I did everything they told us to do. Work hard. Save. Invest. Play by the rules. And you know what happened? The top 0.1% — 137,000 households, most of them living off capital gains and business ownership, not wages — just more than doubled their wealth since 2019. Fourteen and a half trillion dollars. Ten trillion from stocks alone.
Meanwhile the bottom half of this country — that’s roughly 66 million households — holds four trillion dollars total. That’s 2.3% of everything. The average family in that bottom half has about sixty-three thousand bucks. The average top-0.1% household? Over two hundred million. Three thousand times more.
And here’s the part that should make you throw the remote through the goddamn television: only ten percent of the people in that top 0.1% even earn their money from wages. The rest? Business owners. Capital gains. Money making money while you make do.
They will tell you the economy is working. They will point at the stock market like it’s proof positive. But the stock market is not the economy — it’s the casino where the already-rich go to double down while the rest of us stand in line at Walmart praying the prices don’t go up again this week.
And don’t give me that shit about “the bottom half saw the biggest percentage gains.” When your share is two point three percent of the national total, a big percentage gain on shit is still shit. The bottom half’s entire wealth — every home equity dollar, every savings account, every kid’s college fund — is less than what the top 0.1% added from the stock market in one fucking year.
Fourteen and a half trillion. One hundred thirty-seven thousand households. That’s not an economy. That’s a heist with a ticker tape.
Source story: US top 0.1% more than doubled their wealth since 2019 on stock boom, Fed data shows.