A new congressional report commissioned by Bernie Sanders finds that the 1 percent now own one-third of all wealth, while the bottom half of Americans hold only 2 percent. It’s another sign of the slide into oligarchy that Sanders has warned about for years.
by Luke Savage, Jacobin
Last summer, Bernie Sanders’s YouTube channel released a short clip entitled simply “Oligarchy or democracy?” Featuring compiled footage spanning Sanders’s career in both the House and Senate, the clip opens with the simple declaration, “Those who have the money have the power.” It’s a simple, and in many ways obvious truth. But it’s also one that sometimes gets ignored or marginalized in mainstream discourse about democracy. Threats to democracy, of course, don’t always directly involve questions of money or wealth. From attacks on voting rights to political institutions designed to protect minority rule, racism is a major factor as well. But, between dark money and unrestrained campaign donations, the noxious imprint of concentrated wealth is rarely far from sight.

That reality is difficult to ignore when you examine the obscene way that America’s collective wealth has come to be distributed. This maldistribution was incidentally the subject of a recent report requested by Sanders from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found that wealth has continued to flow upward to an increasingly tiny number of well-off Americans.
Between 1989 to 2019, the CBO reports, the total real wealth (adjusted for inflation) held by all families in the United States tripled from $38 trillion in 2019 dollars to $115 trillion — or about five times the national GDP. The fruits of that growth, however, have accrued heavily to those at the top. As of 2019, the richest 10 percent of families held an astonishing 72 percent of this wealth, while those in the top 1 percent held more than one-third. The appalling asymmetry of these developments is underscored even more strongly by the CBO’s findings vis-à-vis the bottom half of all American families — who now hold a mere 2 percent of the country’s total wealth. There is a strong racial bias as well, with the median wealth of white families considerably higher than that of black or hispanic ones.
Recent Posts
Big Demonstration Unwelcomes NATO To The Hague
June 23, 2025
Take Action Now The day before the demonstration in the Hague, hundreds of people gathered for a counter-summit, to discuss strategies for moving…
Zohran Mamdani Is Showing Democrats How To Shape Voter Opinion
June 23, 2025
Take Action Now Polls recorded shifts in NYC residents’ priorities following mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaigning on housing.By Susan…
Bombing Iran Is Part Of The USA’s Repetition Compulsion For War War War
June 22, 2025
Take Action Now More than ever, the United States and Israel are overt partners in what the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 called “the supreme…
62 percent Of Democrats Agree Party Leadership Should Be Replaced: Survey
June 20, 2025
Take Action Now The party has found it difficult to build a cohesive message as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has been embroiled in…