Article: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/news/economy/inequality-record-top-1-percent-wealth/index.html
We know that USA is one of the world’s richest country. I have always wondered why does rich countries still have poverty. An article that I read recently is from CNN Money titled “Record inequality: The top 1% controls 38.6% of America’s wealth” posted on Sept 27th, 2017.
Highlighting a few important parts from the article:
1. 1% of families control 38.6% of the wealth (in USA)
2. Bottom 90% control 22.8% of the wealth
3. Not stated in the article, but you can conclude that the remaining 9% controls 38.6% of the wealth.
The part of the article that that I want to recreate is the actual income distributions from 2016. According to the article, top 1% bought in 23.8% of the overall income, and the bottom 90% bought in less than half.
If you apply these statistics to the actual numbers for the population. USA had 323,100,000 population (source US Census Bureau). Taking 2016’s GDP as the income for 2016, it will be $18,570,000,000,000 (source World Bank).
Top 1% bought in 23.8% of the overall income, equates to 3,231,000 people bringing in $4,419,660,000,000. The bottom 90% bought in less than half, estimate 49%, equates to 290,790,000 people bringing in $9,099,300,000,000.
Averaging it out, the top 1% bringing in an income of $1,367,892 per person. The bottom 90% of the USA population brining in an income of $31,291 per person – for the entire year of 2016. These are all estimated numbers that I calculated based off the total population, not even considering factors like unemployment rate.
A Forbes.com article published on Nov 9th, 2017 titled “The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country, Study Finds” shows that just 3 people (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos) has a combined wealth of $250 billion – the same as bottom half of the country.
Article link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-richest-americans-hold-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-of-country-study-finds/#676d69a03cf8
