{"id":36515,"date":"2025-07-25T14:39:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T14:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/36515\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T14:39:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T14:39:14","slug":"is-america-an-oligarchy-as-bernie-sanders-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/36515\/","title":{"rendered":"Is America an Oligarchy, As Bernie Sanders Says?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMichigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin has recently been fretting about the increasing use of the term \u201coligarchy<\/a>\u201d by her fellow Democrats. Slotkin apparently feels that \u201coligarchy\u201d has no resonance beyond America\u2019s coasts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders<\/a> has been drawing record crowds beyond those coasts to his anti-oligarchy rallies<\/a>. Americans, Sanders has said<\/a>, don\u2019t appear to be \u201cquite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHas America become an oligarchy? Could denouncing America\u2019s growing oligarchy be a winning political message? Let\u2019s leave those two senators to continue their debate over whether the term \u201coligarchy\u201d resonates with voters and consider instead whether that term should resonate with them.<\/p>\n

\n\tLee Drutman at Vox devoted a lengthy piece<\/a> to this subject in April. Oligarchy exists, Drutman posits, when a \u201chandful of very wealthy individuals use their riches to shape and influence the government on their own financial behalf.\u201d He goes on to note the many examples of mega-billionaires<\/a> using their wealth<\/a> to shape government policy, including the nine-figure political contributions<\/a> of Elon Musk<\/a>, Timothy Mellon, and Miriam Adelson in the 2024 election. On tax and policy issues where the interests of all billionaires align, Drutman concludes, policy making has consistently favored their shared interests.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a recent New Yorker essay<\/a>, Evan Osnos fills in the gory details about how the ultra-rich are also using their influence to benefit themselves personally. He mentions, for instance, the pardon President Donald Trump<\/a> bestowed on billionaire Trevor Milton after Milton and his wife contributed $1.8 million to Trump\u2019s campaign. He also outlines the benefits Elon Musk and his businesses are receiving from Team Trump. Most troubling of all, Osnos details how Trump \u2014 our \u201coligarch in chief\u201d \u2014 has used his presidential power to benefit himself.<\/p>\n

\n\tDrutman\u2019s statistical analysis focuses on the income share of the entire top one percent, a cohort of over three million Americans. His stats on this top one percent, while certainly helpful, should not draw attention away from the reality that America\u2019s wealth is primarily concentrating into far fewer than 3 million sets of pockets. Or even 3,000 \u2014 or 300 \u2014 sets of pockets. Ultimately, over the past dozen or so years, about half the concentration of wealth in the U.S. has benefited just 19 families.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tIndeed, the data on America\u2019s wealth concentration over the past four decades point us clearly in only one direction: oligarchy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that direction can be difficult to scope out \u2014 until we look beyond the increasing share of the country\u2019s wealth held by each top-most group, whether that share be the top one percent or top 0.1 percent of whatever. The statistics on the wealth of America\u2019s rich consistently obscure the wealth of America\u2019s richest. Say, for instance, that the top 0.01 percent grabs an additional two percent of the country\u2019s wealth. The entire top 0.1 percent and entire top one percent would show that same two percent increase even if the wealth share of the bottom 0.99 percent of the top one percent has registered no increase at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWe can only see the pattern of American wealth concentration clearly when we focus on the groups that follow each of those top-most groups, the nine percent that follow the top one percent, the 0.9 percent that follow the top 0.1 percent, and the 0.09 percent that follow the top 0.01 percent. The numbers we get from these breakdowns point us dramatically to the handful of very wealthy Americans who make up our 21st-century American oligarchy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s start with the nine percent of Americans who sit just below the top one percent. Back in January 1990, according to economist Gabriel Zucman\u2019s Realtime Inequality<\/a> database, our top 10 percent in the U.S. had virtually the same share of America\u2019s wealth as this group held 10 years earlier. But the wealth shares of the top one percent and the next nine percent moved in opposite directions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tThe deep pockets in the top one percent increased their wealth share by 5.6 percentage points, moving from a 24.8 percent wealth share to a 30.4 percent share over the ten-year period. The next nine percent saw their share of the nation\u2019s wealth decrease by 5.9 percentage points, from 43.7 to 37.8 percent during that same 10-year period.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSince 1990, the wealth share of that 9 percent has slid further. That share sits today just slightly above 35 percent. The concentration in America\u2019s wealth since 1980, in other words, has quite clearly been limited to the top one percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNow let\u2019s look inside that top one percent. We find the same dynamic at work. The wealth share of the top 0.1 percent has stunningly increased over the past 45 years, from 8.1 percent in 1980 to 21.9 percent today. In the first 26 years of that period, the next 0.9 percent saw only a slight increase in their wealth share, from 16.7 to 18 percent, with no share increase at all since then.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich means that since 2006, the concentration in our country\u2019s wealth has been limited to just the top 0.1 percent. The next 0.9 percent have essentially only been treading water.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs we move higher up in the ranks of America\u2019s super wealthy, we see the same story. Since December 2012, our richest 0.01 percent have increased their wealth share by close to two percentage points, to 12.1 percent. And the wealth share of the next 0.09 percent? In December 2012, that share stood at 9.7 percent. Today, over a decade later, it stands at 9.8 percent, virtually the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe bottom line: Since 2012, the concentration in our country\u2019s wealth has almost entirely been limited to just our richest 0.01 percent. Our country\u2019s wealth is not just continuing to concentrate. The beneficiaries of that concentration have become an ever smaller group.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHow small? The economist Gabriel Zucman has recently shared with The Wall Street Journal \u00a0estimates<\/a> on the share of U.S. wealth held by our richest 0.00001 percent, an elite just 19 households strong. The wealth share of this tiny group has hit 1.8 percent of total U.S. wealth, a share that represents over a ten-fold increase from the top 0.00001 percent\u2019s share in 1982.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe can determine, using a combination of the Forbes 400 list from 2012 and Zucman\u2019s data for total American wealth at that time, some even more striking numbers. About half of the wealth-share increase of the top 0.01 percent since 2012 has been concentrated in the top 0.00001 percent \u2014 the top one-thousandth of the top one-hundredth of the top one percent. Nineteen households total.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tTo recap, the concentration of American wealth has been, over the past dozen or so years, largely limited to the top 0.01 percent of American households, and half that concentration has benefited just 19 households.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s oligarchy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin has recently been fretting about the increasing use of the term \u201coligarchy\u201d by her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,8634,13652,12,11,3,29841,21,19,22,20,25,24,1432],"class_list":{"0":"post-36515","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-bernie-sanders","10":"tag-billionaires","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-elon-musk","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-oligarchy","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa","21":"tag-wealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}