Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Over 50% of all wealth in the US is inherited not earned


 - by New Deal democrat

I got waylaid putting together a very detailed post about how the newly-widened Panama Canal is disrupting the internal US transportation network. When it goes up at Seeking Alpha, I’ll link to it.

In the meantime, here is something that I found a week or two ago for you to chew on. Over half of all US wealth is not earned but inherited:


According to a report summarized recently in the Washington Post“The wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country's wealth.”

It’s likely that about 25% of all wealth in the US is inherited of the top 1%. I strongly suspect the relationship is even more egregious at the level of the top 0.1% and top 0.01%.

It’s hard to argue that the US is at all a meritocracy when the starting points are so distorted.