[quote=harvey][quote=livinincali] Would that have impacted some people in the middle and upper middle class. Yeah it would, but it would have hit those at the top harder than those in the middle.[/quote]
[quote]You’re probably happy that you 401K more than doubled from some hypothetical 100K to 250K but Bill Gates went from 30 billion to over 75 billion at the same time.[/quote]
Your second point completely refutes the first.
When Bill Gates only has “only” $30 billion, he still has incredible power, more net worth than literally millions of people combined, and tremendous opportunity to make more. He can take all sorts of risks, make all sorts of investments (and has access to the choice ones.)
When someone else who is Bill Gate’s age only has $100K, they are essentially trapped, unable to do anything but earn wages to get by and have almost no realistic opportunity to grow their wealth. If they have $250K, they may at least have a few more options.
There are reasons that “the rich get richer.” Making everybody poorer doesn’t change those reasons, it actually makes them more pronounced.
And of course there’s the fact that most of the very wealthy made their wealth long before any bailouts. Sorry, bailouts have nothing to do with the wealth gap. If anything they probably diminished it.[/quote]
Just do the math. If you the average paycheck to paycheck american with a net worth of $20K of saving who cares what happens to the stock market. Say the top 10% have a net worth of $1 million with 50% of that in stocks. So the wealth gap is a ratio of 50/1 or $980K. Say the stock market gets cut by 50%. Now the wealth gap is 750/20 = 37.5/1 or $730K. The wealth gap just shrunk right.
Or just look at this chart. Notice the time frames when wealth inequality shrunk a lot. What happened during those times?