If your bank accounts run into eight figures, your housing costs are in the millions and you have oodles of investments in bitcoin, stocks, hedge funds and other speculative endeavors, then you’re one of the people the Wall Street Journal aims its reporting at. “The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People,” read a headline in the Feb. 23 Journal.
The fact of the matter is the rich are getting richer through extracting superprofits off the exploitation of the working class. That’s how capitalism works. For working people, many of us face increasing difficulties making ends meet.
Households that rake in $250,000 a year or more — those in the top 10% of income levels — account for nearly 50% of all spending, especially on luxury items. And this spending is what propels big-business media like the Journal to claim classless “consumers” are doing fine.
Between September 2023 and September 2024 these high rollers increased their spending by 12%, while spending by the working class over this same period dropped. The net worth of those in the top 20% has risen more than $35 trillion, or 45%, since the end of 2019, the Federal Reserve reports.
While working people have had to use up most of the funds they scrounged to put aside for the future to cover high prices for food, energy, housing, health care and more today, the top 10% put away $1.3 trillion more in savings over the past five years.
Tech ‘superbillionaires’
There are more billionaires today, and there’s a new category — “superbillionaires.” There are 24 of them, each of whom is worth $50 billion and up. Among them are 16 who are so-called centi-billionaires, with a net worth over $100 billion. Many rapidly accumulated this wealth from advances in computers, chips, social media, AI and the like. Most of their products are used by the bosses to extract more surplus labor from the working class, not to make actual products we need.
Among those included in this list are X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Lawrence Ellison, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Bill Gates and Steven Ballmer from Microsoft.
“The great American fortunes of today are new money, not old,” noted a 2024 report by the Heritage Foundation. While capitalists in their own right, these newly arrived billionaires are not yet part of the historic U.S. ruling class, who were born out of the rise of industrial and banking capital, owning the giant steel, auto, railroad and oil companies, and more.
Things can go sour quickly, as shown by the example of Sam Bankman-Fried, who racked up $26 billion with his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, until he was convicted of fraud and imprisoned.
The gap keeps growing between the huge wealth being accumulated by the capitalist ruling families and the squeeze they put on the toilers to generate it. Last year the top 1% of U.S. households held $49.2 trillion in wealth, or about 30% of the country’s total wealth. To put this in perspective, this is more than the 2024 gross national product of the four largest capitalist economies — U.S., $25.43 trillion; China, $14.72 trillion; Japan, $4.25 trillion; and Germany, $3.85 trillion.
Crisis of working people in New York
In New York City, where billionaires own high-rise apartments overlooking Central Park and other cozy neighborhoods, a quarter of the city’s residents don’t have enough money to afford food, housing or to see a doctor, reports Columbia University and Robin Hood, an anti-poverty group.
The number of people living below official government poverty levels in the city was nearly double the national average in 2023 and increased by 7% in just two years.
About a quarter of children in the city live in households that can’t make ends meet. More than 146,000 New York City students — about one in every eight enrolled in public schools — were homeless for at least part of the 2023-24 school year. And the crushing cost of decent child care is out of reach for most working-class families.
“The Economy Is Still Fine. Americans Are Still Gloomy,” headlined another Journal article Feb. 26, describing plummeting “consumer confidence.” What more and more working people sense is that as the capitalist economic crisis deepens there’s less prospects to improve their lives and those of their children.