American Inequality Today

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The “2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cited an unhoused population of “771,480 people -- or about twenty-three of every 10,000 people in the United States,” an increase of 18 per cent from the previous report. The United States has experienced an unprecedented rise in homelessness, driven by the nation’s affordability crisis.

But recent research reveals that the actual number of those experiencing homelessness in the U.S., factoring in those living in cars or hotel rooms, or doubled up with other people, might be as much as six times higher. From 2023 to 2024, families with children experienced the largest year-over-year increase in homelessness of any group. Among the 130,000 people homeless in New York each night, around three-quarters of those in shelters were in families, including some 45,000 children.

Today, there isn’t a single state, metropolitan area, or county in the United States where a full-time worker earning the local minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. Yet America’s richest earn in hours what ordinary workers – not the homeless -- earn over lifetimes. The ten richest people in the country increased their wealth by $365 billion last year.

As Matt Egan writes for CNN, the 2024-2025 growth, from April to April, accounted for roughly a billion dollars a day in growth for the top ten. “By contrast,” he notes, “the typical American worker made just over $50,000 in 2023.” To put that in perspective: according to Oxfam, it “would take a staggering 726,000 years for 10 U.S. workers at median earnings to make that much money.” In fact, 60 per cent of Americans live pay cheque to pay cheque.

A 2022 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 10 per cent of Americans hold 60 per cent of the country’s wealth, with the top one per cent grabbing 27 per cent for themselves. America’s billionaires are now collectively worth a record six trillion dollars. Their wealth has more than doubled since the passage of the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.

The analysis comes from Americans for Tax Fairness, a left-leaning nonprofit that advocates for wealthy Americans to pay their fair share. Given such a situation, “inequality” no longer feels like a strong enough word for what we see.

Not surprisingly, U.S. households have been accumulating debt at a staggering rate.  Total household and nonprofit organization debt did not pass the two trillion-dollar mark until the mid-1980s, but now total U.S. household and nonprofit organization debt has surpassed the 20 trillion dollar mark.  Household debt alone accounts for approximately 18 trillion dollars of this total.

Yes, unemployment figures seem low. But much of this is simply definitional trickery. More than 100 million U.S. adults that do not have jobs are considered to be “not in the labour force.” When a U.S. adult is not working, they are put into one of two buckets.  For years, government bureaucrats have kept the number of Americans that are “officially unemployed” at a very low level, while the number of Americans that are dumped into the bucket labeled “not in the labour force” has just kept increasing.

During the Great Recession, the number of Americans that were considered to be “officially unemployed” plus the number of Americans that were considered to be “not in the labour force” never exceeded 100 million.  Today, the number of Americans that are considered to be “not in the labour force” alone exceeds 102 million.

The power of American plutocrats plays out on multiple levels. First and most obviously, American business magnates have direct power over the lives of vast numbers of employees. They can replace any particular worker far more easily than that worker can replace the source of their livelihood, and so these men run their businesses like miniature dictatorships. This economic power translates in turn into massively disproportionate political influence.

The relentless concentration of private wealth, and with it the political influence of the wealthy, has metastasised in recent decades under Republican and Democrat presidents alike. The oligarchs are not confined to the Republican side of the aisle. Former vice-president Kamala Harris had 83 billionaires donating to her 2024 campaign. According to Americans for Tax Fairness, Harris received $143 million in billionaire donations, though this looks modest compared to Republican Donald Trump’s $450 million. Even so, those 83 billionaires would almost certainly have exercised real political influence in a Harris administration.

It is an act of moral evasion to insist on using morally neutral terms to describe “very rich” Americans while we call those in hostile nations like Russia “oligarchs.” Most people have heard Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase describing democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” in his famous 1863 Gettysburg Address. Has this been replaced by government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class?

The United States isn’t on the brink of revolt, but it’s far down the sort of path that has, historically, led to popular unrest, or something far greater. The state has thoroughly abandoned everyday Americans and let oligarchs write its laws and reap the rewards. The rise in right populism is a symptom of, and a response to, this reality.