If All the U.S. Wealth Were Divided Up Equally Each American Would Have $216,567

[Red Terror Dr.]

If all the U.S. wealth were divided up equally, each American man, woman, and child would have $216,567. If we were to remove the children from this equation and just divided up the wealth among adults, the results would be $301,539 per adult man and woman. So those of you who say if we re-distribute the wealth we would all be poor are talking a lot of garbage!

This figure comes from the website run by economists Thomas Piketty, Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, , Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

http://www.wid.world/

I found out about this statistic by Professor Richard Wolff (Ph.D. Yale) in the following video where approximately 13:12 minutes into the video he deals with this scenario:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsWtcULPcy8

[LeftistsAreRadical]

Holy shit...thank you for sharing this. The next time I get faced with a bunch of Republicans telling me that socialism makes everyone "equally poor" I'll whip this out, and this time they won't be able to use the "you're not even an economist lol" argument. I knew there was a lot of wealth but I didn't know it was quite that much.

[ComradeAllende]

While I'm not opposed to the idea that wealth should be divided equally (or controlled via democratic methods), I think the main point of the conservative retort is that redistributing the wealth will reduce the capitalists' incentives to produce, which is true assuming the preservation of capitalist social and economic relations. After all, an industrialist isn't going to keep his factories going when all his profits are taxed away.

Of course, if we abolish the capitalist system and institute some form of industrial democracy that maintains and increases general productivity, dividing up the pie becomes no issue at all.

[Antiochus]

A bit of a disingenuous argument in some ways. It sort of sounds like "You can have the cake and eat it too"... "You can have the $216,000 and everything that entails within the Capitalist system". I am not too sure how that figure came about. The U.S's GDP per capita is roughly $55,000 a year.

Nevertheless, yes: In a developed nation such as the U.S or Britain, Germany etc... poverty and scarcity are artificial in the sense that there is more than enough to 'go around', several times over, especially basics such as food, housing (in the U.S there are many more foreclosed abandoned homes than homeless people), electricity etc...

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

Is that 216k USD in cold hard cash or does "wealth" include the value of real estate and movable property?

[Heretek]

I've heard this argument before and it usually ends up as apologism for worker coops and state unions, an argument for "progressive liberalism" over "conservative liberalism." This is simply because money exists as a component of the market system and does not actually mean any kind of 'wealth.' Sure the figure sounds nice in the current order, but why not simply seize all of the wealth of the world for the workers, rather than continue a wage-laborer existence? That's essentially what it boils down to, you simply get paid more. And as capitalism does, it will just raise prices to continue with profit. Money is only valuable now because of scarcity, however artificial that is. As such, spreading it out just depreciates the currency. $1.00 could very well become $0.01

[The Intransigent Faction]

This, I think, is tied to the "one size fits all" caricature of socialism and a liberal conception of "equality".
It's sort of like when liberals measure wealth in terms of salary figures rather than actual wealth (ownership of capital).

If wealth is still generated through exploitation, there can be no equality even if an "equal" income were sustainable within capitalism. Assuming we'd all somehow come to own equal amounts of capital and equally exploit each other, that wouldn't solve the problems with capitalism, either.

[Red Terror Dr.]

We need to post this video with the relevant statistics on as many Facebook pages as possible. These statistics need to circulate the globe in general and the United states in particular.