Amanda Marcotte

If you open your paycheck -- or, in our modern era, check your deposit statement online -- and feel a crushing sense that it's just not as big as it should be, odds are you're not an egotist or delusional. Working Americans increasingly just don't make enough to pay the bills, in no small part because the wealthy people we work for would rather just keep that money for themselves rather than share it with the people who earned it for them. It's a sad state of affairs that is becoming economically untenable for this country.

A new paper out by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman shows that the bottom 90% of Americans owns less than a quarter of the country's wealth, down to 23% from a high of 36% in the mid-80s. This is the lowest amount of the country's wealth controlled by the middle and working classes since 1940. Back then, New Deal-era economic policies were allowing working people to keep an increasing amount of the wealth they created, but since the mid-80s, there's been a dramatic downturn, as the top 10% hoard most of the wealth while the rest of us watch our savings accounts dwindle. Really, it's more like the top 1%, as the Occupy Wall Street protesters would say, who own almost 40% of the country's wealth. One-tenth of 1% of Americans -- about 16,000 families -- owns over 11% of our country's wealth, which is more than the bottom two-thirds of us combined.

A lot of the reason for this growing gap in wealth between the rich and the rest of us is due to income inequality. "The bottom 60% of Americans have experienced a lost decade of either stagnant or falling wages since 2000 despite increasing their productivity 25% over the same period," Bryce Covert at ThinkProgress writes. "But wages for the 1% grew by about 200% since the 1960s." Subsequently, wealthier people can sock away their money -- the top 1% saves one-third of its income -- while the idea of a "savings account" is becoming a pipe dream for the rest of us who can barely pay the bills.

In fact, it's a stretch to even say that we're successfully paying our bills, since we have to borrow so much money to get by. And it's not because we're buying TVs and smartphones. It the basic bills -- housing and education -- that are putting us so deeply in debt. "Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before," Saez and Zucman write in a brief on their paper. In the past, middle class people made enough money to pay off debts and save money on top of it, but with stagnant wages and rising debt levels, instead we're just borrowing to get by, with no real hope of getting into the black.

Employers of middle class workers get away with not paying workers what they're worth by relying on the lending industry to pick up the slack. But employers of minimum wage workers instead are turning to the taxpayers to cover the difference between what they want to pay employees and what employees actually need to survive. As reported at Moyers & Company, the "federal minimum wage of $7.25 is now worth 30% less than it was in the 1960s, after adjusting for inflation." For someone trying to raise two children on it, it puts you $4,000 below the federal poverty line.

If employers won't pay their workers enough to feed and house their families, that leaves us, the taxpayers, to handle the shortfall by providing housing assistance and food stamps to people that work for companies who refuse to pay a living wage. As Joshua Holland reported in 2013, these wealthy companies know that they are foisting their financial responsibilities onto the taxpayer so they can profit off the difference. McDonald's even has a resource line to help employees sign up for food stamps and Medicaid, so that they can have healthy employees with the confidence that the rest of us will foot the bill. Taxpayers pony up a full $7 billion a year in social services to fast food workers, so that fast food companies can make more money by continuing to pay poverty wages.

The rich are getting richer while the rest of us fall behind for a very simple reason: We are subsidizing them, with our tax money and our credit lines, as they gobble up all the country's wealth. We don't want to get into a situation like the 1920s, where the gap between the rich and everyone else created an economic situation that collapsed on itself. It's time to start making changes, such as raising the minimum wage and returning to a more progressive tax system, to help working people get back to a place where they're not just working to make their bosses richer, but so that they can keep some of that money for themselves.

Amanda Marcotte blogs about feminism and politics.

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