The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.
By Joseph Stiglitz
The top 10% of U.S. households now hold 67.3% of the nation's total household wealth. With an average net worth of $7.2 Million.
The top 1% of U.S. households hold 30.3% of the nation's total household wealth. With an average net worth of $13.7 Million.
The bottom 50% of U.S. households only hold 2.7% of the nation's total household wealth. With an average net worth of $52,000.
U.S. billionaires gained $2.8 trillion in wealth between 2020–2024. During this same period of time over 50 million Americans experienced food insecurity.
We live in a society built on disparity, where a few indulge on excess and greed while many scrape by and suffer.
It used to be the case that a person in the U.S. could support a family of 3 while working 1 job, which is obviously no longer the case. This life was not lost due to external pressures, it was lost due to greed and exploitation. It was lost due to the capital-owning class exploiting worker's labor, moving production overseas to exploit workers even more than they could in the U.S. This life was lost for many more reasons than I can state but all of them boil down to one common denominator, they were fueled by greed and exploitation.
We now live in a modern age where a single company can generate 1 Billion dollars of revenue in a single day, however, still pays employee's little enough that they cannot afford to build a life of their own. We now live in an age where employees exist only to have their labor exploited.
Of course it is widely believed that people have free will to not be exploited, I view this to be propaganda. You are given the illusion of choice, the illusion of having any say in your life. In our society you have two viable options, to either work or die. Providing labor under the threat of death is not work it is modern slavery. We are not individual humans with dreams and goals we are slaves that only exist to provide the ruling class with value through our exploited labor.