during the past 100 years. The study was commissioned by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan organization in Cambridge, Mass., which is best known as the arbiter for determining when the U.S. economy falls into recession.
The authors of the study were economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics. Using tax records, they made estimates for 2012 on wealth -- that is, the value of all assets, such as a home, and savings and retirement accounts, minus all debts, such as mortgages and credit card balances.
The top 0.1 percent included 160,000 families with net assets of at least $20 million. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent encompassed 144 million families with average wealth of $84,000.
That report says wealth concentration among the richest Americans followed a U-shaped pattern during the past century. It was high in the beginning of the 20th century and then fell from 1929 to 1978. But the study found that wealth concentration among the richest has been rising since, fueled in particular by gains held by the wealthiest 0.1 percent families. The families in that echelon saw their share rise from 7 percent of total household wealth in the late 1970s to 22 percent in 2012.
The bottom 90 percent’s share of the nation’s wealth fell from 35 percent in the mid-1980s to 23 percent in 2012.